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In his letters he complained much of these smells and likewise much of the heat, but more than of either he complained of the insects. It would appear that the mosquitoes worked on him in shifts. By day there came day mosquitoes, creatures of the sunlight and matching it in a way, seeing that they were big grey-striped fellows with keen and strident voices. By night there were small vicious mosquitoes, in colour an appropriate black and in habit more bloodthirsty than Uhlans. After dark the flame of his kerosene lamp was to them as the traditional light in the traditional casement is to returning wanderers. It brought them in millions, and with them tiny persistent gnats and many small coffin-shaped beetles and hosts of pulpy, unwholesome-looking moths of many sizes and as many colours. Screens and double screens at the window openings did not avail to keep these visitors out. Somehow they found a way in. The mosquitoes and the gnats preyed upon him; the beetles and the moths were lured by the flame to a violent end. To save the wick from being clogged by their burnt bodies he hooded the top of the lamp with netting. This caused the lamp chimney to smoke and foul itself with soot. To save his shins from attack he wrapped his legs in newspaper buskins. For his hands and his face and his neck and his ears he could devise no protection.

To be encountered just outside the door were huge flying cockroaches that clung in his hair or buffeted him in the face as they blundered along on purposeless flights. Still other insects, unseen but none the less busy, added to the burden of his jeremiad. Borers riddled the pages of his books; and the white ant, as greedy for wood pulp as a paper baron, was constantly sapping and mining the underpinnings of his house.

Touching on the climate his tone was most rebellious. By all accounts the weather was rarely what one born in Vermont would regard as seasonable weather. According to him its outstanding characteristics were heat, moistness and stickiness. If he took a nap in the afternoon he rose from it as from a Turkish bath. His hair was plastered to his head all day with dampness; his forehead and his face ran sweat; his wrists were as though they had been parboiled and freshly withdrawn from the water. Perspiration glued his garments to his frame. His shoes behind the door turned a leprous white from mildew and rotted to pieces while yet they were new.

The forest, into which he sometimes ventured, was a place of dampness, deepness and smells; a place of great trees, fat fungoids, sprawling creepers, preposterous looking parasites, orchids, lianas; a place of things that crawled and climbed and twined and clung. It was filled with weird sounds–the booming of wild pigeons; a nagging, tapping sound as though woodchoppers were at work far off in its depths; and a constant insane chattering sound, as though mad children, hidden all about him, were laughing at him. Dusk brought from their coverts the flying foxes, to utter curious notes as they sailed through the gloaming, and occasionally sharp squeaks as of mortal agony or intense gratification–he couldn’t make up his mind which. After nightfall if he flung a burning cigar stump out upon the sand he could see it moving off in the darkness apparently under its own motive power. But the truth was that a land crab, with an unsolvable mania for playing the role of torchbearer, would be scuttling away with the stub in one of its claws.

The forest sheltered no dangerous beasts and no venomous reptiles but in it were stinging nettles the touch of which was like fire to a sensitive white skin. Also, the waters of the lagoon were free from man-eaters, but wading close to shore one was almost sure to bark one’s shanks on the poisoned coral, making sores that refused to heal. Against the river, which flowed down out of the interior to the sea, Pratt likewise bore a grudge, because it was in the river that a brown woman washed his clothes on the stones, returning them with the buttons pounded off; but for every missing button there was sure to be a bright yellow, semi-indelible stain, where the laundress had spread the garments to dry upon a wild berry bush.