He was half-expecting a call from the lingua, telling him to stop arsing around, but his com stayed silent, so it looked like a certain amount of arsing around was allowed.

According to a recent escapee from the mainland, no less than 700,000 of the youths forcibly sent to the far northwest in the last seven or eight years—since Peiping started an allout downward transfer operation—had died from overwork and exposure to bitter climate or as victims of shifting desert sand. The escapee, a Mr. Hsia who came out early in February, said the figure was based on the reports and other data he had handled while working at the Shanghai Office of Downward Transfer Operation. The deaths, he said, had been recorded in Inner Mongolia and the provinces of Sinkiang, Ninghsia, Kansu and Shensi. He gave no breakdown but noted that the Takla Makan desert of Sinkiang was responsible for the biggest kill.

In the Den of Kinraddie one such beast had its lair […] and at gloaming a shepherd would see it, with its great wings half-folded across the great belly of it and its head, like the head of a meikle cock, but with the ears of a lion, poked over a fir tree, watching.

The “slumgullion” and “lipperings” or “dreenings” of the blubber—consisting of a mixture of the blood which issues from the fat-lean and the salt water and oil which flows from the blubber while the men are handling it as they hoist it aboard ship, stow it away, and prepare it for the try-pots—though discarded in the palmy days of whaling, are now carefully husbanded and amalgamated.