As for me, I visited the camps and the mines, and then I fled. I was a sight which my worst enemy, if I have one, might well have looked upon with eyes of pity. I had got a touch of fever, too, in the swamp, and an illness in Pilou was too terrible for contemplation. I would not live in the place, rent free and with nothing to do but fight mosquitos, for a hundred pounds a week.
The unhappy convicts who work the mines were the most miserable lot I had seen in all Caledonia. Neither by day nor night have they any protection from the swarming pests, which, as one or two of them told me, made their lives one long misery. They sleep in open barracks without mosquito curtains over their hammocks, and by day their tormentors pursue them even down the shafts of the mine.
It was the same with the officials and their wives and children. They all looked anæmic, as though most of the blood had been sucked out of them. They were worried and nervous. Their hands had got into a way of moving mechanically towards their cheeks and necks and foreheads, the result of long and mostly vain efforts to squash mosquitos.
When we were going to have a meal a couple of fire-pots, covered with green boughs, had to be put into the room until it was full of smoke and comparatively empty of mosquitos. Then we went into the smoke, and the fire-pots were put in the doorway. I wasn’t at Pilou long enough to get used to being half-cooked myself while I was eating my dinner, but even the smoke in your eyes and lungs was a more bearable affliction than the winged tormentors who seemed to be a sort of punitive discount on the vast mineral wealth of Pilou.
No one but very wicked people ought to live there, and when they die their accounts ought to be considered squared.
The Saloon of the Ballande liner St. Louis.
With eyes puffed up and almost closed; with nose and ears and lips about twice their normal size; with knuckles and wrists swollen and stiff—to say nothing of a skinful of itching bumps—I got back to Pam, and on board the cargo boat on which I had booked a passage in Noumea.
We called her afterwards the Ballande liner St. Louis. She was an exaggeration of La France, and belonged to the same distinguished firm. She was bigger and, if possible, dirtier. She also smelt more, because there was a larger area for the smells to spread themselves over.