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If at two feet of distance he receives one eighth of the total effect, he will at four feet of distance obtain only one thirty-second part. In practice, the punka should just clear his head when standing, and the weighting of the curtain should be of some yielding material, so as not to damage any person who might stand in its course.
Come; we'll go down as we are to dinner, and watch the ridiculous captain and his fan-bearer. The punka will at least give us a breath of fresh air. There doesn't seem to be any on deck. One regrets Darjeeling." Martha followed her young mistress into the dining-saloon; she was anxious and upset. Where would this mood end? With a glance of relief she found Warrington's chair still vacant.
Added to the hell-hot, baking stuffiness that radiated from the walls, there came the squeaking of a punka rope pulled out of time the piece of piping in the mud-brick wall through which the rope passed had become clogged and rusted, and the villager pressed into service had forgotten how to pull; he jerked at the cord between nods as the heat of the veranda and the unaccustomed night duty combined to make him sleepy.
And then, above his head, Hemingway heard the lazy whisper of the punka, and from the harbor the raucous whistle of the Crown Prince Eitel, signalling her entrance. The world had not stopped; for the punka-boy, for the captain of the German steamer, for Harris seated with face averted, the world was still going gayly and busily forward. Only for him had it stopped.
He looked a very sick bad old man as he lay there on his low couch, placed so as to court the air from without, cooled by its passage through damped grass screens, and to receive the full strength of the punka, pulled by an invisible hand outside. "You go to England to-morrow?" he asked, sharply.
There are some very important natural laws which are illustrated in the punka. The first is that which governs the movement of the pendulum. The number of swings it makes per minute depends on the length of the suspending cords; a pendulum three feet long will swing 62½ times per minute, and a pendulum six feet long will swing 44¼ times per minute.
We shall now proceed to examine several forms of punka, all made to the same size, and, for purposes of comparison, we shall drive them all at the same speed. And in order that their effects may be visible to you, I have prepared an indicator which resembles more than anything else the keyboard of a piano.
As the air weighs 0.072 lb. per cubic foot at 82° Fahrenheit, and as a considerable quantity of air is put in motion, the power required to drive a punka depends upon the quantity of air it puts in motion in a given time. The useful effect is a separate matter; it depends on the amount of air thrown in a downward direction.
They must, therefore, be made of such a weight that they will swing nearly as far on the opposite side as they are pulled on the near side; any greater weight is useless and only serves to wear out the suspending cords, which, by the way, are nearly always too numerous and too thick for their purpose. Exp. 2. Here is a panel punka which we shall try to use without the customary swing bar.
And suppose that then you came across the complete works of Shakespeare and that you had never read them or the Odyssey and that you had never read that or, better, suppose that there was a Steinway piano in your sitting-room, and that one day the boy who worked the punka for you dropped the rope and sat down at the piano and played Beethoven from beginning to end as Rubenstein would have played him and suppose you had never heard a note of Beethoven before.
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