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He got injected with the extract of misery beforehand," he says. "He was born wishing he wasn't. I know what it is, but he don't know what it is, Kiyi don't. He don't know what's the matter. First thing he saw was the cholera." All about the gardens there was a tinkle of bells made by the wind blowing them, and a gong kept muttering somewhere.
Tha-Thana!" "Kishhatriya," he mumbles, "Kiyi," and he fell back into his absent-mindedness. So we went past him to the little temple behind the gilded cone. Most of the monks were sitting around it on the grass, and Irish, with his hair remarkable wild, among them, and against a pillar sat Sadler, bent over Kiyi's body that was on his knees. One of the yellow robes recited a monotonous chant.
For four hours in the morning we scrubbed the gun deck, washed the white paint work with fresh water and soap, scrubbed the deck with stiff "kiyi" brushes, and polished off the bright work. By noon the deck had its pristine immaculate look. "What do you think of this?" he inquired pugnaciously.
He sat, solemn and still, while Sadler was unloading his mind, and it seemed to me that Kiyi was mysterious, same as the bronze Buddhas in the cone pagoda. "He's got it," says Sadler, speaking husky. "Worse'n I did." "Got what?" I says. Sadler's face had grown tired, sort of heavy and worn, while he was looking down at Kiyi. "Born with it.
Maybe Sadler is studying the "Kiyi Proposition," still, to find out how the three hundred bronze Buddhas can give three hundred cheerful agreements to the statement that "All things are one," when, on the contrary, some things have Kiyi luck and some don't. I don't know. The rights and wrongs of this world always seemed to me pretty complicated.
I says: "Ain't any doubt about that. It's Kiyi." It was quite a parcel of years I sailed the Pacific, ten years, or thereabout, altogether. The time I saw Sadler behind the Green Dragons was my last cruise there. I says to myself: "Tommy, you ain't a 'bonny sailor boy' any more. Why don't you sail your own ship? Haven't you got a bank in the West Indies? Why don't you liquidate on Clyde?
"See here," he says, "Tommy, what's the idea of this?" Then we backed out of that assembly. Seemed to me it was a proposition a man might as well dodge. Only, I recollect how little Kiyi looked like a wisp of dry hay, and Sadler uncommon large, with his fists on the stone floor on either side, and his head hung over Kiyi, and how the yellow men squatted and said nothing.
His folks work in the rice fields. The littlest one's Kishatriya, which I call him Kiyi on account of his solemnness. Seemed to me it ought to cheer things up, to call him Kiyi. His folks died of cholera. He keeps meditatin' all the time. "Business," he says. "Oh! Fu Shan Lum Shan. Why. Yes! Saleratus!" He seemed to have trouble getting his mind to those long-past things.
It generally takes time and a few knock-out cuffs from bear's paw to teach a dog that there's two ends to a bear and only one of them safe to tackle, but that little ornery kiyi knew it from the start.
A little farther on, and up a dry earthy hillside, a medium-sized beast leapt from an eroded place fairly under my feet and made off with a singularly familiar kiyi. It was a strange-looking animal, apparently brick red in colour. When I had collected myself I saw it was a wild dog. It had been asleep in a warm hollow of red clay, and had not awakened until I was fairly upon it.
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