There Was Also A Rude Crucifix,
From Which I Gather That This Is A Roman Catholic Family.
There were
two teapots of tea on a chair, a big tub of pommeloes on the floor, and
a glazed red earthenware bowl full of ripe bananas on another chair.
A
sort of sickle, a gun, and some bullock gear hung against the wall. In
the middle of the room there was a sort of trap in the floor, and there
was the same in two other apartments. Through this all rubbish is
conveniently dropped. A woman brought in a cocoa-nut, and poured the
milk into a gourd calabash, and the man handed me the dish of bananas,
so I had an epicurean repast, and realized that I was in Cochin China!
They were courteous people, and not only refused the quarter dollar
which I pressed upon them, but gave me a handkerchief full of bananas
when I left them, being pleased, however, to accept a puggree.
The neat gravel area, the covered walls, and neatly tiled roof, the
lattice work, the boards suspended from the door-posts, with (as I
have since learned) texts from the Chinese Classics in gold upon them,
and the large establishment, show that the family belongs to the upper
class of Anamites, and leave one quite unprepared for the reeking,
festering heap of garbage below the house, the foul, fetid air, and
swarming vermin of the interior, and the unwashedness of the inmates. I
bowed myself out, the gate was barred behind me, and in two minutes I
had lost what I supposed to be my way, and having left the maze of
cactus-walled paths behind, was entangled in a maze of narrow village
paths through palms and bananas, flowering trees covered with creepers
and orchids, and a wonderful profusion of small and great ferns.
Getting back into the cactus hidden village I found groups of pretty,
dark-skinned children, quite naked, playing in the deep dust, while
some no bigger were lounging in the shade smoking cigars, lazily
watching the clouds of smoke which they puffed out from their chubby
cheeks.
Finding my own footsteps in the deep dust, I got back to a pathway with
a monstrous bamboo hedge on one side, and a rice-field on the other, in
which was a slimy looking pond with a margin of pink water-lilies, in
which a number of pink buffaloes of large size were wallowing with much
noise and rough play, plastering their sensitive hides with mud as a
protection against mosquitoes.
With some difficulty, by some very queer paths and with much
zigzagging, I at last reached Cholen,* a native town, said to be three
or eight miles from Saigon, and was so exhausted by the fatigue of the
long walk in such a ferocious temperature that I sat by the roadside on
a stump under a huge tropical tree, considering the ways of ants and
Anamites. Children with brown chubby faces which had never been washed
since birth, and, according to all accounts, will never be washed till
death, stood in a row, staring the stare of apathy, with a quiet
confidence.
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