Word: guano
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Enter the Hunchback. The title story has a standard McCullers theme: love and loneliness in a Southern town. Miss Amelia is 30, solitary and well-to-do with the profits of her store (feed, guano, meal and moonshine whisky). Once she had been married-for ten days; but she had driven her husband off with her powerful fists and rasping tongue. But one day a little hunchback with a soft, sassy face comes to town and announces that he is Miss Amelia's kin. To everybody's surprise, she takes him in, and a big change takes place...
...again flat broke, in another South American port. He wanders into the waterfront dive run by Milly, a "shark" who helps shanghai drunken sailors into freighter crews. Wenzel's young face and smooth muscles soften Milly's heart; as she liquors up a crew for a wretched guano ship, she decides to save him for herself. But Wenzel refuses the favor and takes his place with his tricked and sodden buddies...
...Peru's rainless, guano (dung)covered Chincha Islands, Director Carlos Llosa Belaunde of the semi-official Compañia Administradora del Guano fondly examined a guano sample. His 20 million birds were performing magnificently, producing more & more fertilizer for Peru's irrigated fields. Recently Señor Llosa announced that this year the national guano harvest would be 170,000 tons, up from the 1942 low of 79,000 tons. Chief reasons: a scientific pampering of the guano birds, and the fact that the Peruvian (Humboldt) Current, which sometimes falters, was flowing strong and cold from the Antarctic...
Most important guano bird is the guanay (a kind of cormorant), a highly efficient mechanism for catching the fish that swarm in Peruvian waters and turning them into fertilizer. Each guanay eats about 60 small fish a day and deposits annually some five kilos (11 Ibs.) of guano. Steamers passing the Chincha Islands are forbidden to blow their whistles lest the birds take off, fertilizing the sea. The guanayes have a bad habit of flying low after their takeoff, and their tailfeathers brush guano off the cliffs. Señor Llosa is ringing the steep-sided islands with walls...
...Chincha Islands are already playing host to almost all the birds they can hold. What the guano birds need now, says Señor Llosa, is more staging areas. The climate of southern Peru is favorable; the sea is full of fish. But there are virtually no islands there, and when the birds try to nest on the mainland, foxes eat their eggs. So Señor Llosa is building ten-foot walls across the peninsulas, making artificial islands for the birds to use as bases. He even dreams of parking the birds some day far at sea on anchored...