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Falk by Joseph Conrad
page 45 of 95 (47%)
Johnson does not exist. Their suggestion was that I should hunt the
man up myself with the help of the Consulate's constable--an
ex-sergeant-major of a regiment of Hussars.

This man, whose usual duty apparently consisted in sitting behind a
little table in an outer room of Consular offices, when ordered to
assist me in my search for Johnson displayed lots of energy and a
marvellous amount of local knowledge of a sort. But he did not conceal
an immense and sceptical contempt for the whole business. We explored
together on that afternoon an infinity of infamous grog shops, gambling
dens, opium dens. We walked up narrow lanes where our gharry--a tiny
box of a thing on wheels, attached to a jibbing Burmah pony--could by
no means have passed. The constable seemed to be on terms of scornful
intimacy with Maltese, with Eurasians, with Chinamen, with Klings, and
with the sweepers attached to a temple, with whom he talked at the gate.
We interviewed also through a grating in a mud wall closing a blind
alley an immensely corpulent Italian, who, the ex-sergeant-major
remarked to me perfunctorily, had "killed another man last year."
Thereupon he addressed him as "Antonio" and "Old Buck," though that
bloated carcase, apparently more than half filling the sort of cell
wherein it sat, recalled rather a fat pig in a stye. Familiar and never
unbending, the sergeant chucked--absolutely chucked--under the chin
a horribly wrinkled and shrivelled old hag propped on a stick, who had
volunteered some sort of information: and with the same stolid face he
kept up an animated conversation with the groups of swathed brown women,
who sat smoking cheroots on the door-steps of a long range of clay
hovels. We got out of the gharry and clambered into dwellings airy like
packing crates, or descended into places sinister like cellars. We got
in, we drove on, we got out again for the sole purpose, as it seemed, of
looking behind a heap of rubble. The sun declined; my companion was curt
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