k the coffee brought to us before dawn, in grouchy, sleepy,
monosyllabic silence. Immediately after, the cattle were to water and
feed ... and a hungry lot they were ... but despite their appetites,
with each day, because of the excessive heat of the tropics, and the
confined existence that was theirs--such an abrupt transition from the
open range--they waxed thinner and thinner, acquired more of large-eyed
mournfulness and an aspect of almost human suffering in their piteous,
pleading faces....

* * * * *

If the big chap who succumbed to heart failure that night had lived a
few days longer, he would have wondered still more at me or anyone else
surviving a day's work in the hold.

For the thermometer ran up incredibly ... hotter and hotter it grew ...
and down there in the hold we had to shovel out the excrement every
morning after breakfast. It was too infernal for even the prudish
Anglo-Saxon souls of us to wear clothes beyond a breechclout, and shoes,
to protect our feet from the harder hoof.

Our eyes stung and watered from the reek of the ammonia in the
cattle-urine. What with the crowding, the bad air (despite the canvas
ventilators let down) and the sudden change from green pasturage to
dry, baled food, most of the beasts contracted "the skitters." This
mess was what we had to shovel out through the portholes ... an
offensive-smelling, greenish, fluidic material, that spilled, the half
of it, always, from the carefully-held scoop of the shovel.

Cursing, with the bitter sweat streaming off our bodies and into our
eyes, and with an oblique eye to guard from heat-maddened, frantic
steer-kicks,--each day, for several hours, we suffered through this hell
... to emerge panting, like runners after a long race; befouled ... to
throw ourselves down on the upper deck, under the blue, wind-free sky
and feel as if we had come into paradise....

* * * * *

"I wish I had never come back to this hell-ship, at Brisbane!"

"I wish I had never come aboard at all at Sydney!"

* * * * *

At such times, and at other odd ends of leisure, I brought my Westcott
and Hort's Greek New Testament from my bunk, and with the nasty smell of
sheep close-by, but unheeded through custom--I studied with greater
pleasure than I ever did before or since.

* * * * *

As I said before, it was not long before these