Crowding in on them, challenging each other from opposite sides, the restaurants were longer and shallow, with their groups of tables ranged against walls decorated in appallingly primitive and savage designs: palms like crawling spiders of verdigris set on columns of chocolate rose from shores, from seas, of liquid bright muds in which grotesque caricatures of men, barbarously clad or, swollen headed, in travesties of civilized garb, faced women with exaggerated and obscene anatomies. They, like the banks, were crowded; companies of negroes sat over dishes of mucous consistency and drank, with thick lips, liquors of vicious dyes. The prodigious women, often paler than the men, drinking with them, gabbled in a loud and corrupt Spanish and, without hats on their sere crinkled masses of hair, were unrestrained in displays of calculated or emotionally demented excitement. A flat wagon passed, holding, on precarious chairs, a band furiously playing an infernal jumbled music which, as it swelled, filled all the occupants of the cafés with a twitching hysteria. Subdued masculine shouts were pierced by shameless feminine cries; lust and rage and nameless intoxications quivered like the perceptible films of hot dust on the air. Negroes, Haitians with the flattened skulls, the oily skin, of the Gold Coast, and Jamaicans glowing with a subcutaneous redness, thronged the sidewalks; and sharp-jawed men, with a burned indeterminate superiority of race, riding emaciated horses, added to the steel of their machetes revolvers strapped on their long thighs. What, mainly, occupied Lee Randon was the nakedness of the passion everywhere surcharging the surface of life. There was, in the sense familiar to him, no restraint, no cover beyond the casual screens at the backs of the restaurants; no accident to which the uncertain material of life was subject was improbable; murder rasped, like the finger of death on wire strings, at the exasperated sensibilities of organisms exposed, without preparation, to an incomprehensible state of life a million years beyond their grasp. It fascinated and disturbed Lee: it had a definite interest, a meaning, for him. Was it to this that Savina had turned? Had the world only in the adherence to the duty typified by Fanny left such a morass as he saw about him? Was he, Lee Randon, instead of advancing, falling back into a past more remote than coherent speech? Nothing, he asserted, could be further from his intention and hope. Yet, without doubt, he was surrounded by the denial of order, of disciplined feeling; and, flatly, it terrified him.