ated nostrils, breathing hard.

"Too late," said the mate, suddenly. "The oars touch the bottom already.
We are done."

The boat stuck. The men laid in the oars, and sat, panting, with crossed
arms.

"Yes, we are caught," said Almayer, composedly. "That is unlucky!"

The water was falling round the boat. The mate watched the patches of
mud coming to the surface. Then in a moment he laughed, and pointing his
finger at the creek--

"Look!" he said; "the blamed river is running away from us. Here's the
last drop of water clearing out round that bend."

Almayer lifted his head. The water was gone, and he looked only at a
curved track of mud--of mud soft and black, hiding fever, rottenness,
and evil under its level and glazed surface.

"We are in for it till the evening," he said, with cheerful resignation.
"I did my best. Couldn't help it."

"We must sleep the day away," said the mate. "There's nothing to eat,"
he added, gloomily.

Almayer stretched himself in the stern sheets. The Malays curled down
between thwarts.

"Well, I'm jiggered!" said the mate, starting up after a long pause.
"I was in a devil of a hurry to go and pass the day stuck in the mud.
Here's a holiday for you! Well! well!"

They slept or sat unmoving and patient. As the sun mounted higher the
breeze died out, and perfect stillness reigned in the empty creek. A
troop of long-nosed monkeys appeared, and crowding on the outer boughs,
contemplated the boat and the motionless men in it with grave and
sorrowful intensity, disturbed now and then by irrational outbreaks of
mad gesticulation. A little bird with sapphire breast balanced a slender
twig across a slanting beam of light, and flashed in it to and fro like
a gem dropped from the sky. His minute round eye stared at the strange
and tranquil creatures in the boat. After a while he sent out a thin
twitter that sounded impertinent and funny in the solemn silence of the
great wilderness; in the great silence full of struggle and death.

CHAPTER THREE

On Lingard's departure solitude and silence closed round Willems; the
cruel solitude of one abandoned by men; the reproachful silence which
surrounds an outcast ejected by his kind, the silence unbroken by the
slightest whisper of hope; an immense and impenetrable silence that
swallows up without echo the murmur of regret and the cry of revolt.
The bitter peace of the abandoned clearings entered his heart, in which
nothing could live now but