Presently he picked up her red port light.  Yes, he admitted to himself with a sigh, she was making for one of the ports to southward, for Sette Camma perhaps, or Loango, or Landana, or Kabenda, and he calmed himself down with the discovery.  Had she been heading north, he had it in him to have swum out to her through the surf and the sharks, and chanced being picked up.  He was sick of this savage Africa which lay behind him.  The sight of those two lights, the bright white, and the duller red, let him know how ravenous was his hunger to see once more a white man and a white man’s ship, and to feel the sway of a deck, and to smell the smells of oil, and paint, and Christian cookery, from which he had been for such a weary tale of days divorced.

The steamer drew on till she came a-beam, and the red port light was eclipsed, and “carrying no stern light,” was Captain Kettle’s comment.  There was a small glow from her deck and two or three of her ports were lit, but for the most part she crept along as a mysterious black ship voyaging into a region of blackness.  It was too dark to make out more than her bare existence, but Kettle took a squint at the Southern Cross, which hung low in the sky like an ill-made kite, to get her bearings, and so made note of her course, and from that tried to deduce her nationality.

From the way she was steering he reckoned she came from Batanga or Cameroons, which are in German territory, and so set her down as sailing originally from Marseilles or Hamburg, and anyway decided that she was not one of the Liverpool boats which carry all the West Coast trade to England.  But as he watched, she seemed to slew out of her course.  She lengthened out before him across the night, as her bows sheered in toward the land, till he saw her broadside on, and then she hung motionless as a black blot against the greater blackness beyond.

Captain Kettle summed the situation:  “Rounded up and come to an anchor.  There’ll be a factory somewhere on the beach there.  But I don’t know, though.  That one-eyed head-man said nothing about a factory, and if there was one, why doesn’t she whistle to raise ’em up so’s they’d be ready to bring off their bit o’ trade in the surf-boats when day breaks?”

A cloud slid away in the sky, and the moon shone out like the suddenly opened bulb of a dark lantern.  The oily surface of the sea flashed up into sight, and on it sat the steamer—­a picture in black and silver.  She lay there motionless as the trees on the beach, and the reason for her state was clear.  Her forefoot soared stiffly aloft till it was almost clear of the water; her stern was depressed; her decks listed to port till it was an acrobatic feat to make passageway along them.