Black Light by Talbot Mundy — Read

The dusty moonlit road toward Cummings' bungalow led between slattern walls and ill-kempt gardens, through a grove of trees that had been blackened by the fires of vagrants and nibbled by goats into naked poverty--on past cheap pretentious cottages of Eurasians--past shuttered shops and littered byways where the Christians did business and a Catholic chapel, neat and lean and hungry-looking, raised a crucifix above a white iron roof. Then past the park, so called, where a caged tiger lay dreaming of life with his paws through the bars and his white teeth agleam in a grin of despair made monstrous by the moonlight. On past the club and the tennis courts--the mean hotel "for Europeans only," in a compound in which white-clad servants slept like corpses under trees that cast mottled shadows.

Joe was conscious of being followed. He supposed that the man with the basket of snakes, and the ayah, were taking advantage of his company for the protection it might give them; they kept far enough behind him not to intrude, near enough to be heard if they should cry for help, walking one on each side of the road like ghosts who did not like each other but were wafted on the same slow wind. He glanced over his shoulder at them only once or twice, afraid that if he glanced too often they might take that for an invitation to draw nearer. It occurred to him once that they might be spying on him. He stopped to see if they would stop. But they came on, so he dismissed the thought and continued on his way, his shoes white with dust and his thoughts black with boredom.