ity. Here it was that Benham
stayed and talked with his host, a man robed in marvellous silks and
subtle of speech even in the European languages he used, and meanwhile
Prothero, it seemed, had gone down into the wickedness of the town
below. It was a very great town indeed, spreading for miles along the
banks of a huge river, a river that divided itself indolently into three
shining branches so as to make islands of the central portion of the
place. And on this river swarmed for ever a vast flotilla of ships and
boats, boats in which people lived, boats in which they sought pleasure,
moored places of assembly, high-pooped junks, steamboats, passenger
sampans, cargo craft, such a water town in streets and lanes, endless
miles of it, as no other part of the world save China can display. In
the daylight it was gay with countless sunlit colours embroidered upon
a fabric of yellow and brown, at night it glittered with a hundred
thousand lights that swayed and quivered and were reflected quiveringly
upon the black flowing waters.

And while Benham sat and talked in the garden above came a messenger who
was for some reason very vividly realized by White's imagination. He was
a tall man with lack-lustre eyes and sunken cheeks that made his cheek
bones very prominent, and gave his thin-lipped mouth something of the
geniality of a skull, and the arm he thrust out of his yellow robe to
hand Prothero's message to Benham was lean as a pole. So he stood out in
White's imagination, against the warm afternoon sky and the brown roofs
and blue haze of the great town below, and was with one exception the
distinctest thing in the story. The message he bore was scribbled by
Prothero himself in a nerveless scrawl: "Send a hundred dollars by this
man. I am in a frightful fix."

Now Benham's host had been twitting him with the European patronage of
opium, and something in this message stirred his facile indignation.
Twice before he had had similar demands. And on the whole they had
seemed to him to be unreasonable demands. He was astonished that while
he was sitting and talking of the great world-republic of the future and
the secret self-directed aristocracy that would make it possible,
his own friend, his chosen companion, should thus, by this inglorious
request and this ungainly messenger, disavow him. He felt a wave of
intense irritation.

"No," he said, "I will not."

And he was too angry to express himself in any language understand