Here are the quotations for the coming week (January 16th
to 22nd):
1. Every single pot has to be tested for quality. A
native, called the purkhea, drives his fist into the opium, rubs and
smells it, and calls out the class for the benefit of the opium examiner. A
sample picked between finger and thumb is thrown into a jar, and if the opium
examiner thinks the purkhea has said sooth, the class of that jar is
marked in chalk, and everything is entered in a book. Every ten samples are put
in a locked box with duplicate keys, and sent over to the laboratory for assay.
With the tenth boxful—and this marks the end of the challan of a hundred
jars—the Englishman in charge of the testing signs the test-paper. …
2. The factory floors are made slippery with the tread of
bare-footed coolies, who shout as the tea whirls through its transformations.
The over- note to the clamour—an uncanny thing too—is the soft rustle-down of
the tea itself—stacked in heaps, carried in baskets, dumped through chutes,
rising and falling in the long troughs where it is polished, and disappearing at
last into the heart of the firing-machine—always this insistent whisper of
moving dead leaves. Steam-sieves sift it into grades, with jarrings and
thumpings that make the floor quiver, and the thunder of steam-gear is always at
its heels ; but it continues to mutter unabashed till it is riddled down into
the big, foil-lined boxes and lies at peace.
3. They remember,
too, that for many years voices gave orders which they obeyed with their bodies,
but their minds were abroad on all the seas. It seems to them that they stood
through days and nights slowly sliding a bar backwards and forwards through a
white glow that was part of the ship. They remember an intolerable noise in
their burning heads from the walls of the stoke-hole, and they remember being
savagely beaten by men whose eyes seemed asleep. When their shift was over they
would draw straight lines in the air, anxiously and repeatedly, and would
question one another in their sleep, crying, “Is she straight?”
The sources of this week's extracts (January 9th to 15th) are as
follows:
1, (...“Go on, sir! Injecto ter pulvere – you’ve kicked half
the ditch into my eye already. ” ) This is from "My Son's Wife" in A
Diversity of Creatures.
2. (... Between his uncle’s discursive evening talks, studded with
kitchen-Greek and out-of-date Roman society-verses ... he fancied he
understood…) This is from “The Church that was at Antioch” in Limits
and Renewals.
3. (...Non hoc semper erit liminis aut aquae caelestis patiens
latus. … Was that done with intention?” “I – I thought it fitted,
sir.”) This is from “Regulus” in A Diversity of
Creatures.
In the New Readers' Guide we have recently published notes by Alastair
Wilson on the first three letters from
From
Tideway to Tideway, Kipling's articles about his honeymoon journey
across America and to Japan. Also notes by John McGivering on
"The
Grave of the Hundred Head".
Good wishes to all, John R
