The two huge triangular mat sails, with their
seventy-foot yards and booms, had followed the cargo, and were
being fitted to the stripped masts of the steamer.
They rose, they swelled, they filled, and the empty steamer visibly
laid over as the wind took them. They gave her nearly three knots
an hour, and what better could men ask? But if she had been forlorn
before, this new purchase made her horrible to see. Imagine a
respectable charwoman in the tights of a ballet-dancer rolling drunk
along the streets, and you will come to some faint notion of the
appearance of that nine-hundred-ton, well-decked, once schooner-rigged
cargo-boat as she staggered under her new help, shouting and raving
across the deep. With steam and sail that marvellous voyage
continued; and the bright-eyed crew looked over the rail, desolate,
unkempt, unshorn, shamelessly clothed beyond the decencies.
At the end of the third week she sighted the island of Pygang-Watai,
whose harbour is the turning-point of a pearl sea-patrol. Here the
gun-boats stay for a week ere they retrace their line. There is no
village at Pygang-Watai; only a stream of water, some palms, and a
harbour safe to rest in till the first violence of the southeast
monsoon has blown itself out.
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