otten profits before
him, a very dry throat, and a great call for swifter action and yet
newer worlds. It was all too easy. This globe-trotting thing threatened
to become monotonous....

"And not even a drink on tap," he complained, for the virtuous
steward--also Dutch--had retired long ago beyond the troubling of a bell
push. "A fellow might just as well be back home with the lid down."

He stumbled out on deck in the dawn that came pouring up from behind the
earth like a cloud of luminous, pearly smoke. The _Lombock_ had made
harbor some time during the night and now lay anchored in a river mouth
off the fringe of a toy town--one of those island cities apparently
built of matches and cigar boxes that have a thousand years of history
behind them and no sense of dignity and not so much as a brick block to
support the same.

The water front was a tangle of crazy jetties, of string-tied fishing
boats and bird-cage houses, some on stilts and some on floating
shingles, to rise and fall with the tide. There stood the inevitable
ancient fort, clad in creepers, and there were the usual rows of
godowns, lime-washed and naked. A little mosque sprouted from a nest of
palms, like a moldy turnip trying to grow the wrong way. Up along the
wooded rise nestled a few solid dwellings, with garden walls and tended
terraces. But Tunstal discovered no wonders--nothing to claim a star in
any guidebook--and he looked indifferently at that age-old land with its
great green, jungled slopes shouldering back and back until they faded
in dim blue.

The early stir of little brown men, the raffle of small craft propelled
by pictorial pirates in kilted sarongs, the amphibious urchin who
paddled a log and besought a chance to dive for coppers; the mounting
heat, the lifting river mists, the first saffron tinting of the sun, and
even the complex and curious odor that wafted overstream, of jasmine and
mud flats and ripe fish, of swamps and hearths and the indescribable
exhalation of the human forcing house--he had observed these things
before in places quite similar.

Wherefore he yawned in the face of the immemorial East and moved toward
the lowered gangway to meet the first mate, a lean and leathery mariner,
whom he hailed with boisterous outcry.

"Hello chief--you're the very chap I need."

The mate paused to turn his patient, almost mournful regard that seemed
never to focus short of the horizon.

"I'm going ashore," announced Mr. Tunstal