Six-inch trees, throated with rotten remnants of thatched roofs through which they had aspired toward the sun, rose about him.
Quick-growing trees had shadowed the kingposts so that the idols and totems, seated in carved shark jaws, grinned greenly and monstrously at the futility of man through a rime of moss and mottled fungus.

A poor little sea-wall, never much at its best, sprawled in ruin from the coconut roots to the placid sea.

Bananas, plantains, and breadfruit lay rotting on the ground.

Bones lay about, human bones, and Jerry nosed them out, knowing them for what they were, emblems of the nothingness of life.

Skulls he did not encounter, for the skulls that belonged to the scattered bones ornamented the devil devil houses in the upland bush villages.
The salt tang of the sea gladdened his nostrils, and he snorted with the pleasure of the stench of the mangrove swamp.