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The distance that they set between themselves and the bourgeoisie, their very exclusiveness, gave them a certain elevation, and enhanced their value. Each noble represented a certain price for the townsmen, as Bambara Negroes, we are told, attach a money value to cowrie shells.
India was awake, and Kim was in the middle of it, more awake and more excited than anyone, chewing on a twig that he would presently use as a toothbrush; for he borrowed right- and left-handedly from all the customs of the country he knew and loved. There was no need to worry about food no need to spend a cowrie at the crowded stalls.
He alone could sail the Cowrie, therefore the others could not leave Jungle Island without him; but what was there to prevent Gust, with just sufficient men to man the schooner, slipping away from Kai Shang, Momulla the Maori, and some half of the crew when opportunity presented? It was for this opportunity that Gust waited.
From the high land above us green scrub-covered spur after spur shoots downward to the shore, enclosing numerous little beaches of coarse sand and many coloured spiral shells "Reddies" we boys called them with here and there a rare and beautiful cowrie of banded jet black and pearly white.
'Oh, I will follow them, north and south, east and west, and though I may travel far, yet some day I will find them. Then her mother said no more, but gave her a camel and some food, and a negro and his wife to take care of her, and she fastened a cowrie shell round the camel's neck for a charm, and bade her daughter go in peace.
But the chief feature is the slave market, where the unfortunate beings are ranged, according to their sex, in two long rows. The cowrie, so frequently mentioned in Park's Travels, is here the chief medium of circulation.
In Mesopotamia the board was a log of wood sliced in two and hinged together. In either half five or six holes were scooped out, and the game consisted in dropping cowrie shells or pebbles into the holes. When the number in a particular hollow came to a certain amount with the addition of the one dropped in, you won the contents. In most places the coffee was served in Arab fashion, not Turkish.
The pretty cowrie, lemon-coloured and grey and brown, throws over its shining shoulders a shawl of the hue of the rock on which it crawls about, grey or brown or tawny, with white specks and dots which make for invisibility a thin filmy shawl of exquisite sensitiveness.
The battle there was over. Schmidt and Momulla and two others alone remained alive of all the company of the Cowrie, for they had found sanctuary in the forecastle.
The currency of the country consists of cowrie shells, or kurdie, which are not, as in regions near the coast, fastened together in strings of one hundred each, but are separate, and must be counted one by one. The governors of towns make them up in sacks containing twenty thousand each.
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