Bean-Burst

The Hamburg Amerika motorship Rhineland was plowing a cautious course along the jaundiced flood of the Yangtze-Kiang, below Hankow, China. In the Rhineland's hold lay tons and tons of starchy little white pellets, a heavy cargo of beans. There was a crunching jar and trillions of the beans spilled about or shivered in their places as the Rhineland collided with the Japanese S. S. Mitsuki Maru. Then quiet again, and a trickling of yellow river water in among the beans. Like the droplets that crawl into men's beards to soften them for shaving; like the droplets that stole into the wooden wedges of Egyptian quarrymen exhuming stone for the Pyramids; like droplets that will steal into compressed Chinese waterflowers to make them bloom in bowls on Occidental library tables--so stole droplets of the yellow Yangtze flood in between the starch layers of the Rhineland's myriad passive beans, making them swell and shoulder one another, making their mass bulge and press against the triple-riveted bulkheads, until the bulkheads slowly burst and the Rhineland, despite salvaging efforts, was a total wreck. Scientific name for the creeping of the droplets: capillary action.