Au-dessous du volcan

Hugh resettled the towel around his brother's neck, then, as if absent-minded obeying the other's wordless instructions, went out, humming, through the bedroom back to the porch, where the radio was now stupidly playing Beethoven in the wind, blowing hard again on this side of the house. On his return with the whisky bottle he rightly deduced the Consul to have hidden in the cupboard, his eyes ranged the Consul's books disposed quite neatly - in the tidy room where there was not otherwise the slightest sign its occupant did any work or contemplated any for the future, unless it was the somewhat crumpled bed on which the Consul had evidently been lying - on high shelves around the walls : Dogme and Ritual de la Haute Magie, Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America, there were two long shelves of this, together with the rusty leather bindings and frayed edges of the numerous cabbalistic and alchemical books, though some of them looked fairly new, like the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King, probably they were treasures, but the rest were a heterogeneous collection : Gogol, the Mahabharata, Blake, Tolstoy, Pontoppidan, the Upanishads, a Mermaid Marston, Bishop Berkeley, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Vice Versa, Shakespeare, a complete Taskerson, All Quiet on the Western Front, the Clicking of Cuthbert, the Rig Veda - God knows, Peter Rabbit; "Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit," the Consul liked to say - Hugh returned, smiling, and with a flourish like a Spanish waiter poured himself a stiff drink into a toothmug.