16 The Wine-Dark Sea - Libro della tutto

Patrick O'Brian The Wine-Dark Sea
from a political point of view, it was our
many common friends in the Order that
gave our meetings quite a different aspect
– our common friends and our
common attachment to the Sierra Leone
scheme for settling liberated slaves, to
which we are both subscribers.
The first occasion was a ride in the
barren wastes that lie beyond the reach
of irrigation all round Lima. These expeditions
are called hunting, and on
feast-days the more athletic citizens
urge their horses about the stony deserts
in search of a more or less fabulous
creature said to resemble a hare
and blaze away at the very few things
that move, usually a dingy, inedible
passerine which I take to be a dwarvish
subspecies of Sturnus horridus. I collected
three beetles for you, of which all