uor. We moored the brig to the rocks with
difficulty, and got aground on mud and decided to stick there and tow
off when we had done--the bottom was as greasy as butter. Our efforts
to fix up planks and sleepers in order to wheel the quap aboard were as
ill-conceived as that sort of work can be--and that sort of work can at
times be very ill-conceived. The captain had a superstitious fear of his
hold: he became wildly gesticulatory and expository and incompetent at
the bare thought of it. His shouts still echo in my memory, becoming as
each crisis approached less and less like any known tongue.

But I cannot now write the history of those days of blundering and toil:
of how Milton, one of the boys, fell from a plank to the beach, thirty
feet perhaps, with his barrow and broke his arm and I believe a rib,
of how I and Pollack set the limb and nursed him through the fever that
followed, of how one man after another succumbed to a feverish malaria,
and how I--by virtue of my scientific reputation--was obliged to play
the part of doctor and dose them with quinine, and then finding that
worse than nothing, with rum and small doses of Easton's Syrup, of which
there chanced to be a case of bottles aboard--Heaven and Gordon-Nasmyth
know why. For three long days we lay in misery and never shipped a
barrow-load. Then, when they resumed, the men's hands broke out into
sores. There were no gloves available; and I tried to get them, while
they shovelled and wheeled, to cover their hands with stockings
or greased rags. They would not do this on account of the heat and
discomfort. This attempt of mine did, however, direct their attention to
the quap as the source of their illness and precipitated what in the
end finished our lading, an informal strike. "We've had enough of this,"
they said, and they meant it. They came aft to say as much. They cowed
the captain.

Through all these days the weather was variously vile, first a furnace
heat under a sky of a scowling intensity of blue, then a hot fog that
stuck in one's throat like wool and turned the men on the planks into
colourless figures of giants, then a wild burst of thunderstorms,
mad elemental uproar and rain. Through it all, against illness, heat,
confusion of mind, one master impetus prevailed with me, to keep the
shipping going, to maintain one motif at least, whatever else arose
or ceased, the chuff of the spades, the squeaking and shriek of the
barrows, the pluppa, pluppa,