Occurrences like the crossing of the bar just now were extremely alarming to his prospects.  He did not want to be left behind by some swift catastrophe.  Massy being on the bridge, the old man had to brace himself up and make a show, he supposed.  But it was getting very bad with him, very bad indeed, now.  Even Massy had been emboldened to find fault this time; Sterne, listening at the foot of the ladder, had heard the other’s whimpering and artless denunciations.  Luckily the beast was very stupid and could not see the why of all this.  However, small blame to him; it took a clever man to hit upon the cause.  Nevertheless, it was high time to do something.  The old man’s game could not be kept up for many days more.

“I may yet lose my life at this fooling—­let alone my chance,” Sterne mumbled angrily to himself, after the stooping back of the chief engineer had disappeared round the corner of the skylight.  Yes, no doubt—­he thought; but to blurt out his knowledge would not advance his prospects.  On the contrary, it would blast them utterly as likely as not.  He dreaded another failure.  He had a vague consciousness of not being much liked by his fellows in this part of the world; inexplicably enough, for he had done nothing to them.  Envy, he supposed.  People were always down on a clever chap who made no bones about his determination to get on.  To do your duty and count on the gratitude of that brute Massy would be sheer folly.  He was a bad lot.  Unmanly!  A vicious man!  Bad!  Bad!  A brute!  A brute without a spark of anything human about him; without so much as simple curiosity even, or else surely he would have responded in some way to all these hints he had been given. . . .  Such insensibility was almost mysterious.  Massy’s state of exasperation seemed to Sterne to have made him stupid beyond the ordinary silliness of shipowners.

Sterne, meditating on the embarrassments of that stupidity, forgot himself completely.  His stony, unwinking stare was fixed on the planks of the deck.

The slight quiver agitating the whole fabric of the ship was more perceptible in the silent river, shaded and still like a forest path.  The Sofala, gliding with an even motion, had passed beyond the coast-belt of mud and mangroves.  The shores rose higher, in firm sloping banks, and the forest of big trees came down to the brink.  Where the earth had been crumbled by the floods it showed a steep brown cut, denuding a mass of roots intertwined as if wrestling underground; and in the air, the interlaced boughs, bound and loaded with creepers, carried on the struggle for life, mingled their foliage in one solid wall of leaves, with here and there the shape of an enormous dark pillar soaring, or a ragged opening, as if torn by the flight of a cannonball, disclosing the impenetrable gloom within, the secular inviolable shade of the virgin forest.  The thump of the engines reverberated regularly like the strokes of a metronome beating the measure of the vast silence, the shadow of the western wall had fallen across the river, and the smoke pouring backwards from the funnel eddied down behind the ship, spread a thin dusky veil over the somber water, which, checked by the flood-tide, seemed to lie stagnant in the whole straight length of the reaches.