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So I kep' still, and would clean the head-board silently with kerosine and a woolen rag. And Philury is a likely girl. Very freckled, but modest and unassuming. She is little, and has nice little features, and a round little face; and though she can't be said to resemble it in every particular, yet I never could think of any thing whenever I see her, but a nice little turkey-egg.
A hand-lamp on the mantelpiece diffused a yellow twilight through the room; a twilight flavoured with kerosine: and across the twilight the shadow of the punkah flitted, like a whispering ghost. Zyarulla, crouching at the bedside, slid a cautious knotted hand between the buttons of the sleeping-coat, and laid it lightly on his master's heart.
In the centre of the room two Sidis are sitting, in cock-horse fashion, astride what appear to be wooden imitations of a cannon and beating the parchment- covered mouths of their pseudo-steeds with their hands; at their feet a third Sidi is playing a kind of reveille upon a flattened kerosine oil-tin; and in the corner, with his back to the audience, an immense African an ebony Pan blowing frenzy through his wide lips is forcing the whole weight of his lungs into a narrow reed pipe.
I have said that all birds fight more or less, but birds are not alone in this. The little wide-mouthed, goggled-eyed fishes, which Malay ladies keep in bottles and old kerosine tins, fight like demons. Goats sit up and strike with their cloven hoofs, and butt and stab with their horns.
Both Battalions, the Plymouth and the K.O.S.B.s, had climbed the high cliff without loss; so it was signalled; there is no firing; the Turks have made themselves scarce; nothing to show danger or stress; only parties of our men struggling up the sandy precipice by zigzags, carrying munitions and large glittering kerosine tins of water.
Where candles are scarce and kerosine is not, a "slush lamp" is a useful substitute. Take an old but sound quart tin pannikin, half fill it with sand or earth, and prepare a thin stick of pine, round which wrap a strip of soft cotton cloth. The stick should be about half an inch longer than the depth of the pannikin.
There is not a single tree, there is no grass ... dreary as hell.... Baku and the Caspian Sea are such rotten places that I would not agree to live there for a million. There are no roofs, there are no trees either; Persian faces everywhere, fifty degrees Reaumur of heat, a smell of kerosine, the naphtha-soaked mud squelches under one's feet, the drinking water is salt.
"Shoo! I never put that on! It didn't have smell enough to do any good. I knew that as soon as I unrolled it. I just rubbed myself heavy with that mixture of kerosine, vinegar and gum camfire you've been making me for twenty years, and I slept uncommon well." "Oh," answered Mother Mayberry, "I wish you had tried Tom's plaster. I feel sure "
Old Bombayites can remember the days of cocoanut, when he had to begin his operations during the cold season by putting a row of bottles out in the sun to melt the frozen oil; but kerosine has changed all that, and he has nothing to do but to trim the wick into that fork-tailed pattern in which he delights, and which secures the minimum of light with the maximum destruction of chimneys, to smear the outside of each lamp with his greasy fingers, to conjure away a gallon or so of oil, and to meet remonstrance with a child-like query, "Do I drink kerosene oil?"
Of the days that I am writing about, and for long years afterwards, coconut oil was the one and only source from which we derived our artificial lighting, and it was not until the early seventies that a change came over the spirit of the dream by the introduction of kerosine oil.
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