Claude Monet Poplars on the Banks of the Epte painting

The boats put in at one Daqo port or another, usually the crew's port, to unload and sell their fish; then they all sail on several hundred kilometers down the coast to Gazt, a long, shallow harbor in the hot marshlands south of the canebrake country. There the sailors help the Aq unload the stone. They receive no payment for or profit from this part of the trip.
I asked a shipmaster who had "sailed the faring" many times why she and her sailors were willing to take the Aq stone farers down to Gazt. She shrugged. "It's part of the agreement," she said, evidently not having thought much about it. After thinking, she added, "Be an awful job to drag that stone overland through the marshes."
Before the Daqo boats have sailed halfway back to the harbor mouth, the Aq have begun loading the stone onto wheeled flatbed carts left on the docks