The Sun Is God Read Online Free PDF

sat in a wicker chair. She lathered him and began shaving him with a Gillette safety razor. Pinching his long, angular nose she ran the razor over his throat, cheeks, and prominent chin, cleaning the razor in the water between strokes. “What do you think of my new shaving device?” Will asked.
    â€œYou must not speak!” Siwa scolded, easing the blade over his carotid artery.
    â€œShow him the razor,” Will said to Siwa who, ignoring him, stroked the blade over his Adam’s apple.
    â€œThe whiskers?” she asked hopefully. It was obviously a point of contention for Will did not even need to reply before she moved onto his cheeks. When Siwa had completed her shave, she bathed Will’s face with a towel dipped in hot water. Will got up from the chair and, as if completing an imagined conversation, he added: “My mustache is quite the thing, actually, in the civilized world. Swoons from the young ladies left and right.”
    He grabbed a straw boater and slapped it on his head at a rakish thirty-degree angle. “How do I look?” he asked. He knew in fact that he looked good. He had his mother’s green eyes, cheek bones, and soft oval face, and his father’s dark red hair and whiskers.
    â€œWill you be returning for dinner?” Siwa asked.
    Will looked at Kessler. “I expect not,” Kessler said apologetically.
    Siwa’s brow furrowed again. She took Will’s sleeve. “You will be cross with yourself if they find it necessary to bring you home in a wheelbarrow,” she whispered.
    â€œChrist! Have some faith in me, eh lass?” he said, and with a sad little shake of her head she retired indoors.
    Kessler retrieved Brunhilde from under the overhang and all three walked down the hill toward Herbertshöhe. The sleepy little settlement of perhaps three dozen houses was quiet. The warehouses of the Forsayth Company were inactive, the telegraph shack closed, and the German New Guinea Company office empty. There were no Europeans on the muddy street and save for a few miserable natives chewing and spitting betel juice, not another living soul. The natives were naked, emaciated, their mouths stained purple. Most of them were infected with ring worm and they scratched incessantly when they were not spitting or coughing. The constant writhing and betel chewing of the New Guineans was what had finally put an end to Kessler’s church going at the French Mission. “You should do something for those poor devils,” Will said, giving them a wide berth.
    â€œWhat can we do?” Kessler asked. There was no cure for ring worm and the only palliative was opium.
    They walked a little further along Hanover Strasse. “Quiet today,” Will remarked. It was always quiet, except for when a Forsayth boat was at the jetty or the monthly steamer entered the bay. For European companionship only the hotel or the yacht club could be relied upon, but Will increasingly avoided both those places—too many of the people propping up the bar reminded him of himself, or, how he would be a year or two down the line. Kessler tapped his watch. “Do you have the hour, Will?” he asked without much hope.
    â€œNot I,” Will said, with a guilty recollection that his grandfather’s Great Western repeater had bought a case of brandy.
    Since Will had been in town last, several people had boarded up their homes for the rainy season or gone bust or taken ship to Samoa or Australia. The Chinese general store he didn’t patronize had closed and if a Chinaman couldn’t make it here, nobody could. Even Governor Hahl usually avoided Herbertshöhe, out surveying his islands, or off on some jaunt up-country, where, if there was any justice, he’d be killed and eaten like several prominent Europeans before him.
    Brunhilde’s cheerless clip clop became a doleful commentary on the white man’s need to venture to Earth’s more forlorn places.