the
Serang peeped over the white canvas screen of the rail.

No doubt the Malay was standing back, nearer to the wheel; but the
great disparity of size in close association amused Sterne like the
observation of a bizarre fact in nature. They were as queer fish out of
the sea as any in it.

He saw Captain Whalley turn his head quickly to speak to his Serang;
the wind whipped the whole white mass of the beard sideways. He would
be directing the chap to look at the compass for him, or what not. Of
course. Too much trouble to step over and see for himself. Sterne's
scorn for that bodily indolence which overtakes white men in the East
increased on reflection. Some of them would be utterly lost if they
hadn't all these natives at their beck and call; they grew perfectly
shameless about it too. He was not of that sort, thank God! It wasn't
in him to make himself dependent for his work on any shriveled-up little
Malay like that. As if one could ever trust a silly native for anything
in the world! But that fine old man thought differently, it seems. There
they were together, never far apart; a pair of them, recalling to the
mind an old whale attended by a little pilot-fish.

The fancifulness of the comparison made him smile. A whale with an
inseparable pilot-fish! That's what the old man looked like; for it
could not be said he looked like a shark, though Mr. Massy had called
him that very name. But Mr. Massy did not mind what he said in his
savage fits. Sterne smiled to himself--and gradually the ideas evoked
by the sound, by the imagined shape of the word pilot-fish; the ideas
of aid, of guidance needed and received, came uppermost in his mind:
the word pilot awakened the idea of trust, of dependence, the idea of
welcome, clear-eyed help brought to the seaman groping for the land
in the dark: groping blindly in fogs: feeling their way in the thick
weather of the gales that, filling the air with a salt mist blown up
from the sea, contract the range of sight on all sides to a shrunken
horizon that seems within reach of the hand.

A pilot sees better than a stranger, because his local knowledge, like
a sharper vision, completes the shapes of things hurriedly glimpsed;
penetrates the veils of mist spread over the land by the storms of the
sea; defines with certitude the outlines of a coast lying under the pall
of fog, the forms of landmarks half buried in a starless night as in a
shallow grave. He recognizes because he already