stence utterly
forgotten, I believe, before a French river pilot came on board to take
our ship down, empty as she came, into the Havre roads. You may think
that this state of forced idleness favoured some advance in the fortunes
of Almayer and his daughter. Yet it was not so. As if it were some sort
of evil spell, my banjoist cabin mate's interruption, as related above,
had arrested them short at the point of that fateful sunset for many
weeks together. It was always thus with this book, begun in '89 and
finished in '94--with that shortest of all the novels which it was to be
my lot to write. Between its opening exclamation calling Almayer to his
dinner in his wife's voice and Abdullah's (his enemy) mental reference
to the God of Islam--"The Merciful, the Compassionate"--which closes the
book, there were to come several long sea passages, a visit (to use the
elevated phraseology suitable to the occasion) to the scenes (some of
them) of my childhood and the realization of childhood's vain words,
expressing a light-hearted and romantic whim.

It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking
at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space
then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to
myself, with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no
longer in my character now:

"When I grow up I shall go _there_."

And of course I thought no more about it till after a quarter of a
century or so an opportunity offered to go there--as if the sin of
childish audacity were to be visited on my mature head. Yes. I did go
there: _there_ being the region of Stanley Falls, which in '68 was the
blankest of blank spaces on the earth's figured surface. And the MS.
of "Almayer's Folly," carried about me as if it were a talisman or a
treasure, went _there_, too. That it ever came out of _there_ seems
a special dispensation of Providence, because a good many of my other
properties, infinitely more valuable and useful to me, remained behind
through unfortunate accidents of transportation. I call to mind, for
instance, a specially awkward turn of the Congo between Kinchassa and
Leopoldsville--more particularly when one had to take it at night in
a big canoe with only half the proper number of paddlers. I failed in
being the second white man on record drowned at that interesting spot
through the upsetting of a canoe. The first was a young Belgian officer,
but the acci