Page:Inside Canton.djvu/58

Rh round-headed chub-fish, resembling large tadpoles, and succulent gouramiers, which Creole sensuality has already naturalised at Bourbon. Beside these swimming gentry, then unknown to me, I again beheld the vigorous frogs and long-necked turtles of the bazaar at Macao.

Callery scarcely allowed me to cast a single glance at these denizens of the Tchou-kiang, but dragged me off to the street of the Thirteen Factories. This street is so named, because, as I have already said, it runs along the quarter of the hongs. My guide did not allow me to stop, but pushed me, so to speak, into Physic Street. On falling into this gulf, I lost all consciousness; I experienced something analogous to what a drowning man feels. Without reflecting, without uttering a word, I allowed myself to be carried along by the human current, which flowed between the two banks of houses. Lost in the midst of this stream of shaven heads, hanging queues, long and short robes, and yellow faces, the owners of which were fanning themselves, I felt nothing, I saw nothing, and I allowed myself to be rolled along by the current, as a corpse or the trunk of a tree, is carried down a river!

When I arrived at Macao, I had been eight months at sea; during the various periods we had been in port, we had passed over deserted roads much more frequently than we had walked in the