Dedicated to Charles E. Hands...

The steamer moved up river at half-speed, and the sounds of life fell with the sun. The shores grew blurred. The quiet was the dusk. The ship itself was hushed, and her men about their duties appeared...

There is a region of grey limestone and glass, horizontally stratified into floors, intersected by narrow ravines called avenues, and honeycombed by shipping and commercial offices, which lies between...

Colet was the last to leave the office. He paused on that first-floor landing. Had he forgotten anything? He stood contemplating the handle of his unrefined ash stick as though divining the portent of...

No diner at the Gridiron should flatter another diner by noticing his capriciousness. That would betray his surprise, which he ought not to feel. If he were not singular, he would not be there. For th...

At Brixton on Monday evening, Mr. Perriam was trying to leave his house. It was his address, or his house; he never called it his home. He had but just come from Manchester, and the fact that the trai...

Colet was surprised to find that the night outside was in cool and spacious repose. Its indifference stopped his rush. The Avenue was empty. He could hear the traffic as usual in Leadenhall Street. It...

After a little respite of sleep in the hotel at the dockhead, Jimmy went down through a dull corridor to the coffee-room. He was surprised, when he opened its door, by the attack of an interior light ...

Mr. Sinclair, the chief officer of the Altair, was on the navigating bridge, with the boatswain and a few men, and his voice was raised above the importance of the job, which was but adjusting the wea...

The Altair went down on the first of the ebb at half-speed. Colet had not seen those shores since he came up this very reach more years ago than he could accurately count. It does not heighten the pre...

The oil-lamp of the cabin, after a short sleep, would wake, and move uneasily in its gimbals. Its smoky glim was barely enough to fill the hollow with light, though the room was small, so the long sha...

The steward had warned Colet that they were at Plymouth, and he was by the rail, watching a thin mist change into the hills of a Devon morning, when Sinclair came along. “No hurry, but the old man is ...

Gillespie extolled the Scots. His hardihood left nothing else to talk about. The steward brisked about with the morning dishes. Jimmy, in a way that was new to him, noticed that the odour of the coffe...

A little concentration with a chipping hammer will do more to the inexperienced back than to a rusty deck. Colet, not to be beaten, ached while he chipped, and the sun burned his neck. The rust was ev...

At the saloon mess-table the guardians of the ship were allusive about her welfare. The set of a current had been adverse; she was seven miles astern of her estimated position. The signs in the heaven...

“Come now, will you?” said the captain. Colet was glad of a change from that erratic dinner-table, and gestured his readiness. He was to be purser for the evening. He followed the master out of the sa...

The steward departed, chary of words, as though he were on his way to get another rudder. He had no time to talk. The violent rolling of the ship did not relent. That seemed senseless, when she was cr...

The port-light was a grey round, and the lamp had paled. When Colet noticed that, he wondered how it had come about. He peered out from the port. He could see nothing but wan panic, and a long loose e...

Young Lycett faintly hesitated over that signal; or so Colet imagined. Never before had he watched his fellows so closely. But the lad turned to the rack where rolled flags waited in their pigeonholes...

The men in the boat continued to stare at the place where their ship had been as though they still saw her. They remained trance-like without a movement in an apparent refusal to believe their experie...

The interminable days merged for those open boats. Time lapsed into an uneventful fortitude, a thirsty desert, to which apathy could see no end. The sail of each boat was double-reefed and goose-winge...

The liner’s deck was a neat road, a disciplined promenade, and the seams of its scoured woodwork ran so far and straight that they were as incredible as plain truth. It had garden seats. The extraordi...

They arrived at Rangoon before the day had begun; and though that city had a name which had the appeal of a call of the oboe, yet Colet discovered that he was in no hurry to leave his cabin. Something...

If he had landed on the further side of the moon he could not have been more in the dark. Those letters with which Norrie had armed him⁠—chits, Norrie called them⁠—they were all very well, but in a wa...

There was no difficulty, after all, in discovering a Mr. Ah Loi. The hotel people knew of him. Even a rickshaw man, when challenged, made almost satisfactory signs of intelligence. Colet viewed him su...

In his Penang bedroom, alone with what he did not know of the tropics, Colet guessed he was inappropriate to that variety of dark. It was not only a covert dark. Its nature was foreign. It was unlike ...

Norrie was taciturn. He had hardly spoken that morning. It was noticeable, too, to his companion, that he was very generous in the confined space of that cabin for two with the broad of his back, whic...

One day on the China Sea side, well up the coast from Singapore, they reached a hut. It was night, and it rained. Here they would begin their inland journey. It was somewhere near a beach. It had no o...

They had wandered beyond the verifications of the map, which for some time had been little better than the nearest a cartographer could do with what was mainly hearsay. When the country about a camp g...

Norrie sank into his hammock, and remained, still and yellow, with his eyes shut, as though dead. The camp that evening suggested a depth in solitude which was more remote than Colet had ever known. T...

The high cliffs of trees around their hut so overhung that the sun never found them till near noon. It was like being at the bottom of a well. Daylight fell to the stream beside the hut as a few long ...

The berg rose out of the level forest by the river, and to Colet it was anomalous. It was an isolated mass of white limestone, a lofty island in the ocean of jungle. Its pale cliffs fell sheer to the ...

Now they had found it, now they stood firmly upon the security which most men desire but usually fail to reach, their campfire, somehow, burned with less of its old companionable light. This was the e...

Mr. Parsell did not make an early start. He found their Malays and the situation of the camp too attractive. The awe of the Malays for this eager and energetic little man, who mystified them with his ...

The two partners were sitting together, pulling on their marching boots. They were returning east, to the China Sea coast, and Mr. Parsell would set out for an Indian Ocean beach. Their Chinaman place...

To face about and march away from Norrie made the land different. The very sunlight depends for its brightness on the way we are able to see it. Norrie was an old sentimentalist, easy and warm, armour...

The camp was not awake when Colet left it to go down to the river. Its surroundings were apparitional in the hour before dawn. The forest was uncreated. It was only beginning to come out of the darkne...

In that sharp confusion of forested mountains, with ridges in the clouds, and all based in an inferno of precipice, chasm, and torrent, to the depths of which the sun never reached, it was hard to say...

Why was Mat standing there looking at him? Colet sat up. The sun was bright on a high buttress across the valley. This was late. Time they were on the move. Mat ought to have called him; but Mat never...

No end yet to the eternal trees and the heat. They were in the plains now, though. Areca palms and houses might be seen in the distance any time. Land ho! A little rest wouldn’t do them any harm. Mat ...

When Colet, some weeks later, walked into the lounge of the Penang hotel, the palms in the garden were awake in a cooling draught. The wind could just be felt. It was as though you knew of the stir of...