either. The Frenchman did not drink at all, while Ah Choon restricted
himself to one drink daily.

It was a pretty time. The sun, going into northern declination, was
straight overhead. There was no wind, except for frequent squalls,
which blew fiercely for from five minutes to half an hour, and wound
up by deluging us with rain. After each squall, the awful sun would
come out, drawing clouds of steam from the soaked decks.

The steam was not nice. It was the vapor of death, freighted with
millions and millions of germs. We always took another drink when we
saw it going up from the dead and dying, and usually we took two or
three more drinks, mixing them exceptionally stiff. Also, we made it a
rule to take an additional several each time they hove the dead over
to the sharks that swarmed about us.

We had a week of it, and then the whiskey gave out. It is just as
well, or I shouldn't be alive now. It took a sober man to pull through
what followed, as you will agree when I mention the little fact that
only two men did pull through. The other man was the heathen--at
least, that was what I heard Captain Oudouse call him at the moment I
first became aware of the heathen's existence. But to come back.

It was at the end of the week, with the whiskey gone, and the pearl
buyers sober, that I happened to glance at the barometer that hung in
the cabin companionway. Its normal register in the Paumotus was 29.90,
and it was quite customary to see it vacillate between 29.85 and
30.00, or even 30.05; but to see it as I saw it, down to 29.62, was
sufficient to sober the most drunken pearl buyer that ever incinerated
smallpox microbes in Scotch whiskey.