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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: Indiamen of the square-stern type, that took their captivity, one
imagines, as stolidly as they had faced the buffeting of the waves
with their blunt, honest bows, and disgorged sugar, rum, molasses,
coffee, or logwood sedately with their own winch and tackle. But
when I knew them, of exports there was never a sign that one could
detect; and all the imports I have ever seen were some rare cargoes
of tropical timber, enormous baulks roughed out of iron trunks
grown in the woods about the Gulf of Mexico. They lay piled up in
stacks of mighty boles, and it was hard to believe that all this
mass of dead and stripped trees had come out of the flanks of a
slender, innocent-looking little barque with, as likely as not, a
The Mirror of the Sea |
