Juana laid Coyotito on the blanket, and she placed her shawl over him so that the hot sun could not shine on him. And he folded his blanket and laid it in the bow. He laid his diving rock and his basket and the two ropes in the sand by the canoe. Now he came to the canoe and touched the bow tenderly as he always did. And every year Kino refinished his canoe with the hard shell-like plaster by the secret method that had also come to him from his father. It was at once property and source of food, for a man with a boat can guarantee a woman that she will eat something. Kino's grandfather had brought it from Nayarit, and he had given it to Kino's father, and so it had come to Kino. Kino and Juana came slowly down to the beach and to Kino's canoe, which was the one thing of value he owned in the world. The brush houses of the fishing people were back from the beach on the right-hand side of the town, and the canoes were drawn up in front of this area. A copper haze hung over the water, and the hot morning sun beat on it and made it vibrate blindingly. And the people of the Gulf expected all places were that way, and it was not strange to them.
There was no certainty in seeing, no proof that what you saw was there or was not there. Part of the far shore disappeared into a shimmer that looked like water.
Across the estuary from the town one section of mangroves stood clear and telescopically defined, while another mangrove clump was a hazy black-green blob. Thus it might be that the people of the Gulf trust things of the spirit and things of the imagination, but they do not trust their eyes to show them distance or clear outline or any optical exactness. The uncertain air that magnified some things and blotted out others hung over the whole Gulf so that all sights were unreal and vision could not be trusted so that sea and land had the sharp clarities and the vagueness of a dream. Although the morning was young, the hazy mirage was up. On the beach the hungry dogs and the hungry pigs of the town searched endlessly for any dead fish or sea bird that might have floated in on a rising tide. Spotted botete, the poison fish, lay on the bottom in the eel-grass beds, and the bright-colored swimming crabs scampered over them. The brown algae waved in the gentle currents and the green eel grass swayed and little sea horses clung to its stems. The sea bottom was rich with crawling and swimming and growing things. Fiddler crabs bubbled and sputtered in their holes in the sand, and in the shallows little lobsters popped in and out of their tiny homes in the rubble and sand. The beach was yellow sand, but at the water's edge a rubble of shell and algae took its place. They were high and graceful canoes with curving bow and stern and a braced section midships where a mast could be stepped to carry a small lateen sail. And on the beach the white and blue canoes that came from Nayarit were drawn up, canoes preserved for generations by a hard shell-like waterproof plaster whose making was a secret of the fishing people. More specifically, the settings of the story include a rural fishing village and the larger, more developed town of La Paz.The town lay on a broad estuary, its old yellow plastered buildings hugging the beach. Steinbeck's short novel, The Pearl, is set in La Paz, Mexico. What is the setting of the story the Pearl? Before leaving to sell the pearl, Juan Tomas warns Kino and Juana to get the best price for the pearl, and tells him how their ancestors got an agent to sell their pearls, but this agent ran off with the pearls.īeside this, what grade level is the Pearl by John Steinbeck? Everyone worries that the pearl will destroy Kino and Juana. One may also ask, what happens in chapter 4 of the Pearl? The Pearl Summary and Analysis of Chapter 4. Keeping this in view, how long does it take to read the Pearl? The Pearl A Penguin book Classics on cassette with book Classics on cassette Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century