Once outside in the sunshine my head swam.  It was no longer a question of mere delay.  I perceived myself involved in hopeless and humiliating absurdities that were leading me to something very like a disaster.  “Let us be calm,” I muttered to myself, and ran into the shade of a leprous wall.  From that short side-street I could see the broad main thoroughfare ruinous and gay, running away, away between stretches of decaying masonry, bamboo fences, ranges of arcades of brick and plaster, hovels of lath and mud, lofty temple gates of carved timber, huts of rotten mats—­an immensely wide thoroughfare, loosely packed as far as the eye could reach with a barefooted and brown multitude paddling ankle deep in the dust.  For a moment I felt myself about to go out of my mind with worry and desperation.

Some allowance must be made for the feelings of a young man new to responsibility.  I thought of my crew.  Half of them were ill, and I really began to think that some of them would end by dying on board if I couldn’t get them out to sea soon.  Obviously I should have to take my ship down the river, either working under canvas or dredging with the anchor down; operations which, in common with many modern sailors, I only knew theoretically.  And I almost shrank from undertaking them shorthanded and without local knowledge of the river bed, which is so necessary for the confident handling of the ship.  There were no pilots, no beacons, no buoys of any sort; but there was a very devil of a current for anybody to see, no end of shoal places, and at least two obviously awkward turns of the channel between me and the sea.  But how dangerous these turns were I would not tell.  I didn’t even know what my ship was capable of!  I had never handled her in my life.  A misunderstanding between a man and his ship in a difficult river with no room to make it up, is bound to end in trouble for the man.  On the other hand, it must be owned I had not much reason to count upon a general run of good luck.  And suppose I had the misfortune to pile her up high and dry on some beastly shoal?  That would have been the final undoing of that voyage.  It was plain that if Falk refused to tow me out he would also refuse to pull me off.  This meant—­what?  A day lost at the very best; but more likely a whole fortnight of frizzling on some pestilential mud-flat, of desperate work, of discharging cargo; more than likely it meant borrowing money at an exorbitant rate of interest—­from the Siegers’ gang too at that.  They were a power in the port.  And that elderly seaman of mine, Gambril, had looked pretty ghastly when I went forward to dose him with quinine that morning. He would certainly die—­not to speak of two or three others that seemed nearly as bad, and of the rest of them just ready to catch any tropical disease going.  Horror, ruin and everlasting remorse.  And no help.  None.  I had fallen amongst a lot of unfriendly lunatics!