Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

“My God. Horses,” Hugh said, glancing and stretching himself to his full mental height of six feet two (he was five feet eleven).

How indeed could he hope to find himself, to begin again when, somewhere, perhaps, in one of those lost or broken bottles, in one of those glasses, lay, forever, the solitary clue to his identity? How could he go back and look now, scrabble among the broken glass, under the eternal bars, under the oceans?

He was safe here; this was the place he loved—sanctuary, the paradise of his despair.