in return,
been partly appreciated, less understood, and roughly loved.

So great was Jerry's loneliness that even a two-legged black-god was
desirable, since white-gods had long since faded into the limbo of the
past. For all he might have known, had he been capable of conjecturing,
the only white-gods in existence had perished. Acting on the assumption
that a black-god was better than no god, when he had quite finished the
little pig, he deflected his course to the left, down-hill, toward the
sea. He did this, again without reasoning, merely because, in the subtle
processes of his brain, experience worked. His experience had been to
live always close by the sea; humans he had always encountered close by
the sea; and down-hill had invariably led to the sea.

He came out upon the shore of the reef-sheltered lagoon where ruined
grass houses told him men had lived. The jungle ran riot through the
place. Six-inch trees, throated with rotten remnants of thatched roofs
through which they had aspired toward the sun, rose about him.
Quick-growing trees had shadowed the kingposts so that the idols and
totems, seated in carved shark jaws, grinned greenly and monstrously at
the futility of man through a rime of moss and mottled fungus. A poor
little sea-wall, never much at its best, sprawled in ruin from the
coconut roots to the placid sea. Bananas, plantains, and breadfruit lay
rotting on the ground. Bones lay about, human bones, and Jerry nosed
them out, knowing them for what they were, emblems of the nothingness of
life. Skulls he did not encounter, for the skulls that belonged to the
scattered bones ornamented the devil devil houses in the upland bush
villages.

The salt tang of the sea gladdened his nostrils, and he snorted with the
pleasure of the stench of the mangrove swamp. But, another Crusoe
chancing upon the footprint of another man Friday, his nose, not his
eyes, shocked him electrically alert as he smelled the fresh contact of a
living man's foot with the ground. It was a nigger's foot, but it was
alive, it was immediate; and, as he traced it a score of yards, he came
upon another foot-scent, indubitably a white man's.

Had there been an onlooker, he would have thought Jerry had gone suddenly
mad. He rushed frantically about, turning and twisting his course, now
his nose to the ground, now up in the air, whining as frantically as he
rushed, leaping abruptly at right angles as new scents reached him,