In the shuddering light, in the groan and fume and pant of breath of sprawled brown bodies, he smelled something infernal, like the stench of dying moths lying burned at the base of a lantern. But the smell was no smell of evil but only of mortal exhaustion, of the renewed and endless and irremediable failure of the Niaruna to escape their doomed flesh, as their legend promised, and dance away into the sky.
