Pambe measured the distance to Nurkeed’s naked breast.  If he sprang at him he might be tripped up, and a blind blow at the chest sometimes only means a gash on the breast-bone.  Ribs are difficult to thrust between unless the subject be asleep.  So he said nothing; nor did the other lascars.  Their faces immediately dropped all expression, as is the custom of the Oriental when there is killing on the carpet or any chance of trouble.  Nurkeed looked long at the white eyeballs.  He was only an African, and could not read characters.  A big sigh—­almost a groan—­ broke from him, and he went back to the furnaces.  The lascars took up the conversation where he had interrupted it.  They talked of the best methods of cooking rice.

Nurkeed suffered considerably from lack of fresh air during the run to Bombay.  He only came on deck to breathe when all the world was about; and even then a heavy block once dropped from a derrick within a foot of his head, and an apparently firm-lashed grating on which he set his foot, began to turn over with the intention of dropping him on the cased cargo fifteen feet below; and one insupportable night the sheath-knife dropped from the fo’c’s’le, and this time it drew blood.  So Nurkeed made complaint; and, when the Saarbruck reached Bombay, fled and buried himself among eight hundred thousand people, and did not sign articles till the ship had been a month gone from the port.  Pambe waited too; but his Bombay wife grew clamorous, and he was forced to sign in the Spicheren to Hongkong, because he realised that all play and no work gives Jack a ragged shirt.  In the foggy China seas he thought a great deal of Nurkeed, and, when Elsass-Lothringen steamers lay in port with the Spicheren, inquired after him and found he had gone to England via the Cape, on the Gravelotte.  Pambe came to England on the Worth.  The Spicheren met her by the Nore Light.  Nurkeed was going out with the Spicheren to the Calicut coast.

‘Want to find a friend, my trap-mouthed coal-scuttle?’ said a gentleman in the mercantile service.  ’Nothing easier.  Wait at the Nyanza Docks till he comes.  Every one comes to the Nyanza Docks.  Wait, you poor heathen.’  The gentleman spoke truth.  There are three great doors in the world where, if you stand long enough, you shall meet any one you wish.  The head of the Suez Canal is one, but there Death comes also; Charing Cross Station is the second—­for inland work; and the Nyanza Docks is the third.  At each of these places are men and women looking eternally for those who will surely come.  So Pambe waited at the docks.  Time was no object to him; and the wives could wait, as he did from day to day, week to week, and month to month, by the Blue Diamond funnels, the Red Dot smoke-stacks, the Yellow Streaks, and the nameless dingy gypsies of the sea that loaded and unloaded, jostled, whistled, and roared in the everlasting fog.  When money failed, a kind gentleman told Pambe to become a Christian; and Pambe became