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I drank greedily of the water, but the cakes I could not eat, for they were mouldy. The sights and sounds around me were so awful that I will not try to write of them. And all the while we sweltered in the terrible heat, for the sun pierced through the deck planking of the vessel, and I could feel by her lack of motion that we were becalmed and drifting.
He had sweltered, no doubt, beneath the heights of Hong-Kong, amid a city of swarming junks; and further south had smelled the breeze that blows through the straits of the Spice Islands.
Now and then the booming note of a pigeon, or the soft coo-coo of a ringdove, would break the silence; overhead there was a sky of spotless blue; an hour before I had sweltered under a brazen sun; here, under the mountain shade, though there was not a breath of wind to stir a leaf, it was surprisingly cool.
The frowsy housemaid who brought up my meals was anything but inspiring. My dear little "helpless" shirt was taken away and when I was given a good stuff nightdress in its place, I felt my last link with France had gone! The weather it was July then got terribly hot, and I lay and sweltered. It was some relief to have all bandages removed from my right leg.
Then the bugles rang out in the haunting, mournful strains of the "Last Post," and the service ended with all singing "Abide With Me." We sweltered along down the Red Sea and around into the Indian Ocean. We wished to call at Aden in order to disembark some of our sick, but were ordered to continue on without touching. Our duties were light, and we spent the time playing cards and reading.
The boat fairly flew; we sweltered side by side in the stagnant superheated air; the smell of mud, of mush, the primeval smell of fecund earth, seemed to sting our faces; till suddenly at a bend it was as if a great hand far away had lifted a heavy curtain, had flung open un immense portal.
Often it was midnight before they reached the sheds in which were the sleeping benches. Here they had to lie down on bare planks without any covering. There was no ventilation in these sheds except a bare window or two in the gable. In summer they sweltered and in winter they nearly froze to death.
And such was his sense of power that not even a sentry paced the street without. For by these things is the Indian mind impressed. In the tiny kitchen a dozen men and a boy tried to hush their breathing, and sweltered. For it was very hot, and the pent-up odor of past cookings was stifling to men used to the open.
Meantime, those spectators munched sweets and gossiped, smoked cigarettes and gossiped; sweltered under the glare of the sun and gossiped; and always they talked of the gringos, who had come one hundred strong and never a woman among them; one hundred strong, and every man of them dangling pistols at his hips pistols that could shoot six times before they must be reloaded, and shoot with marvelous exactness of aim at that; one hundred strong, and every one of the hundred making bets that the gringo with the red-brown hair would win the medalla oro from Don José, who three times had fought and kept it flashing on his breast, so that now no vaquero dared lift eyes to it!
Then the need for fast vessels restricted hold room and the methods of the trade attained a degree of barbarity that can not be paralleled since the days of Nero. Shackled together "spoon-wise," as the phrase was, they suffered and sweltered through the long middle passage, dying by scores, so that often a fifth of the cargo perished during the voyage.
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