Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/294

 of thatched huts, of mud and bamboo wattle, crowding on narrow streets that sloped to the centre and held sidewalks no wider than a wall-top. Still nearer ranged the more substantial part of the town, the bald, sun-scorched buildings of corrugated iron and tin, the one-story, open-front shops, with red tile roofs, the uninviting rectangular bodegas and the austere and gloomy government buildings. Over the latter drooped strange flags of yellow and red and blue.

On the higher ground to the right ran rusty streets lined with pink and yellow-tinted house walls of stucco, with heavy Spanish shutters and terra-cotta roof-tiles. Along the fringe of lower ground to the extreme left stood irregular rows of wattled huts, raised the height of a man from the "sand-jiggers" and the miasmal tundra under them, looking like lines of patient herons as they balanced on their rotting palm-wood stilts.

Beyond the town, leading into the slowly rising ground of the southwest, wound a road of shell and limestone, leaving a crooked scar of white against the blackness of the lowlands through which it crept. Close in by the concrete breakwater lay the ribs and spars of a wrecked schooner, mysteriously adding to the atmosphere of gloom and neglect. On a side-track