The pitch in the canoe simply reeked
with the heat and rose up into big blisters.
"I drifted ten days," said the man with the scar. "It's a little thing in
the telling, isn't it? Every day was like the last. Except in the morning
and the evening I never kept a look-out even--the blaze was so infernal. I
didn't see a sail after the first three days, and those I saw took no
notice of me. About the sixth night a ship went by scarcely half a mile
away from me, with all its lights ablaze and its ports open, looking like
a big firefly. There was music aboard. I stood up and shouted and screamed
at it. The second day I broached one of the AEpyornis eggs, scraped the
shell away at the end bit by bit, and tried it, and I was glad to find it
was good enough to eat. A bit flavoury--not bad, I mean--but with
something of the taste of a duck's egg. There was a kind of circular
patch, about six inches across, on one side of the yoke, and with streaks
of blood and a white mark like a ladder in it that I thought queer, but I
did not understand what this meant at the time, and I wasn't inclined to
be particular.
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