"a large chunk of butter in the sun"

"In the rain, which does not come, our laundry always stays on the line.  A river, already half-dead, had its source in the Black Forest.  The sun, El Comandante told me, spends the nights lying on a stretcher.  Gather, gather, gather.  Gather words, my friend, but no one will ever succeed in describing fire exhaustively.  From the radio all we hear are electrical whoosing sounds.  Our boats are meandering about on the Camisea.

Yesterday in the speedboat one of the boatmen had left a large chunk of butter in the sun on a flat glass saucer (late-Woolworth style), and had covered it with a page torn from a porno magazine.  Repulsive-looking men copulated with blowsy blondes, who strangely enough had kept their bikinis on.  I saw that the butter was melting and would soon turn to liquid, so I pushed the saucer into the shade up front in the bow, but on two stops I made later the boatman had pulled the saucer back into he blazing sun.  The butter is salted, and comes out of cans imported from Australia.  I did not ask why the boatman was putting the covered butter in the heat that way, but with silent determination we continued the duel all day and into the early evening to get the butter into the sun, then into the shade.  In the last rays of the sun an enormous tree suddenly burst into bloom with blossoms of glowing yellow, as dense and yellow as a hail of gold.  It happened so fast that from one second to the next the blossoms were there, as if a light had been switched on, and just as quickly they were extinguished again.

Huerequeque found a large piece of petrified wood and gave it to me.  We talked about tortoise dances, about fish dances.  The notion that fish dance preoccupies me."

-- Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless