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The Filipinos had assumed that his announcement cloaked some other invention, and had expected him to branch off at the eleventh hour. The Captain searched the town from garret to cellar, but no Quentin Salas. He unearthed, however, the usual score of paupers and invalids. One of these was a man humped up with rheumatism, as only a Filipino decrepit can be.
A bright-hued humped ox and an ass were turning the wheel which raised cooling waters from the Nile and poured them into a large tank from which they flowed through narrow rivulets to irrigate the beds. This toil was now very laborious, for the river had fallen to so low a level as to give cause for anxiety, even at this season of extreme ebb.
An Indian "Flivver." An ordinary road it is, and passing over it the ordinary procession heavy-wheeled carts drawn by humped, white bullocks; crowded jutkas whose tough, little ponies disappear in a rattle of wheels and a cloud of dust; weddings, funerals, and festivals with processions gay or mournful as the case may be.
He never forgot that lumpy shadow which was the herd, traveling fast in dust that obscured the nearest stars. The shadow humped here and there as the cattle crowded forward at a shuffling half trot, the click awash of their shambling feet treading close on one another.
The moonlight, released by his humped shadow, fell upon something sparkling, at which he leaped with a sudden thirst, and cried: "Gold! Jewels! They are mine." It was an iron casket, old and rusty, that he had raised. Within it, partly rusted to the case, the precious lustre to which he had devoted his life flashed out to the o'erspread arch of night, sown thick with star-dust.
I watched him with a curious fascination, and as I grew sleepier and sleepier that part of my consciousness which was not counting steps, recognized him as a cripple who had come out to Mesopotamia in this special rôle 'to do his bit. His humped back, protruding under his mackintosh as he labored forward, bent into a hoop, must have suggested the idea which was accepted as fact until I pulled myself together at the next halt and heard the mechanical and unimaginative half of me repeat 'Four thousand, seven hundred, and twenty-one. The man raised himself into erectness with a groan, and a crippled greengrocer whom I had known in my youth, to me the basic type of hunchback became an upstanding British private.
He could hear the river sing; he could see in the light of the stars, and a mere flinder of a moon, the clods of earth on the ground below, naught else. For the douce mignonne, with her back all handsomely humped, had suddenly sprung aside and fled down the interior slope of the rampart into the parade and over to the cook's quarters neighboring the kitchen.
Whatever growth occurs is irregular and disproportionate. The trunk, though small compared with the head, appears massive against the background of the diminutive extremities. The back is somewhat humped, arching at the waist-line, while the abdomen protrudes like a balloon, with a hernia, often, at the navel.
Then he humped himself together, in that indescribably awkward way that all herons have at the beginning of their flight, slanted heavily up to the highest tree on the shore, and stopped for a longer period on a dead branch to look back at me. I had not moved so much as an eyelid; nevertheless he saw me too plainly to trust me.
When I struck the town I see there warn't nobody out in the storm, so I never hunted for no back streets, but humped it straight through the main one; and when I begun to get towards our house I aimed my eye and set it. No light there; the house all dark which made me feel sorry and disappointed, I didn't know why.