"What are you driving at, stranger?" he said.
"Do you cork your noses, then, that you can't smell?"
"Oh, you mean the smell from the pearl oysters."
"Do they smell as vile as that?" I remarked. "Surely a dozen open sewers would not cause such a stink!"
"Well," he replied, "if you've any doubt, go across to that Chink's yard over there and smell for yourself."
I
held a double fold of handkerchief to my face and fol-. lowed my nose.
True, there were barrels full of putrefying pearl oysters of small size
standing about. Yellow men, stripped to the waist, were pouring hot
water into the casks and stirring the mixture with long bamboo poles.
This, after some time, was transferred into other casks, strained
through a doubled square of cheese-cloth, and what was left atop were
yellowish seed-pearls, the largest no bigger than pin-heads.
"Have
you any bigger ones?" I asked the boss Chink. He displayed a row of
gold-filled teeth and led me into his parlor. He tossed a few small
round pieces into a china dish for my inspection, but his price was sky
high.
"Too much money," I said.
He scratched his bare belly, and replied: "Canton pay velly good plice; more better I sell Canton." And that was that.
At
Onslow three days later I was to sleep ashore that night in a real bed
for a change, but when the hotelkeeper's wife turned over the mattress
and a snake came wriggling out from between blankets and sheets, I got
no sleep at all. Instead I went for a walk with another fellow. We went
out into the bright moonshine along the Ashburton River. We came at
length on a deserted gold-mining camp. The pans were there, the cooking
pots, the spades and everything, just as they had been left when the
gold-rush to Kalgoorie caused such a stir.
We
stood and waited for someone to come out of some forsaken shanty or
tumble-down hut, but no one came. The quiet place gave us the creeps.
We trotted back without talking, occupied with our own thoughts, until
we came to a kind of slushy sandy bog and found a man who had got fast
stuck in it.
