ceded that he
had never let a mosquito in together with himself. Mr. Travers dodged in
and out without grace and was obviously much irritated at the necessity.
Mrs. Travers did it in a manner all her own, with marked cleverness
and an unconscious air. There was an improvised table in there and some
wicker armchairs which Jorgenson had produced from somewhere in the
depths of the ship. It was hard to say what the inside of the Emma
did not contain. It was crammed with all sorts of goods like a general
store. That old hulk was the arsenal and the war-chest of Lingard's
political action; she was stocked with muskets and gunpowder, with bales
of longcloth, of cotton prints, of silks; with bags of rice and currency
brass guns. She contained everything necessary for dealing death and
distributing bribes, to act on the cupidity and upon the fears of men,
to march and to organize, to feed the friends and to combat the enemies
of the cause. She held wealth and power in her flanks, that grounded
ship that would swim no more, without masts and with the best part
of her deck cumbered by the two structures of thin boards and of
transparent muslin.

Within the latter lived the Europeans, visible in the daytime to the few
Malays on board as if through a white haze. In the evening the lighting
of the hurricane lamps inside turned them into dark phantoms surrounded
by a shining mist, against which the insect world rushing in its
millions out of the forest on the bank was baffled mysteriously in its
assault. Rigidly enclosed by transparent walls, like captives of
an enchanted cobweb, they moved about, sat, gesticulated, conversed
publicly during the day; and at night when all the lanterns but one were
extinguished, their slumbering shapes covered all over by white cotton
sheets on the camp bedsteads, which were brought in every evening,
conveyed the gruesome suggestion of dead bodies reposing on stretchers.
The food, such as it was, was served within that glorified mosquito net
which everybody called the "Cage" without any humorous intention. At
meal times the party from the yacht had the company of Lingard who
attached to this ordeal a sense of duty performed at the altar of
civility and conciliation. He could have no conception how much his
presence added to the exasperation of Mr. Travers because Mr. Travers'
manner was too intensely consistent to present any shades. It was
determined by an ineradicable conviction that he was a victim