At any rate, if I must take my ship down myself it was my duty to procure if possible some local knowledge.  But that was not easy.  The only person I could think of for that service was a certain Johnson, formerly captain of a country ship, but now spliced to a country wife and gone utterly to the bad.  I had only heard of him in the vaguest way, as living concealed in the thick of two hundred thousand natives, and only emerging into the light of day for the purpose of hunting up some brandy.  I had a notion that if I could lay my hands on him I would sober him on board my ship and use him for a pilot.  Better than nothing.  Once a sailor always a sailor—­and he had known the river for years.  But in our Consulate (where I arrived dripping after a sharp walk) they could tell me nothing.  The excellent young men on the staff, though willing to help me, belonged to a sphere of the white colony for which that sort of Johnson does not exist.  Their suggestion was that I should hunt the man up myself with the help of the Consulate’s constable—­an ex-sergeant-major of a regiment of Hussars.

This man, whose usual duty apparently consisted in sitting behind a little table in an outer room of Consular offices, when ordered to assist me in my search for Johnson displayed lots of energy and a marvellous amount of local knowledge of a sort.  But he did not conceal an immense and sceptical contempt for the whole business.  We explored together on that afternoon an infinity of infamous grog shops, gambling dens, opium dens.  We walked up narrow lanes where our gharry—­a tiny box of a thing on wheels, attached to a jibbing Burmah pony—­could by no means have passed.  The constable seemed to be on terms of scornful intimacy with Maltese, with Eurasians, with Chinamen, with Klings, and with the sweepers attached to a temple, with whom he talked at the gate.  We interviewed also through a grating in a mud wall closing a blind alley an immensely corpulent Italian, who, the ex-sergeant-major remarked to me perfunctorily, had “killed another man last year.”  Thereupon he addressed him as “Antonio” and “Old Buck,” though that bloated carcase, apparently more than half filling the sort of cell wherein it sat, recalled rather a fat pig in a stye.  Familiar and never unbending, the sergeant chucked—­absolutely chucked—­under the chin a horribly wrinkled and shrivelled old hag propped on a stick, who had volunteered some sort of information:  and with the same stolid face he kept up an animated conversation with the groups of swathed brown women, who sat smoking cheroots on the door-steps of a long range of clay hovels.  We got out of the gharry and clambered into dwellings airy like packing crates, or descended into places sinister like cellars.  We got in, we drove on, we got out again for the sole purpose, as it seemed, of looking behind a heap of rubble.  The sun declined; my companion was curt and sardonic in his answers, but it appears we were just missing Johnson all along.  At last our conveyance stopped once more with a jerk, and the driver jumping down opened the door.