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They crowded round to examine a small object that lay between two smears of earth in the centre of the upturned palm. It was round and had a neat little opening on its under side. It was pretty, certainly. Their heads pressed forward in a bunch, like cabbages heaped for market. But no one spoke. "See it?" said Stumper impatiently; "see what it is?"
Parnapishtim carefully provides plugs to fill out all crevices, and furthermore smears a large quantity of bitumen without and within. He also has a large quantity of oil placed on the boat, oxen, jars filled with mead oil, and wine for a festival, which he institutes at the completion of the structure. The preparations are on a large scale, as for the great New Year's Day celebrated in Babylonia.
From all the wealthy houses, and from many of the poorer sort, rang the wail of the women mourners as they sang their dirges for the dead. But in the meaner quarters many a hovel was marked with three smears of blood, dashed on each pillar of the door and on the lintel; and the sound that came from these dwellings was the cry of mirth and festival.
The western half of the sky looked as though it were on fire, and the horizon in that quarter was piled high with great smears of dusky, smoky-looking cloud, heavily streaked with long splashes of vivid orange and crimson colour. As a spectacle it was magnificent, but the magnificence was gloomy, sombre, and threatening beyond anything that I had ever beheld.
It was red and green in streaks, and her eyes were red and inflamed. The father was startled by her appearance. "What is the matter, dear child?" he said. "You are ill." Then his eyes fell on her apron. Its crumpled state, and the red and green smears on it, showed the use to which it had been put, and he began to guess what had happened. Anna hung her head.
Near to it were two or three smaller smears and a remarkably distinct and clean print of a thumb. Thorndyke gazed intently at the paper for a minute or two, scrutinising the thumb-print and the smears in turn, but making no remark, while Mr. Singleton watched his impassive face with expectant curiosity. "Not much difficulty in identifying that mark," the official at length observed.
He sometimes assumes a form that is rendered white with the ashes he smears on it and is adorned with a half-moon on the forehead.
When the bridegroom's house is reached, the bride smears the doorposts with fat and oil and ties a woollen fillet round each: she is then lifted over the threshold, is taken by her husband into the partnership of fire and water the essentials of domestic life and passes into the atrium.
He rumples up the bed, but he does it awkwardly and it is impossible to reconcile these three facts, the bed crumpled, the clock showing twenty minutes past three, and the countess dressed as if it were mid-day. He adds as much as he can to the disorder of the room. He smears a sheet with blood; also the bed-curtains and furniture.
By this time the sun had disappeared, and all over the west the yellow sky came down evenly, like a gold curtain, on the still sea that seemed to have solidified into a slab of dark blue stone, not a twinkle on its immobile surface. Across its dusky smoothness were two long smears of pale green, like a robin's egg. "Do you like the water?" Usher asked, in the tone of a polite host.
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