It was the season of the rice harvest, when South India coolies swarm over to Burmah much as the peasantry of Mayo and Connemara used to crowd to England every summer.
If anybody is really anxious to remember that there are paddy fields in Burmah he should cross the Bay of Bengal in December.
Somebody said that our ship was an unlucky one—that it ran down the Mecca on her last trip and killed her third officer; but we got through safely enough, though that crossing was one of the most disagreeable as well as the most weird I ever made—disagreeable because of the bad weather, and weird because of the passengers.
The deck and the lower deck were tanks of live humanity, and when it began to get rough, as it did the morning after we left Madras, catching the end of a strayed cyclone, it was worse than a Chinese puzzle to cross from the saloon to the spar deck, and ten chances to one that even if you did manage to avoid stepping on a body you slipped and shot into seven sick Hindoo ladies and a family of children.
There were six first-class passengers, all Europeans, and 1700 deck passengers, all Asiatics, and the latter paid twelve rupees each for the four days' passage, bringing with them their own food.
"THEY COULD NOT LIE DOWN WITHOUT OVERLAPPING."
The first evening all six of the Europeans appeared at dinner—a Trichinopoly collector, a Madras tanning manager and his wife (who told me that half your American boots and shoes are made from buffalo skins shipped from Madras to the United States), a young lieutenant going to take charge of a mountain battery of Punjabis at Maimyo in Upper Burmah, and a young Armenian, son of a merchant at Rangoon, who had been to Europe about his eyes.
After coffee the man next to me suddenly leapt from his chair with a yell. He thought he had been bitten by a centipede. The centipede was there right enough, but as the pain passed off the next day we supposed the brute had only fastened his legs in and had not really bitten.