“I don’t.  I fancy Andrews said something about a swamp.”

“It must be the same.  It’s on the east coast.  And somehow there’s something in the water that keeps things from decaying.  Like creosote it smells.  It reminded me of Trinidad.  Did they get any more eggs?  Some of the eggs I found were a foot-and-a-half long.  The swamp goes circling round, you know, and cuts off this bit.  It’s mostly salt, too.  Well....  What a time I had of it!  I found the things quite by accident.  We went for eggs, me and two native chaps, in one of those rum canoes all tied together, and found the bones at the same time.  We had a tent and provisions for four days, and we pitched on one of the firmer places.  To think of it brings that odd tarry smell back even now.  It’s funny work.  You go probing into the mud with iron rods, you know.  Usually the egg gets smashed.  I wonder how long it is since these Aepyornises really lived.  The missionaries say the natives have legends about when they were alive, but I never heard any such stories myself.[A] But certainly those eggs we got were as fresh as if they had been new laid.  Fresh!  Carrying them down to the boat one of my nigger chaps dropped one on a rock and it smashed.  How I lammed into the beggar!  But sweet it was, as if it was new laid, not even smelly, and its mother dead these four hundred years, perhaps.  Said a centipede had bit him.  However, I’m getting off the straight with the story.  It had taken us all day to dig into the slush and get these eggs out unbroken, and we were all covered with beastly black mud, and naturally I was cross.  So far as I knew they were the only eggs that have ever been got out not even cracked.  I went afterwards to see the ones they have at the Natural History Museum in London; all of them were cracked and just stuck together like a mosaic, and bits missing.  Mine were perfect, and I meant to blow them when I got back.  Naturally I was annoyed at the silly duffer dropping three hours’ work just on account of a centipede.  I hit him about rather.”

[Footnote A:  No European is known to have seen a live Aepyornis, with the doubtful exception of MacAndrew, who visited Madagascar in 1745.—­H.G.W.]

The man with the scar took out a clay pipe.  I placed my pouch before him.  He filled up absent-mindedly.

“How about the others?  Did you get those home?  I don’t remember—­”

“That’s the queer part of the story.  I had three others.  Perfectly fresh eggs.  Well, we put ’em in the boat, and then I went up to the tent to make some coffee, leaving my two heathens down by the beach—­the one fooling about with his sting and the other helping him.  It never occurred to me that the beggars would take advantage of the peculiar position I was in to pick a quarrel.  But I suppose the centipede poison and the kicking I had given him had upset the one—­he was always a cantankerous sort—­and he persuaded the other.