Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen

To an epicure in odours the village of Bangalang just before the rainy season closed down would have been an adventure without illusions. At that time even the native canoes plying between Mongo Tom's and Gallegos passed it to windward. There were great piles of drying and putrefying fish on the beach, the kettles were busy trying-out palm oil, --and the combination of fish-guts, grease-wood, and rancid vegetable-butter was something that only the inured inhabitants and the delighted buzzards of the vicinage could stand. Great clouds of these birds continued to arrive daily, attracted by a place which advertised itself so well to Buzzardom. As a consequence, the palm thatch of the fishers' huts showed, even at a distance, as if covered with melting patches of snow.

The hut of Ungah-gola, Neleta's maternal aunt, occupied the most salubrious site in the redolent town. That is not to insist that its environs suggested the jasmine in full bloom. But the house was built over the water, and what was thrown through the floor- door, its only entrance, was regularly removed by the diurnal besom of the tide instead of decomposing leisurely in a more normal manner. To a woman of eighty,--by far the oldest woman on the Grain Coast, where the female life-span was usually brief--the absence of flies was something, as was also the exclusion of both rain and sunlight which the rather superior construction of the hut afforded.