bvious nature of his own merits
(he was really an excellent officer); only, nowadays, professional merit
alone does not take a man along fast enough. A chap must have some push
in him, and must keep his wits at work too to help him forward. He made
up his mind to inherit the charge of this steamer if it was to be done
at all; not indeed estimating the command of the Sofala as a very great
catch, but for the reason that, out East especially, to make a start is
everything, and one command leads to another.

He began by promising himself to behave with great circumspection;
Massy's somber and fantastic humors intimidated him as being outside
one's usual sea experience; but he was quite intelligent enough to
realize almost from the first that he was there in the presence of an
exceptional situation. His peculiar prying imagination penetrated it
quickly; the feeling that there was in it an element which eluded his
grasp exasperated his impatience to get on. And so one trip came to an
end, then another, and he had begun his third before he saw an opening
by which he could step in with any sort of effect. It had all been very
queer and very obscure; something had been going on near him, as if
separated by a chasm from the common life and the working routine of
the ship, which was exactly like the life and the routine of any other
coasting steamer of that class.

Then one day he made his discovery.

It came to him after all these weeks of watchful observation and puzzled
surmises, suddenly, like the long-sought solution of a riddle that
suggests itself to the mind in a flash. Not with the same authority,
however. Great heavens! Could it be that? And after remaining
thunderstruck for a few seconds he tried to shake it off with
self-contumely, as though it had been the product of an unhealthy bias
towards the Incredible, the Inexplicable, the Unheard-of--the Mad!

This--the illuminating moment--had occurred the trip before, on the
return passage. They had just left a place of call on the mainland
called Pangu; they were steaming straight out of a bay. To the east a
massive headland closed the view, with the tilted edges of the rocky
strata showing through its ragged clothing of rank bushes and thorny
creepers. The wind had begun to sing in the rigging; the sea along the
coast, green and as if swollen a little above the line of the horizon,
seemed to pour itself over, time after time, with a slow and thundering
fall, into the