that he had never let a mosquito in together with himself.  Mr. Travers dodged in and out without grace and was obviously much irritated at the necessity.  Mrs. Travers did it in a manner all her own, with marked cleverness and an unconscious air.  There was an improvised table in there and some wicker armchairs which Jorgenson had produced from somewhere in the depths of the ship.  It was hard to say what the inside of the Emma did not contain.  It was crammed with all sorts of goods like a general store.  That old hulk was the arsenal and the war-chest of Lingard’s political action; she was stocked with muskets and gunpowder, with bales of longcloth, of cotton prints, of silks; with bags of rice and currency brass guns.  She contained everything necessary for dealing death and distributing bribes, to act on the cupidity and upon the fears of men, to march and to organize, to feed the friends and to combat the enemies of the cause.  She held wealth and power in her flanks, that grounded ship that would swim no more, without masts and with the best part of her deck cumbered by the two structures of thin boards and of transparent muslin.

Within the latter lived the Europeans, visible in the daytime to the few Malays on board as if through a white haze.  In the evening the lighting of the hurricane lamps inside turned them into dark phantoms surrounded by a shining mist, against which the insect world rushing in its millions out of the forest on the bank was baffled mysteriously in its assault.  Rigidly enclosed by transparent walls, like captives of an enchanted cobweb, they moved about, sat, gesticulated, conversed publicly during the day; and at night when all the lanterns but one were extinguished, their slumbering shapes covered all over by white cotton sheets on the camp bedsteads, which were brought in every evening, conveyed the gruesome suggestion of dead bodies reposing on stretchers.  The food, such as it was, was served within that glorified mosquito net which everybody called the “Cage” without any humorous intention.  At meal times the party from the yacht had the company of Lingard who attached to this ordeal a sense of duty performed at the altar of civility and conciliation.  He could have no conception how much his presence added to the exasperation of Mr. Travers because Mr. Travers’ manner was too intensely consistent to present any shades.  It was determined by an ineradicable conviction that he was a victim held to ransom on some incomprehensible terms by an extraordinary and outrageous bandit.  This conviction, strung to the highest pitch, never left him for a moment, being the object of indignant meditation to his mind, and even clinging, as it were, to his very body.  It lurked in his eyes, in his gestures, in his ungracious mutters, and in his sinister silences.  The shock to his moral being had ended by affecting Mr. Travers’ physical machine.  He was aware of hepatic pains, suffered from accesses of somnolence and suppressed