ys. They had the worried expression
of men who had a long call made upon their endurance. Carter, heavy-eyed
and dull, steered for the yacht's gangway. Lingard asked as they were
crossing the brig's bows:

"Water enough alongside your craft, I suppose?"

"Yes. Eight to twelve feet," answered Carter, hoarsely. "Say, Captain!
Where's your show of cutthroats? Why! This sea is as empty as a church
on a week-day."

The booming report, nearly over his head, of the brig's eighteen-pounder
interrupted him. A round puff of white vapour, spreading itself lazily,
clung in fading shreds about the foreyard. Lingard, turning half round
in the stern sheets, looked at the smoke on the shore. Carter remained
silent, staring sleepily at the yacht they were approaching. Lingard
kept watching the smoke so intensely that he almost forgot where he
was, till Carter's voice pronouncing sharply at his ear the words "way
enough," recalled him to himself.

They were in the shadow of the yacht and coming alongside her ladder.
The master of the brig looked upward into the face of a gentleman,
with long whiskers and a shaved chin, staring down at him over the side
through a single eyeglass. As he put his foot on the bottom step he
could see the shore smoke still ascending, unceasing and thick; but even
as he looked the very base of the black pillar rose above the ragged
line of tree-tops. The whole thing floated clear away from the earth,
and rolling itself into an irregularly shaped mass, drifted out to
seaward, travelling slowly over the blue heavens, like a threatening and
lonely cloud.

PART II. THE SHORE OF REFUGE

I

The coast off which the little brig, floating upright above her anchor,
seemed to guard the high hull of the yacht has no distinctive features.
It is land without form. It stretches away without cape or bluff, long
and low--indefinitely; and when the heavy gusts of the northeast monsoon
drive the thick rain slanting over the sea, it is seen faintly under the
grey sky, black and with a blurred outline like the straight edge of a
dissolving shore. In the long season of unclouded days, it presents to
view only a narrow band of earth that appears crushed flat upon the vast
level of waters by the weight of the sky, whose immense dome rests on it
in a line as fine and true as that of the sea horizon itself.

Notwithstanding its nearness to the centres of European power, this
coast has been known for ages to the armed wande