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Updated: October 5, 2025
I and " He broke off suddenly and eyed me with furtive cunning. "Yes, yes, monsieur, Leroux and I. And we two worked here together, with nothing more than picks and shovels and mortars and pestles, Leroux and I. There was nobody else. We slept here when Duchaine thought we were in Quebec. For days and days we washed and dug, and we have hardly scratched the surface.
Hearing the fatal signal, the Indians, attending upon their masters, assailed them with whatever missile they could command. Some seized upon pikes and swords; others snatched up the pots in which meal was stewing at the fire, and beating the Spaniards about the head, bruised and scalded them at the same time. Some caught up plates, pitchers, jars, and the pestles wherewith they pounded the maize.
Rice-mortars, pestles, and similar objects are found beneath the dwellings. The Village Spring. Each village is situated near to a spring or on the banks of a stream. In the latter case deep holes are dug in the sands, and the water that seeps in is used for household purposes.
When rice is wanted for food, the paddy is dried in the sun, and then pounded by the women in wooden mortars with pestles five feet long. As a rule two or three women each use their pestles at one mortar, which is cut out of the trunk of a tree. I have seen as many as six girls use their pestles in quick succession at one mortar.
Scores of the savages were vigorously plying their stone pestles in preparing masses of poee-poee, and numbers were gathering green bread-fruit and young cocoa-nuts in the surrounding groves; while an exceeding great multitude, with a view of encouraging the rest in their labours, stood still, and kept shouting most lustily without intermission.
As they passed into the house they saw two slave-girls pounding rice in a large wooden mortar, with two enormous wooden pestles, while the savoury steam that arose from some invisible kitchen served to put a finer edge on their already sharpened appetites.
When in our day men began to explore the Grand Canyon and its numberless tributaries, a great number of indications of man's presence were found on the rim, on the fault lines or breaks in the sheer precipitous walls, on the plateaus and in the Canyon beneath, in the shape of crude house ruins, lookout houses or forts, indifferent trails, cliff-dwellings, hewn-out water cisterns, mescal pits, with countless pieces of broken pottery, arrowheads, stone axes, hammers, mortars, pestles and even cemeteries. or places of cremation.
The golden pestles and mortars fixed as signs upon the sun-blind frames outside the Druggists', appear to have been just turned out of the United States' Mint; and when I saw a baby of some week or ten days old in a woman's arms at a street corner, I found myself unconsciously wondering where it came from: never supposing for an instant that it could have been born in such a young town as that.
When he had told this story, the goblin asked: "O King, which of them was the most delicate?" And the king said: "The one who was bruised by the mere sound of the pestles, when nothing touched her. The other two who were wounded or blistered by actual contact with lotus-petals or moonbeams, are not equal to her."
In the other courtyard a voice was heard complaining of cold, and coming very feeble, but exceedingly distinct, out of the vast silence of the abandoned houses and clearings. Babalatchi coughed discreetly. From under the house the thumping of wooden pestles husking the rice started with unexpected abruptness. The weak but clear voice in the yard again urged, "Blow up the embers, O brother!"
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