evening meal of rice and curry, and he was just sitting down to it as
I approached. With incredible deftness he mingled the curry and the
rice together--he had no knife, fork or spoon--by using the end-joints
of his thumb and fingers: then, when he had sufficiently amalgamated
the mass, he rolled up a little ball of it, placed the ball upon
his crooked thumb as a boy does a marble, and shot it into his mouth
without losing a grain. Thus he despatched his meal, and I could not
but marvel at the neatness and dexterity which he displayed, with
scarcely more need of a finger-bowl at the end than the most delicate
feeder you shall see at Delmonico's.

The crops raised upon the rich alluvium of these islands were
enormous, and if the other difficulties attending cultivation in
such a region could be surmounted, there seemed to be no doubt of
our friend the babou's success in his venture. But it was a wild and
lonesome region, and as we floated along, after leaving the island,
up a canal which flamed in the sunset like a great illuminated baldric
slanting across the enormous shoulder of the world, a little air came
breathing over me as if it had just blown from the mysterious regions
where space and time are not, or are in different forms from those
we know. A sense of the crudity of these great expanses of
sea-becoming-land took possession of me; the horizon stretched away
like a mere endless continuation of marshes and streams; the face of
my companion was turned off sea-ward with an expression of ineffably
mellow tranquillity; a glamour came about as if the world were again
formless and void, and as if the marshes were chaos. I shivered with a
certain eager expectation of beholding the shadowy outline of a great
and beautiful spirit moving over the face of the waters to create a
new world. I drew my gaze with difficulty from the heavens and turned
toward my companion.