The elderly serang, emitting a strange inarticulate cry, gave the example.  He was an excellent petty officer—­very competent indeed, and a moderate opium smoker.  The rest of them in one great rush smothered that pony.  They hung on to his ears, to his mane, to his tail; they lay in piles across his back, seventeen in all.  The carpenter, seizing the hook of the cargo-chain, flung himself on top of them.  A very satisfactory petty officer too, but he stuttered.  Have you ever heard a light-yellow, lean, sad, earnest Chinaman stutter in pidgin-English?  It’s very weird indeed.  He made the eighteenth.  I could not see the pony at all; but from the swaying and heaving of that heap of men I knew that there was something alive inside.

From the wharf Almayer hailed in quavering tones: 

“Oh, I say!”

Where he stood he could not see what was going on on deck unless perhaps the tops of the men’s heads; he could only hear the scuffle, the mighty thuds, as if the ship were being knocked to pieces.  I looked over:  “What is it?”

“Don’t let them break his legs,” he entreated me plaintively.

“Oh, nonsense!  He’s all right now.  He can’t move.”

By that time the cargo-chain had been hooked to the broad canvas belt round the pony’s body, the kalashes sprang off simultaneously in all directions, rolling over each other, and the worthy serang, making a dash behind the winch, turned the steam on.

“Steady!” I yelled, in great apprehension of seeing the animal snatched up to the very head of the derrick.

On the wharf Almayer shuffled his straw slippers uneasily.  The rattle of the winch stopped, and in a tense, impressive silence that pony began to swing across the deck.

How limp he was!  Directly he felt himself in the air he relaxed every muscle in a most wonderful manner.  His four hoofs knocked together in a bunch, his head hung down, and his tail remained pendent in a nerveless and absolute immobility.  He reminded me vividly of the pathetic little sheep which hangs on the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece.  I had no idea that anything in the shape of a horse could be so limp as that, either living or dead.  His wild mane hung down lumpily, a mere mass of inanimate horsehair; his aggressive ears had collapsed, but as he went swaying slowly across the front of the bridge I noticed an astute gleam in his dreamy, half-closed eye.  A trustworthy quartermaster, his glance anxious and his mouth on the broad grin, was easing over the derrick watchfully.  I superintended, greatly interested.

“So!  That will do.”

The derrick-head stopped.  The kalashes lined the rail.  The rope of the halter hung perpendicular and motionless like a bell-pull in front of Almayer.  Everything was very still.  I suggested amicably that he should catch hold of the rope and mind what he was about.  He extended a provokingly casual and superior hand.