other expenses consequent upon the delays arising from my frivolity.

Once outside in the sunshine my head swam. It was no longer a question
of mere delay. I perceived myself involved in hopeless and humiliating
absurdities that were leading me to something very like a disaster. "Let
us be calm," I muttered to myself, and ran into the shade of a
leprous wall. From that short side-street I could see the broad main
thoroughfare ruinous and gay, running away, away between stretches of
decaying masonry, bamboo fences, ranges of arcades of brick and plaster,
hovels of lath and mud, lofty temple gates of carved timber, huts of
rotten mats--an immensely wide thoroughfare, loosely packed as far as
the eye could reach with a barefooted and brown multitude paddling ankle
deep in the dust. For a moment I felt myself about to go out of my mind
with worry and desperation.

Some allowance must be made for the feelings of a young man new to
responsibility. I thought of my crew. Half of them were ill, and I
really began to think that some of them would end by dying on board if
I couldn't get them out to sea soon. Obviously I should have to take my
ship down the river, either working under canvas or dredging with the
anchor down; operations which, in common with many modern sailors,
I only knew theoretically. And I almost shrank from undertaking them
shorthanded and without local knowledge of the river bed, which is so
necessary for the confident handling of the ship. There were no pilots,
no beacons, no buoys of any sort; but there was a very devil of a
current for anybody to see, no end of shoal places, and at least two
obviously awkward turns of the channel between me and the sea. But how
dangerous these turns were I would not tell. I didn't even know what
my ship was capable of! I had never handled her in my life. A
misunderstanding between a man and his ship in a difficult river with no