time our salaries went on.  Young Cole was aggrieved because, as he said, we could not enjoy any sort of fun in the evening after loafing like this all day:  even the banjo lost its charm since there was nothing to prevent his strumming on it all the time between the meals.  The good Paramor—­he was really a most excellent fellow—­became unhappy as far as was possible to his cheery nature, till one dreary day I suggested, out of sheer mischief, that he should employ the dormant energies of the crew in hauling both cables up on deck and turning them end for end.

For a moment Mr. Paramor was radiant.  “Excellent idea!” but directly his face fell.  “Why . . .  Yes!  But we can’t make that job last more than three days,” he muttered discontentedly.  I don’t know how long he expected us to be stuck on the riverside outskirts of Rouen, but I know that the cables got hauled up and turned end for end according to my satanic suggestion, put down again, and their very existence utterly forgotten, I believe, before a French river pilot came on board to take our ship down, empty as she came, into the Havre roads.  You may think that this state of forced idleness favoured some advance in the fortunes of Almayer and his daughter.  Yet it was not so.  As if it were some sort of evil spell, my banjoist cabin-mate’s interruption, as related above, had arrested them short at the point of that fateful sunset for many weeks together.  It was always thus with this book, begun in ’89 and finished in ’94—­with that shortest of all the novels which it was to be my lot to write.  Between its opening exclamation calling Almayer to his dinner in his wife’s voice and Abdullah’s (his enemy) mental reference to the God of Islam—­“The Merciful, the Compassionate”—­which closes the book, there were to come several long sea passages, a visit (to use the elevated phraseology suitable to the occasion) to the scenes (some of them) of my childhood and the realisation of childhood’s vain words, expressing a light-hearted and romantic whim.

It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now: 

“When I grow up I shall go there.”

And of course I thought no more about it till after a quarter of a century or so an opportunity offered to go there—­as if the sin of childish audacity were to be visited on my mature head.  Yes.  I did go there:  there being the region of Stanley Falls which in ’68 was the blankest of blank spaces on the earth’s figured surface.  And the Ms. of “Almayer’s Folly,” carried about me as if it were a talisman or a treasure, went there too.  That it ever came out of there seems a special dispensation of Providence; because a good many of my other properties, infinitely more