The Sheltering Sky

by Paul Bowles

The lieutenant was intelligent enough to insist on allowing himself the luxury of not being snobbish about the indigenous population.

Then he remembered having heard that Americans did not speak English in any case, that they had a patois which only they could understand among themselves.

The person who frantically has been counting the seconds on his way to catch a train, and arrives panting just as it disappears, knowing the next one is not due for many hours, feels something of the same sudden surfeit of time, the momentary sensation of drowning in an element become too rich and too plentiful to be consumed, and thereby made meaningless, non-existent.

Now she did not remember their many conversations built around the idea of death, perhaps because no idea about death has anything in common with the presence of death.