yself suddenly on the quay
as if transported there in the twinkling of an eye, before a portal of
dressed white stone above a flight of shallow white steps.

All this seemed to glide toward me swiftly. The whole great roadstead
to the right was just a mere flicker of blue, and the dim cool hall
swallowed me up out of the heat and glare of which I had not been aware
till the very moment I passed in from it.

The broad inner staircase insinuated itself under my feet somehow.
Command is a strong magic. The first human beings I perceived distinctly
since I had parted with the indignant back of Captain Giles were the
crew of the harbour steam-launch lounging on the spacious landing about
the curtained archway of the shipping office.

It was there that my buoyancy abandoned me. The atmosphere of
officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human
endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of
paper and ink. I passed heavily under the curtain which the Malay
coxswain of the harbour launch raised for me. There was nobody in the
office except the clerks, writing in two industrious rows. But the head
Shipping-Master hopped down from his elevation and hurried along on the
thick mats to meet me in the broad central passage.

He had a Scottish name, but his complexion was of a rich olive hue, his
short beard was jet black, and his eyes, also black, had a languishing
expression. He asked confidentially:

"You want to see Him?"

All lightness of spirit and body having departed from me at the touch
of officialdom, I looked at the scribe without animation and asked in my
turn wearily:

"What do you think? Is it any use?"

"My goodness! He has asked for you twice today."

This emphatic He was the supreme authority, the Marine Superintendent,
the Harbour-Master--a very great person in the eyes of every single
quill-driver in the room. But that was nothing to the opinion he had of
his own greatness.

Captain Ellis looked upon himself as a sort of divine (pagan) emanation,
the deputy-Neptune for the circumambient seas. If he did not actually
rule the waves, he pretended to rule the fate of the mortals whose lives
were cast upon the waters.

This uplifting illusion made him inquisitorial and peremptory. And as
his temperament was choleric there were fellows who were actually afraid
of him. He was redoubtable, not in virtue of his office, but because of
his unwarrantable assumptions. I had never h