Obscurity, The Third Chapter
In which the widow enters society and rumors about her become a rather ghastly thing.
e last read The Second Chapter, in which the ménagère of the Estate St. Vincent had a disturbing premonition.
Where the great river met the land, the water struggled to seep through the murk that was determined to stall it. Only a pole sent into its depths could row them toward their idling destination, the flat-bottomed boat heaped high with trunks of personal effects, large quantities of Rhum Agricole, and one portrait of the Virgin Mary weeping.
The land was strange and wild, just as the captain had foretold. Large overgrowths of trees and roots sunk into the mud as if summoned by it. Wild ferns and palms crawled over one another in a gnarled attempt to reach the sun. The air was humid and thick and the insects that swam in it so large they might have crawled over the corpses in the valley of Gehenna.
Tropical rainstorms poured down upon them, giving the impression that they were swimming their way to the city more so than rowing to it and dark scaly creatures blinked their eyes above the surface as if waiting for one of those precarious rafts to overturn. Indeed, Séverine had the creeping feeling their small party was navigating the river Styx, avoiding at every turn the lures of the underworld.
At long last, they made it to la Nouvelle-Orléans, a strange and beautiful place with cobbled streets, wooden sidewalks, and two and three-story buildings built in the Spanish Style. Though tropical groves reached out to meet it, the city rose up in fortitude against the nature that would attempt to swallow it—with buildings leaning to one side or the other, depending on the inclinations of the wind, and ferns clinging to the balconies in spilling piles of leaves.
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