The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories

face leant over the table

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w," I

diums,"

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nty-five- twenty-seven years ago. If you find anythin

collector

nd." He seemed to take my measure. "I was in the East Indies

e," I said, anticipating a yar

if you've heard the

en I recalled Butcher v. Dawson. "Why!" said I, "you are the man wh

n that island, doing nothing for it neither, and them quite unable to give me notice. It often used to amuse me th

said I. "I don't righ

e heard of t

only a month or so ago. Just before I sailed. They've got a thigh b

It was a monster. Sindbad's roc was just a leg

years ago-'91

awson's hadn't been silly about that salary they might have made a

y miles north of Antananarivo. Do you happen to know? You have to go t

Andrews said somet

odd tarry smell back even now. It's funny work. You go probing into the mud with iron rods, you know. Usually the egg gets smashed. I wonder how long it is since these AEpyornises really lived. The missionaries say the natives have legends about when they were alive, but I never heard any such stories myself.[*] But certainly those eggs we got were as fresh as if they had been new laid. Fresh! Carrying them down to the boat one of my nigger chaps dropped one on a rock and it smashed. How I lammed into the beggar! But sweet it was, as if it was new laid, not even smelly, and its mother dead these four hundred years, perhaps. Said a centipede had bi

live AEpyornis, with the doubtful exception of

ok out a clay pipe. I pl

up absen

? Did you get those h

heathens down by the beach-the one fooling about with his sting and the other helping him. It never occurred to me that the beggars would take advantage of the peculiar positio

ed, like a furnace mouth. And fifty yards behind the back of me was these blessed heathen-quite regardless of the tranquil air of things-plotting to cut off with the boat and leave me all alone with three days' provisions and a canvas tent, and nothing to drink whatsoever beyond a little keg of water. I heard a kind of yelp b

' says I, fl

gain and made him jump with the whang of it. He didn't laugh that time. The third time I got his head, and over he went, and the paddle with him. It was a precious lucky shot for a revolver. I reckon it was fifty yards. He went right

cold after the sun set, and just this black canoe drifting steadily out to sea. I tell you I damned Dawson's and Jamrach's a

ght of the canoe, but I aimed, as I judged, to head it off. I hoped the man in it was too bad to navigate it, and that it would keep on drifting in the same direction. Presently it came up over the horizon agai

s sin, and the ripple under the bows like liquid fire. I was naturally chary of clambering up into it. I was anxious to see what he was up to first. He seemed to be lying cuddled up in a lump in the bows, and the stern was all out of water. The thing kept turning round slowly as it drifted--kind of waltzing, don't you know. I wen

up and purple. My three eggs and the bones were lying in the middle of the canoe, and the keg of water and some coffee and biscuits wrapped in a Cape Argus by his feet, and a tin of methylated spirit underneath him. There was no paddle,

l never came up. Presently the sun got high in the sky and began to beat down upon me. Lord! it pretty near made my brains boil. I tried dipping my head in the sea, but after a while my eye fell on the Cape Argus, and I lay down flat in the canoe and spread this over me. Wond

ze and its ports open, looking like a big firefly. There was music aboard. I stood up and shouted and screamed at it. The second day I broached one of the AEpyornis eggs, scraped the shell away at the end bit by bit, and tried it, and I was glad to find it was good enough to eat. A bit flavoury-not bad, I mean-but with something of the taste of a duck's egg. There was a kind of circular patch, about

ar paused. "Yes," h

-what is it?-embryo, with its big head and curved back, and its heart beating under its throat, and the yolk shrivelled up and great membranes spreading inside of the shell and all over the yolk. Her

ant. I left the third one alone. I held it up to the light, but the shell was too thick for me to get any notion of what might be happeni

the lagoon full of parrot-fish. I took the egg ashore and put it in a good place, well above the tide lines and in the sun, to give it all the chance I could, and pulled the canoe up safe, and loafed about prospecting. It's rum how dull an atoll is. As soon as I had found a spring all the interest seemed to vanish. When I was a kid I thought nothing could be finer or more adventurous than the Robinson Crusoe business, but that pla

e matches used to be. Then I remembered where I was. There were phosphorescent waves rolling up as if they meant to eat me, and all the rest of the night as black as pitch. The air was simply yelling. The clouds seemed down on your head almost, and the rain fell as if heaven was sinking and they were baling out the waters above the firmament. One great roller

e bits of plank scattered-which was the disarticulated skeleton, so to speak, of my canoe. However, that gave me something to do, for, ta

jar and sat up, and there was the end of the egg pecked out and a rum little brown head lo

don't make near enough of his loneliness. But here was interesting company. He looked at me and winked his eye from the front backwards, like a hen, and gave a chirp and began to peck about at once, as though being hatched three hundred years too late was just nothing. 'Glad to see you, Man Friday!' says I, for I had naturally settled he was to

and watch while I fished in the lagoon, and go shares in anything I caught. And he was sensible, too. There were nasty green warty things, l

IS ISLAND all round the place very nearly, in big letters, like what you see done with coloured stones at railway stations in the old country, and mathematical calculations and drawings of various sorts. And I used to lie watching the blessed bird stalking round and growing, growing; and think how I could make a living out of him by showing him about if I ever got taken off. After his first moult he began to get handsome, with a crest and a blue wattle, and a lot of

pickaxe, and two huge brown eyes with yellow rims, set together like a man's-not out of sight of each other like a hen's. His plumage was fine-none of the half-mourning style

-cucumbers or something, but it was really just discontent on his part. I was hungry too, and when at last I landed a fish I wanted it for myself. Tempers were

than a racehorse, and kept landing out at me with sledgehammer kicks, and bringing his pickaxe down on the back of my head. I made for the lagoon, and went in up to my neck. He stopped at the water, for he hated getting his feet wet, and began to mak

re thinking of it all. I don't suppose I ever felt so hurt by anything before or since. It was the brutal ingratitude of the creature. I'd been

I was to catch some nice little bits of fish, perhaps, and go to him presently in a casual kind of way, and offer them to him,

ck fishing, but he took to picking along the beach at low water after worms, and rubbed along on that. Half my time I spent up to my neck in the lagoon, and the rest up the palm-trees. One of them was scarcely high enough, and when he caught me up it he had a regular Bank Holiday with the calves of my legs. It got unbearable. I don't know if you have ever tried sleeping up a palm-tree. It gave me the most horrible nightmares. Th

ing, perhaps twelve yards in length or more, and I fastened two lumps of coral rock to the ends of this. It took me some time to do, because every now and then I had to go into the lagoon or up a tree as the fancy took me. This I whirled rapidly round my head, and then let it go

ugh my anger was hot against him. When I stood over him and saw him bleeding on the

hen he was hatched, and of a thousand pleasant tricks he had played before he went wrong. I thought if I'd only wounded him I might have nursed him round into a better understanding. If I'd had any means of digging into the coral rock I'd have buried him. I felt

solation of it, and only hesitating whether I should walk out into the s

sold them to old Havers. It seems Havers didn't understand they were extra large, and it

ong, they thought they had reached the top of the scale, and called him AEpyornis maximus. Then some one turned up another thigh-bone four feet six

y more AEpyornises, he reckons some scientific swell will go and burst a bloo