ng water silhouetted in solid
black against the western glow. At the time I was so full of new
impressions that I regarded the scene very much as one turns over the
pages of a 'book of views' in a friend's drawing room. I couldn't take
it in. That needs time, and also one must have the Key. I was musing
upon the apparent meaninglessness of a life that had thrown me up for a
moment at a place I'd never heard of before, thrown me up there to
assist in the astonishing job of transporting nuts, when the Chief
remarked, pointing with the stem of his pipe, 'Here's a chief coming.' I
looked round, expecting to see another stout, middle-aged man in singlet
and dungarees, with perhaps an old uniform patrol jacket whose brass
buttons were green with verdigris. But it was not so. He was indicating
a large canoe emerging rapidly from the waterway astern of us. As it
came more into our angle of vision I watched with extraordinary
expectancy. I was dazed, not only by the spectacle, but by the aplomb
with which my shipmates took these things. Here was a savage chief
sitting under an immense parasol in the stern of his state canoe,
propelled by a score of naked, black paddlers in white loin-cloths and
scarlet cricket-caps, coming to call on us. This was evidently his
intention, for the accommodation ladder went down with a rattle, and the
canoe with her twenty spear-shaped paddles swung alongside like a naval
pinnace, and a fat old chap, dressed in a vast white flannel nightgown
with a sort of dress-shirt front pleated on it in blue thread, came
slowly up the ladder. Came up and walked past with a heavy, flat-footed
tread, and disappeared into the saloon with the Old Man. I was too
astonished to speak for some time. That old fellow's face behind its
broad benevolence and its confusing tattooings and mutilations, had an
expression of power. It was an expression you do not find in London
suburbs. You do not find it in the faces of men who sit at a desk and
hire you and fire you. The momentary glimpse I had of that chief's face
made clear to me many passages in history, many things in literature,
many dark and tortuous riddles in the adventures of my own little tinpot
soul. And in the light of this discovery I heard the Chief, our chief,
saying, 'Yes, these chaps have power of life and death over their
people, power of life and death.'

"And for once the hackneyed, battered, old conventional newspaper
gibberish had in it the breath of lif