Explore "The Traveler (1927)" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I plied the seas to the seaports.
The world amid cranes and storerooms of the sordid shore revealed stiffs and beggars in its chasm, companies of the spectral hungry alongside the ships.
Recumbent, parched countries, in the sand, resplendent robes, flaming mantles emerged from the desert, armed like scorpions, guarding the hole of petroleum, in the dusty network of calcined wealth.
I lived in Burma, amid cupolas of powerful metal, and thickets where the tiger burned its rings of bloody gold. From my windows on Dalhousie Street, the indefinable odor, moss in the pagodas, perfumes and excrement, pollen, gunpowder, of a world saturated with human moisture, rose up to me.
The streets summoned me with their countless movements of saffron fabrics and red spitde, beside the filthy waves of the Irrawaddy, soupy water whose blood and oil ran down discharging its lineage from the high lands whose gods at least slept enveloped by its clay.