Wednesday, May 09, 2007

James Bond on anticipating getting a mud-bath


from Diamonds Are Forever

Outside the bus [parked at the Baths] the smell of sulphur hit Bond with sickening force. It was a nauseous smell from somewhere down in the moiling stomach of the world. He moved away from the entrance and sat down on a rough bench under a group of dead looking firs. He remained there for a few minutes, steeling himself for what was going to happen to him through the screen doors and trying to shake off his sense of oppression and disgust. It was partly, he decided, the reaction of a healthy body to contact with disease, and it was partly the tall grim Belsen-like chimney with its plume of innocent smoke. But most of all it was the prospect of going in through those doors, buying the tickets and then stripping his clean body and giving it over to the somehow obscene things they did in this grisly ramshackle establishment.

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