about the girl now, he falls on his own bed, and is asleep instantly, with his mouth slightly open.
The light intensifies outside the windows, which are already luminous. Suddenly the sun leaps into the sky, gilding the tops of the tamarinds and the highest point of the roof. At once the brain-fever birds fill the air with their monotonous cries, as if they had never stopped mechanically calling out the eternal question no one will ever answer.
In their quarters, the servants are still sleeping off the excitements of the night. The dilapidated house stands silent, as if deserted, in the almost cool air of daybreak; as though it were already an abandoned ruin, empty, and fallen into decay. The rooms appear as so many black holes through the unshuttered, wide open windows.
Anna Kavan was one of the greatest unsung enigmas in 20th-century British literature. Born as Helen Ferguson, who lived a fraught childhood and two failed marriages led her to change her name to that of one of her characters. Despite struggling with mental illness and heroin addiction for most of her life, she was still able to write fiction that was as powerful and memorable as any English female writer of the last 150 years.
