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water, will stand upright in the water, about a yard of it above the surface. The
weight makes it easier to keep the pole, which is long, submerged. It may thus be
used with less fatigue. The floor of the brine pit, in most places, is ten to fifteen
feet below the surface of the water. There are areas in the pits, however, where the
depth exceeds that of the poles. In such areas, paddles, of which each raft is
equipped with four, near the retaining vessels, are used. It is slow, laborious work,
however, moving the heavy raft with these levers. The raft is some twelve feet in
width and some twenty-four or twenty-five feet in length. Each raft contains a low
frame, within which are placed the retaining vessels, large, wooden salt, tubs, each
approximately a yard in height and four feet in diameter. Each raft carries four of
these, either arranged in a lateral frame, or arranged in a square frame, at the raft s
center. Ours were arranged laterally. The lateral arrangement is more convenient
in unloading; the square arrangement provides a more convenient distribution of
deck space, supplying superior crew areas at stem and stern. From the point of
view of  harvesting, the arrangements are equivalent, save that the harvesters,
naturally, to facilitate their work, position themselves differently in the two
arrangements. If one is right-handed, one works with the retaining vessel to the
left, so that one can turn and, with the right hand, tip the harvesting vessel,
steadying it with the left band.
I allowed time for the cone to sink to the bottom.
The retaining vessels are, at the salt docks, lifted from the rafts by means of
pulleys and counterweights. The crew of a given raft performs this work. When
the retaining vessels are suspended, they are tipped, and the sludge scooped and
shoveled from them into the wide-mouthed, ring-bearing lift sacks. These, drawn
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10 Tribesmen of Gor
and pushed on carts, fitted onto wooden, iron-sheathed rails, are transported to the
hooked lift ropes. These ropes run in systems to the surface and return. Men at
windlasses on the surface lift the sacks, which, when emptied, return on the slack
loop. The weighted loop cannot slip back because each hook, in turn, preceding
the sack being emptied, engages one of several pintles in the machinery, which is
so geared that it can turn in only one direction. There are twelve of those pintles,
mounted in a large circle; when a given hook drops off one, freed by gravity,
another hook is already engaged on another, held there by the weight of the
ascending lift sacks. Empty sacks are placed on slack hooks, below the machinery,
to be returned to the pit.
The steersman, when not attending to his sweep, carried a lance. We were not
alone in the pits.
Hand over hand, I drew the cone through the sludge toward the raft.
I had been amazed to learn that the brine pits, in effect a network of small
subterranean marine seas, were not devoid of life. I had expected them to be sterile
bodies of water, from the absence of sunlight, precluding basic photosynthesis and
the beginning of a food chain, and the high salt content of the fluid. A human
body, for example, will not sink in the water. This is one of the reasons, too, it is
particularly desirable, in this environment, to weight the raft poles, to help counter
the unusual buoyancy of the saline fluid. In my original conjecture, however, as to
the sterility of these small seas, I was mistaken.
 Look there, called a harvester.
I saw it, too. The other men came to my side of the raft, and we noted it, moving
in the water. The steersman dropped the point of the lance toward the water,
watching, too.
I slowly drew up the metal, perforated cone. Water drained from it, in tiny
irregular streams, spattering back into the sea, and onto the boards of the raft.
Then I lifted the cone and deposited the sludge in the retaining vessel, the large
wooden tub behind me and to my left. I did not again coil and cast the line. I, too,
watched the water.
The light of our lamps flickered on the surface, yellowly, in broken, shifting
refractions.
 There! said one of the men.
Lefts are often attracted to the salt rafts, largely by the vibrations in the water,
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10 Tribesmen of Gor
picked up by their abnormally developed lateral-line protrusions, and their fernlike
craneal vibration receptors, from the cones and poles. Too, though they are blind, I
think either the light, or the heat, perhaps, from our lamps, draws them. The tiny,
eyeless heads will thrust from the water, and the fernlike filaments at the side of
the head will open and lift, orienting themselves to one or the other of the lamps.
The lelt is commonly five to seven inches in length. It is white, and long-finned. It
swims slowly and smoothly, its fins moving the water very little, which apparently
contributes to its own concealment in a blind environment and makes it easier to
detect the vibrations of its prey, any of several varieties of tiny segmented
creatures, predominantly isopods. The brain of the left is interesting, containing an
unusually developed odor-perception center and two vibration-reception centers.
Its organ of balance, or hidden  ear, is also unusually large, and is connected with
an unusually large balance center in its brain. Its visual center, on the other hand,
is stunted and undeveloped, a remnant, a vague genetic memory of an organ long
discarded in its evolution. Among the lefts, too, were, here and there, tiny
salamanders, they, too, white and blind. Like the lefts, They were, for their size,
long-bodied, were capable of long periods of dormancy and possessed a slow
metabolism, useful in an environment in which food is not plentiful. Unlike the
lefts they had long, stemlike legs. At first I had taken them for lelts, skittering
about the rafts, even to the fernlike filaments at the sides of their head, but these
filaments, in the case of the salamanders, interestingly, are not vibration receptors
but feather gills, an external gill system. This system, common in the developing
animal generally, is retained even by the adult salamanders, who are, in this
environment, permanently gilled. The gills of the lelt are located at the lower sides
of its jaw, not on the sides of its head, as is common in open-water fish. The
feather gills of the salamanders, it seems, allow them to hunt the same areas as the
lelts for the same prey, the vibration effects of these organs being similar, without [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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