To
think of it brings that odd tarry smell back even now. It's funny work.
You go probing into the mud with iron rods, you know. Usually the egg gets
smashed. I wonder how long it is since these AEpyornises really lived. The
missionaries say the natives have legends about when they were alive, but
I never heard any such stories myself.[*] But certainly those eggs we got
were as fresh as if they had been new laid. Fresh! Carrying them down to
the boat one of my nigger chaps dropped one on a rock and it smashed. How
I lammed into the beggar! But sweet it was, as if it was new laid, not
even smelly, and its mother dead these four hundred years, perhaps. Said a
centipede had bit him. However, I'm getting off the straight with the
story. It had taken us all day to dig into the slush and get these eggs
out unbroken, and we were all covered with beastly black mud, and
naturally I was cross. So far as I knew they were the only eggs that have
ever been got out not even cracked. I went afterwards to see the ones they
have at the Natural History Museum in London; all of them were cracked and
just stuck together like a mosaic, and bits missing.
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