Chapter 6

The sun had set. And when, after drilling a deep hole with his stick, he
moved from that spot the night had massed its army of shadows under the
trees. They filled the eastern ends of the avenues as if only waiting
the signal for a general advance upon the open spaces of the world; they
were gathering low between the deep stone-faced banks of the canal. The
Malay prau, half-concealed under the arch of the bridge, had not altered
its position a quarter of an inch. For a long time Captain Whalley
stared down over the parapet, till at last the floating immobility
of that beshrouded thing seemed to grow upon him into something
inexplicable and alarming. The twilight abandoned the zenith; its
reflected gleams left the world below, and the water of the canal seemed
to turn into pitch. Captain Whalley crossed it.

The turning to the right, which was his way to his hotel, was only
a very few steps farther. He stopped again (all the houses of the
sea-front were shut up, the quayside was deserted, but for one or two
figures of natives walking in the distance) and began to reckon the
amount of his bill. So many days in the hotel at so many dollars a
day. To count the days he used his fingers: plunging one hand into his
pocket, he jingled a few silver coins. All right for three days more;
and then, unless something turned up, he must break into the five
hundred--Ivy's money--invested in her father. It seemed to him that
the first meal coming out of that reserve would choke him--for certain.
Reason was of no use. It was a matter of feeling. His feelings had never
played him false.

He did not turn to the right. He walked on, as if there still had been
a ship in the roadstead to which he could get himself pulled off in
the evening. Far away, beyond the houses, on the slope of an indigo
promontory closing the view of the quays, the slim column of a
factory-chimney smoked quietly straight up into the clear air. A
Chinaman, curled down in the stern of one of the half-dozen sampans
floating off the end of the jetty, caught sight of a beckoning hand.
He jumped up, rolled his pigtail round his head swiftly, tucked in two
rapid movements his wide dark trousers high up his yellow thighs, and
by a single, noiseless, finlike stir of the oars, sheered the sampan
alongside the steps with the ease and precision of a swimming fish.

"Sofala," articulated Captain Whalley from above; and the Chinaman,
a new emigrant probably, stared upwards with a tense attention as if
waiting to see the queer word fall visibly from the white man's lips.
"Sofala," Captain Whalley repeated; and suddenly his heart failed him.
He paused. The shores, the islets, the high ground, the low points, were
dark: the horizon had grown