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His coat and short-clothes and buckled shoes spoke of long by-gone days, and the skin of his face was brown and shrivelled, so that the bones beneath showed grim and gaunt. Beyond him was a great heap of the same small packages of tobacco, and alongside them a pile of small kegs. Gard lit another of his torches, and stepped gingerly over to them. He sounded one or two, but found them empty.
But there was no mistaking it. There was the what is it? embryo, with its big head and curved back, and its heart beating under its throat, and the yolk shrivelled up and great membranes spreading inside of the shell and all over the yolk. Here was I hatching out the eggs of the biggest of all extinct birds, in a little canoe in the midst of the Indian Ocean. If old Dawson had known that!
The painted object shrivelled underneath her hand; the form collapsed, the hair dropped off, the arched dark eyebrows changed to scanty tufts of grey; the pale lips shrunk, the skin became cadaverous and loose; an old, worn, yellow, nodding woman, with red eyes, alone remained in Cleopatra's place, huddled up, like a slovenly bundle, in a greasy flannel gown.
So she betook herself to wandering in the mountains and valleys and worshipped God until she died, and Almighty Allah have mercy upon her! A pair of pigeons once stored up wheat and barley in their nest during the winter, and when the summer came, the grain shrivelled and became less; so the male pigeon said to his wife, "Thou hast eaten of this grain."
It is very much shrivelled and mummy-like, of the color of parchment, and is little more than a finger-bone, with the dry skin or flesh flaking away from it; on the whole, not a very delightful relic; but Galileo used to point heavenward with this finger, and I hope has gone whither he pointed.
At Lashmar's entrance, his hostess did not move; sunk together in her chair, head drooping forward, she viewed him from under her eyebrows: even to give her hand when he stood before her seemed almost too great an effort, and the shrivelled lips scarce made audible her bidding that he should be seated.
But his shrivelled and shrunken auditor grinned appreciatively, and said, with more than his usual vindictive emphasis: "A-a-h! that's the right kind of talk. Now you're gittin' past all this make-believin' to the truth. We're a cussed mean set we folk who go to church and read the Bible, and then do just what the devil tells us, a-helpin him along all the time.
"She said something to him, did she? perhaps she gave him the fellow flower to this;" and he took out of his coat and twiddled in his thumb and finger a poor little shrivelled crumpled bud that had faded and blackened with the heat and flare of the night "I wonder to how many more she has given her artless tokens of affection the little flirt" and he flung his into the gutter, where the water may have refreshed it, and where any amateur of rosebuds may have picked it up.
It spared neither age nor sexlessness, not even this shrivelled ancient who was meditating on her latter end. Suddenly he became aware of a shadow darkening the doorway. At the same instant the fire leapt back into his grandmother's glasses. Instinctively, almost before he turned his head, he knew it was the hero of the romance.
But she made him think of Eudena. "Come over to us, Ugh-lomi," they cried, and the voice of the shrivelled old woman rose above them all. At the sound of her voice his hesitation returned. He stood on the river bank, Ugh-lomi Ugh the Thinker with his thoughts slowly taking shape. Presently one and then another paused to see what he would do. He was minded to go back, he was minded not to.
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