THREE:Frank found the air full of odors more or less heavy, and some of them the reverse of agreeable. They arose from numerous sticks of incense burned in honor of the gods, and which are irreverently called joss-sticks by foreigners. The incense is supposed to be agreeable to the god, and the smoke is thought to waft the supplicant's prayer to heaven. The same idea obtains in the burning of a paper on which a prayer has been printed, the flame carrying the petition as it flies upward. Traces of a similar faith are found in the Roman Catholic and Greek churches, where candles have a prominent place in religious worship; and the Doctor insisted to his young companions that the Christian and the Pagan are not so very far apart, after all. In addition to the odor of incense, there was that of oil, in which a keeper of a tiny restaurant was frying some cuttle-fish. The oil was of the sort known as "sesame," or barley, and the smell was of a kind that does not touch the Western nostril as agreeably as does that of lavender or Cologne water. Men were tossing balls in[Pg 126] the air in front of the restaurant, quite unmindful of the strong odors, and seeming to enjoy the sport, and a woman and a boy were so busy over a game of battledoor and shuttlecock that they did not observe the presence of the strangers.During the whole of the voyage, as long as the daylight favored them, our young friends remained on deck, and studied the scenery along the route. Sometimes the sea widened out to fifty miles or more, and at others it contracted so that there was no sign of a passage before them, and it was difficult to say which way the steamer would turn. Now and[Pg 304] then the islands were so close together that the steamer made her course as though she were tracing the sinuosities of the Mississippi River, and it was necessary to keep a sharp lookout to avoid accidents on the numerous rocks that lie sunken in the channel. Mishaps to the steamers are of rare occurrence, as the channel has been carefully buoyed, and the pilots understand their business fully; but it is otherwise with the unwieldy junks, which are often driven by an adverse wind directly into the dangers their captains are seeking to avoid. The traffic through the Inland Sea is very great, both by the steamers and by the junks; and sometimes whole fleets of the latter may be seen waiting in some of the sheltering nooks for a favoring wind. The steamers make the passage from one end to the other of the Inland Sea in less than twenty-four hours; but the junks are frequently a fortnight in covering the same distance. They are never in a hurry, and therefore time is no object.
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