eems to me that I thought of nothing whatever, but this is an
impression which is hardly to be believed at this distance of years.
What I am certain of is, that I was very far from thinking of writing a
story, though it is possible and even likely that I was thinking of the
man Almayer.

I had seen him for the first time some four years before from the bridge
of a steamer moored to a rickety little wharf forty miles up, more or
less, a Bornean river. It was very early morning and a slight mist, an
opaline mist as in Bessborough Gardens only without the fiery flicks on
roof and chimney-pot from the rays of the red London sun, promised to
turn presently into a woolly fog. Barring a small dug-out canoe on the
river there was nothing moving within sight. I had just come up yawning
from my cabin. The serang and the Malay crew were overhauling the cargo
chains and trying the winches; their voices sounded subdued on the
deck below and their movements were languid. That tropical daybreak was
chilly. The Malay quartermaster, coming up to get something from the
lockers on the bridge, shivered visibly. The forests above and below and
on the opposite bank looked black and dank; wet dripped from the rigging
upon the tightly stretched deck awnings, and it was in the middle of a
shuddering yawn that I caught sight of Almayer. He was moving across a
patch of burnt grass, a blurred shadowy shape with the blurred bulk of
a house behind him, a low house of mats, bamboos and palm-leaves with a
high-pitched roof of grass.

He stepped upon the jetty. He was clad simply in flapping pyjamas of
cretonne pattern (enormous flowers with yellow petals on a disagreeable
blue ground) and a thin cotton singlet with short sleeves. His arms,
bare to the elbow, were crossed on his chest. His black hair looked
as if it had not been cut for a very long time and a curly wisp of it
strayed across his forehead. I had heard of him at Singapore; I had
heard of him on board; I had heard of him early in the morning and late
at night; I had heard of him at tiffin and at dinner; I had heard of
him in a place called Pulo Laut from a half-caste gentleman there, who
described himself as the manager of a coal-mine; which sounded civilised
and progressive till you heard that the mine could not be worked at
present because it was haunted by some particularly atrocious ghosts. I
had heard of him in a place called Dongola, in the Island of Celebes,
when the Rajah of that