There it was, spread largely on both banks, the Oriental capital which had as yet suffered no white conqueror; an expanse of brown houses of bamboo, of mats, of leaves, of a vegetable-matter style of architecture, sprung out of the brown soil on the banks of the muddy river.  It was amazing to think that in those miles of human habitations there was not probably half a dozen pounds of nails.  Some of those houses of sticks and grass, like the nests of an aquatic race, clung to the low shores.  Others seemed to grow out of the water; others again floated in long anchored rows in the very middle of the stream.  Here and there in the distance, above the crowded mob of low, brown roof ridges, towered great piles of masonry, King’s Palace, temples, gorgeous and dilapidated, crumbling under the vertical sunlight, tremendous, overpowering, almost palpable, which seemed to enter one’s breast with the breath of one’s nostrils and soak into one’s limbs through every pore of one’s skin.

The ridiculous victim of jealousy had for some reason or other to stop his engines just then.  The steamer drifted slowly up with the tide.  Oblivious of my new surroundings I walked the deck, in anxious, deadened abstraction, a commingling of romantic reverie with a very practical survey of my qualifications.  For the time was approaching for me to behold my command and to prove my worth in the ultimate test of my profession.

Suddenly I heard myself called by that imbecile.  He was beckoning me to come up on his bridge.

I didn’t care very much for that, but as it seemed that he had something particular to say I went up the ladder.

He laid his hand on my shoulder and gave me a slight turn, pointing with his other arm at the same time.

“There!  That’s your ship, Captain,” he said.

I felt a thump in my breast—­only one, as if my heart had then ceased to beat.  There were ten or more ships moored along the bank, and the one he meant was partly hidden away from my sight by her next astern.  He said:  “We’ll drift abreast her in a moment.”

What was his tone?  Mocking?  Threatening?  Or only indifferent?  I could not tell.  I suspected some malice in this unexpected manifestation of interest.

He left me, and I leaned over the rail of the bridge looking over the side.  I dared not raise my eyes.  Yet it had to be done—­and, indeed, I could not have helped myself.  I believe I trembled.

But directly my eyes had rested on my ship all my fear vanished.  It went off swiftly, like a bad dream.  Only that a dream leaves no shame behind it, and that I felt a momentary shame at my unworthy suspicions.

Yes, there she was.  Her hull, her rigging filled my eye with a great content.  That feeling of life-emptiness which had made me so restless for the last few months lost its bitter plausibility, its evil influence, dissolved in a flow of joyous emotion.