Some dark, evil thing set down roots deep into his soul and ate and ate and ate. It was smiling all the time while he moved from one depravity to another. It just kept on smiling and wriggling its broad hips. Depravity and perversion of the most base degree was its natural habitat. Did it matter then what a man slept with- a cow, a horse, a child or anything? A person who cries under conditions like that has retained enough sensitivity to look on his own degradation, and there is a point where he begins to fight his way to freedom. It took a shattering death to pull out the deep, dark roots.

.....Medusa was smiling. She had some top secret information to impart to Elizabeth. It was about her vagina. Without any bother for decencies, she spread her long black legs in the air and the most exquisite sensation travelled out of her towards Elizabeth. It enveloped Elizabeth from head to toe like a slow, deep, sensuous bomb. It was like falling into deep, warm waters, lazily raising one hand and resting in a heaven of bliss.
Then she looked at Elizabeth and smiled a mocking, superior smile You haven’t got anything near that, have you?
.......it was not maddening to her to be told she hadn't a vagina. She might have had but it was not such a pleasant area of the body to concentrate on, possibly only now and then if necessary.

.....The bush slept all around, and at night the insects communed with their own selves in long, brooding, plaintive soliloquies. The deep, black midnight sky vibrated with a billion soft blue lights, and at dawn the sun arose like a majestic king thrusting one powerful golden arm above the flat horizon. Only the bush, the brown road, the insects, the stars and the yellow-gold dawn remained a tender, background symphony. There was no beauty or tenderness in her learning:
What is love?
Who is God?
If I cry, who will have compassion on me as my suffering is the suffering of others?
This is the nature of evil. This is the nature of goodness.

.....The next night he introduced a girl. She had her hair done up in the traditional style; small chunks of hair were tied on to a length of string and wound round and round the head. The girl bowed her head so Elizabeth could get a good look at her hair-do.
....She wasn’t the usual sort of girl. She was a specialist in sex. A symbol went hand in hand with her, a small sewing machine with a handle.
"She can go with a man the whole night and feel no ill-effects the next day, provided you stimulate her properly”, Dan explained.
The stimulation worked like a sewing-machine; turn the handle with a big swing, then the needle rattles up and down; turn the handle again and so on. It looked as if the key to it was her penny button. She liked her penny button tickled.
His other comment on Miss Sewing-Machine was; "She’s a demon of self control".
Then he simply tumbled the girl into bed beside Elizabeth and went with her the whole night....They kept on bumping her awake till at dawn they made the last bump, bump,bump.

...he thrust black hands in front of her, black legs and a huge, towering black penis. The penis was always erect. From that night he kept his pants down; after all, the women of his harem totalled seventy-one.

...The next night he had a new girl-Miss Wriggly-Bottom. She looked Chinese; she was quite yellow, and her long, straight, black hair cascaded over her bare shoulders. The girl didn’t care for clothes; She was stark naked. Miss Sewing-Machine had a dress on till the lights dimmed Wriggly-Bottom had small round breasts and a neat, nipped-in waist. She walked in time to a silent jazz tune she was humming and wriggled her bottom. Then she lay herself down on her bed, on her tum, and propped up her chin up in her hands. She looked at Elizabeth with enchanting Black eyes.
“I’m just waiting for my date”, she said.
The date dimmed the lights.
[The next morning he turned on a record which said] “My darling, if you call me I’ll come to you. I don’t like women like that. They are too cheap”.
Apparently he liked the girls to keep their clothes on until he told them to take them off. Then that night he had a dramatic announcement to make. Miss Wriggly Bottom was stone dead. He’d overestimated her stamina. She couldn’t go with a man the whole night. Her sex was outside, on her bust and thighs, it wasn’t inside. There was just a vacuum inside. “I have an insatiable desire”, and in he hauled Miss Sewing-Machine again.
She was looking desperately sad and wistful, but she temporarily solved his problem. The next day he was free to turn his attention back to his job, which was, of course, directing the affairs of the universe.

...to have a supreme pervert thrust his soul into your living body. It was like taking a walk on slime; slithering, skidding and cringing with a deep shame. It was like no longer having a digestive system, a marvellous body, filled with a network of blood vessels -it was simply having a mouth and an alimentary tract; food was shit and piss; the sky, the stars, the earth, people, animals were also shit and piss. It was like living in the hot, feverish world of the pissing pervert of the public toilet-the sort of man who, in in buses and cinema queues, pressed himself against a woman. And when a woman turned around and said: “You shouldn’t do that”, she looked right into a face with an uncomprehending smirk that said: “But don’t you like it? That’s all I do. That’s all I know. My whole life is my pissing vehicle. You’re like that too. You’re just pretending”.

.....Madam Loose-Bottom had a sexual potency on a scale ten times greater than Dan’s. He would go into a bottomless pit of insatiability. Her symbol was a clump of wild grass; her sex was like a rough tumble in the wilderness.

...Some of the women made him panic a little. [Madam Loose-Bottom did] And Body Beautiful did. Their sex must not be more a little more than he could manage. Also women more sexually potent than he were incredibly dirty. He unfolded a long story about Madame loose bottom. She was a fallen goddess; her fall had been so bad that that she was the sort who slept with her own sons. He said: “Her past was so bad that even the police could not keep records of it”.

….The next thing he could not stand was the orgasm of Body Beautiful. It was feverish and hysterical and apparently affected him in a painful way. She was made to expose everything. The flesh of her private parts had a raw, red look as though the surface skin had been rubbed off by many hands. Like a small child wetting her pants, she had an orgasm right on top of Elizabeth.

...He...introduced Miss Pelican Beak. In every way Pelican-Beak was enchantment. She was gay and carefree, tough, energetic and so athletic she seemed to be a trapeze artist. Her symbol came along with her, the beak of the pelican bird. It referred to her passageway, which was long and tough like the bird's beak. This special gift enabled her to make love in all sorts of postures without any danger of internal injury; that is, she could twist her legs above her head, she could twist this way and that, she could do all sorts of things, and...could go the whole night with no ill-effects.
[She] liked to make comments like “Don’t!”,as though she were suddenly ashamed of something because it was love making with all the stops out. Then she alternated this with a long drawn out: “Daa-rling”.

From A Question of Power by Bessie Head

[20th century Southern African]