Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Exile: An Outpost of Empire
Exile is not a little proud of the fact that its tiny Club is like a miniature imitation of Bombay's, if you swept the latter bare of every blade of grass and green growing thing. Bombay does not share this view. It looks upon Exile as the abomination of desolation, and the Club as a pitiable effort to endure existence in the desert.
Nevertheless the Exile Club has surroundings that can be seen nowhere else in the world, and if they strike you aghast you will not call them theatrical at least. For up behind it tower the Rocks, in forma tion and colour like bronze icebergs piercing the sky, and across the harbourage is Banishment islet, behind which the sun sets. To see the sky torn with ?ame behind Banishment and each delicate point of its jagged teeth traced black upon the boiling clouds is a miracle of colour and form. And yet people in Exile may see it every night.
Five men were standing on the Club verandah, watching the bridge tables fill up and talking raw scandal. There is little else to do in Exile between the shifts of work, and after six months of the life people begin to take a savage delight in their neigh bours' sins, knowing that they cannot hide their own. Exile is too blatant and too barren to' hide anything, or perhaps it is the in?uence of the horrid formation of its craters that hardens and blasts humanity. The Rocks drive men mad. All day the sun beats upon them until they glare back and blind human eyesight, and at night the heat comes off them again like the breath of a furnace. That is why the bungalows are built high up the slopes, to get above the stench of it and into the upper air. The Club, being on the shore.
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