me that he and his chaps must be very hungry: that they must have been
growing increasingly hungry for at least this month past. They had been
engaged for six months (I don't think a single one of them had any
clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still
belonged to the beginnings of time--had no inherited experience to teach
them as it were), and of course, as long as there was a piece of paper
written over in accordance with some farcical law or other made down the
river, it didn't enter anybody's head to trouble how they would live.
Certainly they had brought with them some rotten hippo-meat, which
couldn't have lasted very long, anyway, even if the pilgrims hadn't, in
the midst of a shocking hullabaloo, thrown a considerable quantity of it
overboard. It looked like a high-handed proceeding; but it was really
a case of legitimate self-defense. You can't breathe dead hippo waking,
sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on
existence. Besides that, they had given them every week three pieces of
brass wire, each about nine inches long; and the theory was they were to
buy their provisions with that currency in river-side villages. You can
see how _that_ worked. There were either no villages, or the people were
hostile, or the director, who like the rest of us fed out of tins, with
an occasional old he-goat thrown in, didn't want to stop the steamer for
some more or less recondite reason. So, unless they swallowed the wire
itself, or made loops of it to snare the fishes with, I don't see what
good their extravagant salary could be to them. I must say it was paid
with a regularity worthy of a large and honorable trading company. For
the rest, the only thing to eat--though it didn't look eatable in the
least--I saw in their possession was a few lumps of some stuff like
half-cooked dough, of a dirty lavender color, they kept wrapped in
leaves, and now and then swallowed a piece of, but so small that it
seemed done more for the looks of the thing than for any serious purpose
of sustenance. Why in the name of all the gnawing devils of hunger they