the distance was fifty miles, six hours' steaming for the old ship with
the tide, or seven against. Then you steered straight for the land, and
by-and-by three palms would appear on the sky, tall and slim, and with
their disheveled heads in a bunch, as if in confidential criticism of
the dark mangroves. The Sofala would be headed towards the somber
strip of the coast, which at a given moment, as the ship closed with
it obliquely, would show several clean shining fractures--the brimful
estuary of a river. Then on through a brown liquid, three parts water
and one part black earth, on and on between the low shores, three parts
black earth and one part brackish water, the Sofala would plow her way
up-stream, as she had done once every month for these seven years or
more, long before he was aware of her existence, long before he had ever
thought of having anything to do with her and her invariable voyages.
The old ship ought to have known the road better than her men, who had
not been kept so long at it without a change; better than the faithful
Serang, whom he had brought over from his last ship to keep the
captain's watch; better than he himself, who had been her captain for
the last three years only. She could always be depended upon to make her
courses. Her compasses were never out. She was no trouble at all to
take about, as if her great age had given her knowledge, wisdom, and
steadiness. She made her landfalls to a degree of the bearing, and
almost to a minute of her allowed time. At any moment, as he sat on
the bridge without looking up, or lay sleepless in his bed, simply by
reckoning the days and the hours he could tell where he was--the precise
spot of the beat. He knew it well too, this monotonous huckster's
round, up and down the Straits; he knew its order and its sights and its
people. Malacca to begin with, in at daylight and out at dusk, to cross
over with a rigid phosphorescent wake this highway of the Far East.
Darkness and gleams on the water, clear stars on a black sky, perhaps
the lights of a home steamer keeping her unswerving course in the