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Looked properly down upon, there are portions of the Atlantic Ocean to which one would hardly ascribe a trace of colour: at the most a tint of dark indigo reaches the eye. The water, in fact, is practically black, and this is an indication both of its depth and purity.
The first immigrants, many of whom were men of capital, landed at Charleston, and, settling in the fertile low country along the coast, became prosperous planters of rice, indigo, and corn, before a single white inhabitant had found his way to the more salubrious upper country in the western part of the Province.
The stumps of the indigo crackled, and there was a smell of cattle, as a huge and dripping Brahminee bull shouldered his way under the tree. The flashes revealed the trident mark of Shiva on his flank, the insolence of head and hump, the luminous stag-like eyes, the brow crowned with a wreath of sodden marigold blooms, and the silky dewlap that almost swept the ground.
Its soil is fertile as that of the islands of which we have just spoken. No drinkable water is found in any of them; but it would be easy to procure excellent water by digging wells about two metres in depth. Cotton and indigo grow every where spontaneously; what then is wanting, to these countries, to obtain in them what the other colonies produce?
First, there was Madame Gravois' story to listen to as she bustled about giving orders to a kinky-haired negro girl concerning my dinner. Then came the dinner, excellent if I could have eaten it. The virtues of the former Monsieur Gravois were legion. He had come to Louisiana from Toulon, planted indigo, fought a duel, and Madame was a widow. So I condense two hours into two lines.
We rode down the valley below the town and found it very dry and barren, the only industry worth naming being a small indigo plantation. Indigo seems to have been more cultivated formerly than now. In many parts I saw the deserted vats in which the plants were steeped to extract the dye. We ascended a high range to the left of the valley, on the top of which were a few pine trees.
He spoke of Timbuctoo the store-place, the metropolis and market of Central Africa, with its piles of ivory, its piles of virgin gold, its sacks of rice, millet, and ground-nuts, its cakes of indigo, its tufts of ostrich plumes, its metals, its dates, its stuffs, its iron-ware, and particularly its slabs of rock salt, brought on the backs of beasts of burden from Taudeni, the frightful Saharian city of salt, whose soil is salt for leagues around, an infernal mine of that salt which is so precious in the Soudan that it serves as a medium of exchange, as money more precious even than gold.
The captain sullenly kept the boat's nose in the deep channel, but beyond this the gang was apparently no more responsive to words than the alligators which lay sunning themselves at the water's edge. The river now grew narrower, its waters grew clearer, changing from a yellow to a faint indigo. "Getting into a limestone formation," called Higgins over his shoulder.
The boy who from eight to fourteen "chose to read books of science, history, voyages, etc., more than others"; the youth whose gardener uncle would have had him follow that calling, but whose sensitive skin kept him within doors, where he fitted up a room with his botanical and zoological museum; the shoemaker-preacher who made a garden around every cottage-manse in which he lived, and was familiar with every beast, bird, insect, and tree in the Midlands of England, became a scientific observer from the day he landed at Calcutta, an agricultural reformer from the year he first built a wooden farmhouse in the jungle, as the Manitoba emigrant now does under very different skies, and then began to grow and make indigo amid the peasantry at Dinapoor.
In the darkness, with just a thread of moonlight to make patterns upon the black waters and etch out the outline of mast and funnel and hull against the indigo, Cleek recognized that look, and set his mouth grimly. He'd seen it once before, upon that night when this man had stolen into his room and tried to knife him. "Where're you off to, matey? With all your fine secrets?
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