‘ Any idea how many times round the deck make a mile?’

‘None, I’m afraid,’ said Tony. ‘But I should think you must have walked a great distance.’

‘Twenty-two times. One soon gets out of sorts at sea if you’re used to an active life. She’s not much of a boat. Travel with this line often?’

‘Never before.’

‘Ah. Thought you might have been in business in the islands. Not many tourists going out this time of year. Just the other way about. All coming home, if you see what I mean. Going far?’

‘Demerara.’

‘Ah. Looking for minerals perhaps?’

‘No, to tell you the truth I am looking for a city.’

The genial passenger was surprised and then laughed. ‘Sounded just like you said you were looking for a city.’

‘Yes.’

‘That was what you said?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought it sounded like that ... well, so long. I must do another few rounds before dinner.’

He paced off up the deck, straddling slightly in order to keep his balance and occasionally putting out a hand to the rail for support.

Regularly every three minutes for the last hour or so, this man had come by. At first Tony had looked up at his approach and then turned away again, out to sea. Presently the man had taken to nodding, then to saying ‘Hullo’ or ‘Bit choppy’ or ‘Here we are again’; finally he had stopped and began a conversation.

Tony went aft to break this rather embarrassing sequence. He descended the companion way which led to the lower deck. Here, in crates lashed to the side, was a variety of livestock—some stud bulls, a heavily blanketed racehorse, a couple of beagles, being exported to various West Indian islands. Tony threaded a way between them and the hatches to the stern, where he sat against a winch watching the horizon mount above the funnels, then fall until they stood out black against the darkening sky. The pitch was more sensible here than it had been amidships; the animals shifted restlessly in their cramped quarters; the beagles whined intermittently. A lascar took down from a line some washing which had been flapping there all day.

The wash of the ship was quickly lost in the high waves. They were steaming westward down the Channel. As it grew to be night, lighthouses appeared flashing from the French coast. Presently a steward walked round the bright, upper deck striking chimes on a gong of brass cylinders, and the genial passenger went below to prepare himself for dinner in hot sea water which splashed from side to side of the bath and dissolved the soap in a thin, sticky scum. He was the only man to dress that evening: Tony sat in the mustering darkness until the second bell. Then he left his greatcoat in the cabin and went down to dinner.

It was the first evening at sea.

Tony sat at the captain’s table, but the captain was on the bridge. There were empty chairs on either side of him. It was not rough enough for the fiddles to be out, but the stewards had removed the flower vases and damped the tablecloth to make it adhesive. A coloured archdeacon sat facing him. He ate with great refinement but his black hands looked immense on the wet, whitish cloth. ‘I’m afraid our table is not showing up very well to-night,’ he said. ‘I see you are not a sufferer. My wife is in her cabin. She is a sufferer.’

He was returning from a Congress, he told Tony.

At the top of the stairs was a lounge named the Music and Writing Room. The light here was always subdued, in the day by the stained glass of the windows, at night by pink silk shades which hid the electric candles. Here the passengers assembled for their coffee, sitting on bulky, tapestry-covered chesterfields or on swivel chairs irremovably fastened before the writing tables. Here too the steward for an hour every day presided over the cupboardful of novels which constituted the ship’s library.

‘It’s not much of a boat,’ said the genial passenger, sitting himself beside Tony. ‘But I expect things will look brighter when we get into the sun.’

Tony lit a cigar and was told by a steward that he must not smoke in this room. ‘That’s all right,’ said the genial passenger, ‘we’re just going down to the bar. You know,’ he said a few minutes later, ‘I feel I owe you an apology. I thought you were potty just now before dinner. Honestly I did, when you said you were going to Demerara to look for a city. Well, it sounded pretty potty. Then the purser—I’m at his table. Always get the cheeriest crowd at the purser’s table and the best attention—the purser told me about you. You’re the explorer, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, come to think of it, I suppose I am,’ said Tony.

It did not come easily to him to realize that he was an explorer. It was barely a fortnight ago that he had become one. Even the presence in the hold of two vast crates, bearing his name and labelled NOT WANTED ON THE VOYAGE —crates containing such new and unfamiliar possessions as a medicine chest, an automatic shot-gun, camping equipment, pack saddles, a cinema camera, dynamite, disinfectants, a collapsible canoe, filters, tinned butter and, strangest of all, an assortment of what Dr Messinger called ‘trade goods’—failed to convince him fully of the serious nature of his expedition. Dr Messinger had arranged everything. It was he who chose the musical boxes and mechanical mice, the mirrors, combs, perfumery, pills, fish hooks, axe heads, coloured rockets and rolls of artificial silk, which were packed in the box of ‘trade goods’. And Dr Messinger himself was a new acquaintance who, prostrate now in his bunk with what the Negro clergyman would have called ‘suffering’, that day, for the first time since Tony had met him, seemed entirely human.

Tony had spent very little of his life abroad. At the age of eighteen, before going to the University, he had been boarded for the summer with an elderly gentleman near Tours, with the intention that he should learn the language. (... a grey stone house surrounded by vines. There was a stuffed spaniel in the bathroom. The old man had called it ‘Stop’ because it was chic at that time to give dogs an English name. Tony had bicycled along straight, white roads to visit the chateaux; he carried rolls of bread and cold veal tied to the back of the machine, and the soft dust seeped into them through the paper and gritted against his teeth. There were two other English boys there, so he had learned little French. One of them fell in love and the other got drunk for the first time on sparkling Vouvray at a fair that had been held in the town. That evening Tony won a live pigeon at a tombola; he set it free and later saw it being recaptured by the proprietor of the stall with a butterfly net ...) Later he had gone to Central Europe for a few weeks with a friend from Balliol. (They had found themselves suddenly rich with the falling mark and had lived in unaccustomed grandeur in the largest hotel suites. Tony had bought a fur for a few shillings and given it to a girl in Munich who spoke no English.) Later still his honeymoon with Brenda in a villa, lent to them, on the Italian Riviera. (... Cypress and olive trees, a domed church half-way down the hill, between the villa and the harbour, a café where they sat out in the evening, watching the fishing-boats and the lights reflected in the quiet water, waiting for the sudden agitation of sound and motion as the speed-boat came in. It had been owned by a dashing young official, who called it Jazz Girl . He seemed to spend twenty hours a day running in and out of the little harbour ...) Once Brenda and he had gone to Le Touquet with Bratt’s golf team. That was all. After his father died he had not left England. They could not easily afford it; it was one of the things they postponed until death duties were paid off; besides that, he was never happy away from Hetton, and Brenda did not like leaving John Andrew.

Thus Tony had no very ambitious ideas about travel, and when he decided to go abroad his first act was to call at a tourist agency and come away laden with a sheaf of brightly coloured prospectuses, which advertised commodious cruises among palm trees, Negresses and ruined arches. He was going away because it seemed to be the conduct expected of a husband in his circumstances, because the associations of Hetton were for the time poisoned for him, because he wanted to live for a few months away from people who would know him or Brenda, in places where there was no expectation of meeting her or Beaver or Reggie St Cloud at every corner he frequented, and, with this feeling of evasion dominant in his mind, he took the prospectuses to read at the Greville Club. He had been a member there for some years, but rarely used it; his resignation was postponed only by his recurrent omission to cancel the banker’s order for his subscription. Now that Bratt’s and Brown’s were distasteful to him he felt thankful that he had kept on with the Greville. It was a club of intellectual flavour, composed of dons, a few writers and the officials of museums and learned societies. It had a tradition of garrulity, so that he was not surprised when, seated in an armchair and surrounded with his illustrated folders, he was addressed by a member unknown to him who asked if he were thinking of going away. He was more surprised when he looked up and studied the questioner.

Dr Messinger, though quite young, was bearded, and Tony knew few young men with beards. He was also very small, very sunburned and prematurely bald; the ruddy brown of his face ended abruptly along the line of his forehead, which rose in a pale dome; he wore steel-rimmed spectacles and there was something about his blue serge suit which suggested that the wearer found it uncomfortable.

Tony admitted that he was considering taking a cruise.

‘I am going away shortly,’ said Dr Messinger, ‘to Brazil. At least it may be Brazil or Dutch Guiana. One cannot tell. The frontier has never been demarcated. I ought to have started last week, only my plans were upset. Do you by any chance know a Nicaraguan calling himself alternately Ponsonby and FitzClarence?’

‘No, I don’t think I do.’

‘You are fortunate. That man has just robbed me of two hundred pounds and some machine guns.’

‘Machine guns?’

‘Yes, I travel with one or two, mostly for show, you know, or for trade, and they are not easy to buy nowadays. Have you ever tried?’

‘No.’

‘Well you can take it from me that it’s not easy. You can’t just walk into a shop and order machine guns.’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘Still, at a pinch I can do without them. But I can’t do without two hundred pounds.’

Tony had, open on his knee, a photograph of the harbour at Agadir. Dr Messinger looked over his shoulder at it. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘interesting little place. I expect you know Zingermaun there?’

‘No, I’ve not been there yet.’

‘You’d like him—a very straight fellow. He used to do quite a lot, selling ammunition to the Atlas caids before the pacification. Of course it was easy money with the capitulations, but he did it better than most of them. I believe he’s running a restaurant now in Mogador.’ Then he continued dreamily, ‘The pity is I can’t let the R.G.S. in on this expedition. I’ve got to find the money privately.’

It was one o’clock and the room was beginning to fill up; an Egyptologist was exhibiting a handkerchief-ful of scarabs to the editor of a church weekly.

‘We’d better go up and lunch,’ said Dr Messinger.

Tony had not intended to lunch at the Greville but there was something compelling about the invitation; moreover, he had no other engagement.

Dr Messinger lunched off apples and a rice pudding. (‘I have to be very careful what I eat,’ he said.) Tony ate cold steak and kidney pie. They sat at a window in the big dining-room upstairs. The places round them were soon filled with members, who even carried the tradition of general conversation so far as to lean back in their chairs and chat over their shoulders from table to table—a practice which greatly hindered the already imperfect service. But Tony remained oblivious to all that was said, absorbed in what Dr Messinger was telling him.

‘... You see, there has been a continuous tradition about the City since the first explorers of the sixteenth century. It has been variously allocated, sometimes down in Matto Grosso, sometimes on the upper Orinoco in what is now Venezuela. I myself used to think it lay somewhere on the Uraricuera. I was out there last year and it was then that I established contact with the Pie-wie Indians; no white man had ever visited them and got out alive. And it was from the Pie-wies that I learned where to look. None of them had ever visited the City, of course, but they knew about it . Every Indian between Ciudad Bolivar and Para knows about it. But they won’t talk. Queer people. But I became blood-brother with a Pie-wie—interesting ceremony. They buried me up to the neck in mud and all the women of the tribe spat on my head. Then we ate a toad and snake and a beetle and after that I was blood-brother—well, he told me that the City lies between the head waters of the Courantyne and the Takutu. There’s a vast track of unexplored country there. I’ve often thought of visiting it.

‘I’ve been looking up the historical side too, and I more or less know how the City got there. It was the result of a migration from Peru at the beginning of the fifteenth century, when the Incas were at the height of their power. It is mentioned in all the early Spanish documents as a popular legend. One of the younger princes rebelled and led his people off into the forest. Most of the tribes had a tradition in one form or another of a strange race passing through their territory.’

‘But what do you suppose this city will be like?’

‘Impossible to say. Every tribe has a different word for it. The Pie-wies call it the “Shining” or “Glittering”, the Arekuna the “Many Watered”, the Patamonas the “Bright Feathered”, the Warau, oddly enough, use the same word for it that they use for a kind of aromatic jam they make. Of course, one can’t tell how a civilization may have developed or degenerated in five hundred years of isolation ...’

Before Tony left the Greville that day, he tore up his sheaf of cruise prospectuses, for he had arranged to join Dr Messinger in his expedition.



‘Done much of that kind of thing?’

‘No, to tell you the truth it is the first time.’

‘Ah. Well, I daresay it’s more interesting than it sounds,’ conceded the genial passenger, ‘else people wouldn’t do it so much.’

The ship, so far as any consideration of comfort had contributed to her design, was planned for the tropics. It was slightly colder in the smoking-room than on deck. Tony went to his cabin and retrieved his cap and greatcoat; then he went aft again, to the place where he had sat before dinner. It was a starless night and nothing was visible beyond the small luminous area round the ship, save for a single lighthouse that flashed short-long, short-long, far away on the port bow. The crests of the waves caught the reflection from the promenade deck and shone for a moment before plunging away into the black depths behind. The beagles were awake, whining.

For some days now Tony had been thoughtless about the events of the immediate past. His mind was occupied with the City, the Shining, the Many Watered, the Bright Feathered, the Aromatic Jam. He had a clear picture of it in his mind. It was Gothic in character, all vanes and pinnacles, gargoyles, battlements, groining and tracery, pavilions and terraces, a transfigured Hetton, pennons and banners floating on the sweet breeze, everything luminous and translucent; a coral citadel crowning a green hill-top sown with daisies, among groves and streams; a tapestry landscape filled with heraldic and fabulous animals and symmetrical, disproportionate blossom.

The ship tossed and tunnelled through the dark waters towards this radiant sanctuary.

‘I wonder if anyone is doing anything about those dogs,’ said the genial passenger, arriving at his elbow. ‘I’ll ask the purser to-morrow. We might exercise them a bit. Kind of mournful the way they go on.’



Next day they were in the Atlantic. Ponderous waves rising over murky, opaque depths. Dappled with foam at the crests, like downland, where on the high, exposed places snow has survived the thaw. Lead-grey and slate in the sun, olive, field blue and khaki like the uniforms of a battlefield; the sky overhead was neutral and steely with swollen clouds scudding across it, affording rare half-hours of sunlight. The masts swung slowly across this sky and the bows heaved and wallowed below the horizon. The man who had made friends with Tony paraded the deck with the two beagles. They strained at the end of their chains, sniffing the scuppers; the man lurched behind them unsteadily. He wore a pair of race glasses with which he occasionally surveyed the seas; he offered them to Tony whenever they passed each other.

‘Been talking to the wireless operator,’ he said. ‘We ought to pass quite near the Yarmouth Castle at about eleven.’

Few of the passengers were on their feet. Those who had come on deck lay in long chairs on the sheltered side, pensive, wrapped in tartan rugs. Dr Messinger kept to his cabin. Tony went to see him and found him torpid, for he was taking large doses of chloral. Towards evening the wind freshened and by dinner-time was blowing hard; portholes were screwed up and all destructible objects disposed on the cabin floors; a sudden roll broke a dozen coffee cups in the music and reading room. That night there was little sleep for anyone on board; the plating creaked, luggage shifted from wall to wall. Tony wedged himself firm in his bunk with the lifebelt and thought of the City.

... Carpet and canopy, tapestry and velvet, portcullis and bastion, waterfowl on the moat and kingcups along its margin, peacocks trailing their finery across the lawns; high overhead in a sky of sapphire and swansdown silver bells chiming in a turret of alabaster.

Days of shadow and exhaustion, salt wind and wet mist, foghorn and the constant groan and creak of straining metal. Then they were clear of it, after the Azores. Awnings were out and passengers moved their chairs to windward. High noon and an even keel; the blue water lapping against the sides of the ship, rippling away behind her to the horizon; gramophones and deck tennis; bright arcs of flying fish (‘Look, Ernie, come quick, there’s a shark.’ ‘That’s not a shark, it’s a dolphin.’ ‘Mr Brink said it was a porpoise.’ ‘There he is again. Oh, if I had my camera.’); clear, tranquil water and the regular turn and tread of the screw; there were many hands to caress the beagles as they went loping by. Mr Brink amid laughter suggested that he should exercise the racehorse, or, with a further burst of invention, the bull. Mr Brink sat at the purser’s table with the cheery crowd.

Dr Messinger left his cabin and appeared on deck and in the dining-saloon. So did the wife of the archdeacon; she was very much whiter than her husband. On Tony’s other side at table sat a girl named Thérèse de Vitré. He had noticed her once or twice during the grey days, a forlorn figure almost lost among furs and cushions and rugs; a colourless little face with wide dark eyes. She said, ‘The last days have been terrible. I saw you walking about. How I envied you.’

‘It ought to be calm all the way now,’ and inevitably, ‘Are you going far?’

‘Trinidad. That is my home ... I tried to decide who you were from the passenger list.’

‘Who was I?’

‘Well ... someone called Colonel Strapper.’

‘Do I look so old?’

‘Are colonels old? I didn’t know. It’s not a thing we have much in Trinidad. Now I know who you are because I asked the head steward. Do tell me about your exploring.’

‘You’d better ask Doctor Messinger. He knows more about it than I do.’

‘No, you tell me.’

She was eighteen years old; small and dark, with a face that disappeared in a soft pointed chin so that attention was drawn to the grave eyes and the high forehead; she had not long outgrown her schoolgirl plumpness and she moved with an air of exultance, as though she had lately shed an encumbrance and was not yet fatigued by the other burdens that would succeed it. For two years she had been at school in Paris.

‘... Some of us used to keep lipstick and rouge secretly in our bedrooms and try it on at night. One girl called Antoinette came to Mass on Sunday wearing it. There was a terrible row with Madame de Supplice and she left after that term. It was awfully brave. We all envied her ... But she was an ugly girl, always eating chocolates ...’

‘... Now I am coming home to be married ... No, I am not yet engaged, but you see there are so few young men I can marry. They must be Catholic and of an island family. It would not do to marry an official and go back to live in England. But it will be easy because I have no brothers or sisters and my father has one of the best houses in Trinidad. You must come and see it. It is a stone house, outside the town. My family came to Trinidad in the French Revolution. There are two or three other rich families and I shall marry into one of them. Our son will have the house. It will be easy ...’

She wore a little coat, of the kind that was then fashionable, and no ornament except a string of pearls. ‘... There was an American girl at Madame de Supplice’s who was engaged. She had a ring with a big diamond but she could never wear it except in bed. Then one day she had a letter from her young man saying he was going to marry another girl. How she cried. We all read the letter and most of us cried too ... But in Trinidad it will be quite easy.’

Tony told her about the expedition; of the Peruvian emigrants in the middle ages and their long caravan working through the mountains and forests, llamas packed with works of intricate craftsmanship; of the continual rumours percolating to the coast and luring adventurers up into the forests; of the route they would take up the rivers, then cutting through the bush along Indian trails and across untravelled country; of the stream they might strike higher up and how, Dr Messinger said, they would make woodskin canoes and take to the water again; how finally they would arrive under the walls of the city like the Vikings at Byzantium. ‘But of course,’ he added, ‘there may be nothing in it. It ought to be an interesting journey in any case.’

‘How I wish I was a man,’ said Thérèse de Vitré.

After dinner they danced to the music of an amplified gramophone and the girl drank lemon squash on the bench outside the deck bar, sucking it through two straws.



A week of blue water that grew clearer and more tranquil daily, of sun that grew warmer, radiating the ship and her passengers, filling them with good humour and ease; blue water that caught the sun in a thousand brilliant points, dazzling the eyes as they searched for porpoises and flying fish; clear blue water in the shallows revealing its bed of silver sand and smooth pebble, fathoms down; soft warm shade on deck under the awnings; the ship moved amid unbroken horizons on a vast blue disc of blue, sparkling with sunlight.

Tony and Miss de Vitré played quoits and shuffle-board; they threw rope rings into a bucket from a short distance. (‘We’ll go in a small boat,’ Dr Messinger had said, ‘so as to escape all that hideous nonsense of deck games.’) Twice consecutively Tony won the sweepstake on the ship’s run; the prize was eighteen shillings. He bought Miss de Vitré a woollen rabbit at the barber’s shop.

It was unusual for Tony to use ‘Miss’ in talking to anyone. Except Miss Tendril, he could think of no one he addressed in that way. But it was Thérèse who first called him ‘Tony’, seeing it engraved in Brenda’s handwriting in his cigarette case. ‘How funny,’ she said, ‘that was the name of the man who didn’t marry the American girl at Madame de Supplice’s’; and after that they used each other’s Christian names, to the great satisfaction of the other passengers, who had little to interest them on board except the flowering of this romance.

‘I can’t believe this is the same ship as in those cold, rough days,’ said Thérèse.

They reached the first of the islands; a green belt of palm trees with wooded hills rising beyond them and a small town heaped up along the shores of a bay. Thérèse and Tony went ashore and bathed. Thérèse swam badly, with her head ridiculously erect out of the water. There was practically no bathing in Trinidad, she explained. They lay for some time on the firm, silver beach; then drove back into the town in the shaky, two-horse carriage he had hired, past ramshackle cabins from which little black boys ran out to beg or swing behind on the axle, in the white dust. There was nowhere in the town to dine so they returned to the ship at sundown. She lay out at some distance, but from where they stood after dinner, leaning over the rail, they could just hear, in the intervals when the winch was not working, the chatter and singing in the streets. Thérèse put her arm through Tony’s, but the decks were full of passengers and agents and swarthy little men with lists of cargo. There was no dancing that night. They went above on to the boat deck and Tony kissed her.

Dr Messinger came on board by the last launch. He had met an acquaintance in the town. He had observed the growing friendship between Tony and Thérèse with the strongest disapproval and told him of a friend of his who had been knifed in a back street of Smyrna, as a warning of what happened if one got mixed up with women.

In the islands the life of the ship disintegrated. There were changes of passengers; the black archdeacon left after shaking hands with everyone on board; on their last morning his wife took round a collecting box in aid of an organ that needed repairs. The captain never appeared at meals in the dining-saloon. Even Tony’s first friend no longer changed for dinner; the cabins were stuffy from being kept locked all day.

Tony and Thérèse bathed again at Barbados and drove round the island visiting castellated churches. They dined at an hotel high up out of town and ate flying fish.

‘You must come to my home and see what real creole cooking is like,’ said Thérèse. ‘We have a lot of old recipes that the planters used to use. You must meet my father and mother.’

They could see the lights of the ship from the terrace where they were dining; the bright decks with figures moving about and the double line of portholes.

‘Trinidad the day after to-morrow,’ said Tony.

They talked of the expedition and she said it was sure to be dangerous. ‘I don’t like Doctor Messinger at all,’ she said. ‘Not anything about him.’

‘And you will have to choose your husband.’

‘Yes. There are seven of them. There was one called Honoré I liked, but of course I haven’t seen him for two years. He was studying to be an engineer. There’s one called Mendoza who’s very rich but he isn’t really a Trinidadian. His grandfather came from Dominica and they say he has coloured blood. I expect it will be Honoré. Mother always brought in his name when she wrote to me and he sent me things at Christmas and on my fête. Rather silly things, because the shops aren’t good in Port of Spain.’

Later she said, ‘You’ll be coming back by Trinidad, won’t you? So I shall see you then. Will you be a long time in the bush?’

‘I expect you’ll be married by then.’

‘Tony, why haven’t you ever got married?’

‘But I am.’

‘Married?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re teasing me.’

‘No, honestly I am. At least I was.’

‘Oh.’

‘Are you surprised?’

‘I don’t know. Somehow I didn’t think you were. Where is she?’

‘In England. We had a row.’

‘Oh ... What’s the time?’

‘Quite early.’

‘Let’s go back.’

‘D’you want to?’

‘Yes, please. It’s been a delightful day.’

‘You said that as if you were saying good-bye.’

‘Did I? I don’t know.’

The Negro chauffeur drove them at great speed into the town. Then they sat in a rowing-boat and bobbed slowly out to the ship. Earlier in the day, in good spirits, they had bought a stuffed fish. Thérèse found she had left it behind at the hotel. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.



Blue water came to an end after Barbados. Round Trinidad the sea was opaque and colourless, full of the mud which the Orinoco brought down from the mainland. Thérèse spent all that day in her cabin, doing her packing.

Next day she said good-bye to Tony in a hurry. Her father had come out to meet her in the tender. He was a wiry bronzed man with a long grey moustache. He wore a panama hat and smart silk clothes, and smoked a cheroot; the complete slave-owner of the last century. Thérèse did not introduce him to Tony. ‘He was someone on the ship,’ she explained, obviously.

Tony saw her once next day in the town, driving with a lady who was obviously her mother. She waved but did not stop. ‘Reserved lot, these real old creoles,’ remarked the passenger who had first made friends with Tony and had now attached himself again. ‘Poor as church mice most of them, but stinking proud. Time and again I’ve palled up with them on board and when we got to port it’s been good-bye. Do they ever so much as ask you to their houses? Not they.’

Tony spent the two days with his first friend who had business connections in the place. On the second day it rained heavily and they could not leave the terrace of the hotel. Dr Messinger was engaged on some technical enquiries at the Agricultural Institute.



Muddy sea between Trinidad and Georgetown; and the ship lightened of cargo rolled heavily in the swell. Dr Messinger took to his cabin once more. Rain fell continuously and a slight mist enclosed them so that they seemed to move in a small puddle of brown water; the foghorn sounded regularly through the rain. Scarcely a dozen passengers remained on board and Tony prowled disconsolately about the deserted decks or sat alone in the music room, his mind straying back along the path he had forbidden it, to the tall elm avenue at Hetton and the budding copses.

Next day they arrived at the mouth of the Demerara. The customs sheds were heavy with the reek of sugar and loud with the buzzing of bees. There were lengthy formalities in disembarking their stores, Dr Messinger saw to it while Tony lit a cigar and strayed out on to the quay. Small shipping of all kinds lay round them; on the farther bank a low, green fringe of mangrove; behind, the tin roofs of the town were visible among feathery palm trees; everything steamed from the recent rain. Black stevedores grunted rhythmically at their work; West Indians trotted busily to and fro with invoices and bills of lading. Presently Dr Messinger pronounced that everything was in order and that they could go into the town to their hotel.