Explore "Drought" by Eric Walrond on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The whistle blew for eleven o'clock. Throats parched, grim, sun-crazed blacks cutting stone on the white burning hillside dropped with a clang the hot, dust-powdered drills and flew up over the rugged edges of the horizon to descent into a dry, waterless gut. Hunger -- pricks at stomachs inured to brackish coffee and cassava pone -- pressed on folk, joyful as rabbits in a grassy ravine, wrenching themselves free of the lure of the white earth. Helter-skelter dark, brilliant, black faces of West Indian peasants moved along, in pain -- the stiff tails of blue denim coats, the hobble of chigger-cracked heels, the rhythm of a stride... dissipating into the sun-stuffed void the radiant forces of the incline.[1]
The broad road -- a boon to constables moping through the dusk or on hot, bright mornings plowing up the thick, adhesive marl on some seasonal chore, was distinguished by a black, animate dot upon it.