They brought me
into this very rough shelter, a draughty grass room, with a bench,
table, and one chair in it. Two men came in, but not the native
wife and family, and sat down to a calabash of poi and some strips
of dried beef, food so coarse, that they apologised for not offering
it to me. They said they had sent to the lower ranch for some
flour, and in the meantime they gave me some milk in a broken bowl,
their "nearest approach to a tumbler," they said. I was almost
starving, for all our food was on the pack-mule. This is the place
where we had been told that we could obtain tea, flour, beef, and
fowls!
By some fatality my pen, ink, and knitting were on the pack-mule; it
was very cold, the afternoon fog closed us in, and darkness came on
prematurely, so that I felt a most absurd sense of ennui, and went
over to the cook-house, where I found Gandle cooking, and his native
wife with a heap of children and dogs lying round the stove. I
joined them till my clothes were dry, on which the man, who in spite
of his rough exterior, was really friendly and hospitable, remarked
that he saw I was "one of the sort who knew how to take people as I
found them."
This regular afternoon mist which sets in at a certain altitude,
blotting out the sun and sky, and bringing the horizon within a few
yards, makes me certain after all that the mists of rainless Eden
were a phenomenon, the loss of which is not to be regretted.
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