The funnel is painted blue on yellow, giving her a holiday air, a little
out of keeping with the yellow and black cholera flag at her main. She
dare not stop; she must not communicate with any one. There are leprous
streaks of lime-wash trickling down her plates for a sign of this. So
she threshes on down the glorious coast, she and her swarming
passengers, with the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday eating out
her heart.

Yet another, the pick of all the East rooms, before we have done with
blue water. Most of the nations of the earth are at issue under a
stretch of white awning above a crowded deck. The cause of the dispute,
a deep copper bowl foil of rice and fried onions, is upset in the
foreground. Malays, Lascars, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, Burmans--the
whole gamut of racetints, from saffron to tar-black--are twisting and
writhing round it, while their vermilion, cobalt, amber, and emerald
turbans and head-cloths are lying underfoot. Pressed against the yellow
ochre of the iron bulwarks to left and right are frightened women and
children in turquoise and isabella-coloured clothes. They are half
protected by mounds of upset bedding, straw mats, red lacquer boxes, and
plaited bamboo trunks, mixed up with tin plates, brass and copper
_hukas_, silver opium pipes, Chinese playing cards, and properties
enough to drive half-a-dozen artists wild. In the centre of the crowd of
furious half-naked men, the fat bare back of a Burman, tattooed from
collar-bone to waist-cloth with writhing patterns of red and blue
devils, holds the eye first. It is a wicked back. Beyond it is the
flicker of a Malay _kris_. A blue, red, and yellow macaw chained to a
stanchion spreads his wings against the sun in an ecstasy of terror.
Half-a-dozen red-gold pines and bananas have been knocked down from
their ripening-places, and are lying between the feet of the fighters.
One pine has rolled against the long brown fur of a muzzled bear. His
owner, a bushy-bearded Hindu, kneels over the animal, his body-cloth
thrown clear of a hard brown arm, his fingers ready to loose the
muzzle-strap. The ship's cook, in blood-stained white, watches from the
butcher's shop, and a black Zanzibari stoker grins through the bars of
the engine-room-hatch, one ray of sun shining straight into his pink
mouth. The officer of the watch, a red-whiskered man, is kneeling down
on the bridge to peer through the railings, and is shifting a long, thin
black revolver fr