Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 8, 2025
The evening was perfectly calm and clear; the extreme monotony of the view gave it an interest even in the midst of mud-banks and gulls sand-hillocks and solitary vultures. In riding back in the morning we came across a very fresh track of a Puma, but did not succeed in finding it. We saw also a couple of Zorillos, or skunks, odious animals, which are far from uncommon.
If you had fished you not have hooked rats or dead cats, and if you had put your head out and looked round, you would have encountered altogether a clean, airy, and respectable neighbourhood, populous enough to be quite cheery, with occasional gardens instead of mud-banks, and without interminable rows of tall chimney-pots excluding the light of heaven.
It could only be used on the muddiest foreshore of the beach, far away from the bathing-machines and pierheads, below the grassy slopes of Fort Keeling. The tide ran out nearly two miles on that coast, and the many-coloured mud-banks, touched by the sun, sent up a lamentable smell of dead weed.
Every now and then we go in for fish. There are schnapper, rock-cod, mullet, mackerel, and herring, or species that answer to those, to be had for very little trouble. There are also soles, which we catch on the mud-banks and shallows at night, wading by torchlight, and spearing the dazzled fish as they lie. When we make a great haul we salt, dry, or smoke the capture for lasting use.
What was to happen next I could not imagine, for the Chinese were a different race from mine, and from what I knew I was confident that fair play was no part of their make-up. After waiting a few minutes longer, the crew hoisted the lateen sail, and Yellow Handkerchief steered down toward the mouth of San Rafael Creek. The tide was getting lower, and he had difficulty in escaping the mud-banks.
The latter article was required for a very innocent purpose: each parish has a public musket, and the gunpowder was wanted for making a noise on their saint or feast days. The people here live chiefly on shell-fish and potatoes. At certain seasons they catch also, in "corrales," or hedges under water, many fish which are left on the mud-banks as the tide falls.
These mud-banks are covered with mangroves in many places, forming great stretches of uniform thicket. The mangrove is here a tree growing to a height of twenty or thirty feet, branching thickly, and bearing a dark, luxuriant foliage. At high water, the mangrove swamps present the appearance of thickets growing out of the water.
The wheat, the pale ripened tufted sugar-cane, the millet, the barley, the onions, the fringed castor-oil bushes jostle each other for foothold, since the Desert will not give them room; and men chase the falling Nile inch by inch, each dawn, with new furrowed melon-beds on the still dripping mud-banks. Administratively, such a land ought to be a joy.
The channel by which we went to and returned from Olinda was bordered on each side by mangroves, which sprang like a miniature forest out of the greasy mud-banks. The bright green colour of these bushes always reminded me of the rank grass in a churchyard: both are nourished by putrid exhalations; the one speaks of death past, and the other too often of death to come.
The very short winter afternoon had worn away, and, before they knew, the winter moon was walking the untroubled sea. Long ruled lines of silver showed where a ripple of the rising tide was turning over the mud-banks. The wind had dropped, and in the intense stillness they could hear a donkey cropping the frosty grass many yards away.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking