All the others are just little swollen Egos."

This was an unusual excursion, and he quickly returned to practical
matters.

"There's a better anchorage over there," he drawled, waving the milk-tin
toward Zacynthos. "And less danger of our being caught than here. But no
use; we've got to humor the crew, of course. When they say '_pulo
burrantu_,' that settles it. Haunted islands--ghosts--fatal to
discipline. I used to have cruises spoiled by that sort of thing. We
must stay here and chance being found."

He shot a stream of Java sugar into the tea, and, staring at the
sleepers, rubbed his shaven head thoughtfully.

"Oh, yes, 'superstition,' all very easy to say," he muttered, half to
himself. "But who _knows_, eh? Must be something in it, at times."

His mood this afternoon was new and surprising. Nor was it likely to
occur often in such a man. He had brought the _Fulmar_ round the south
of Celebes, making for Ceram; but as the Dutch had forbidden him to
travel in the interior, saying that the natives were too dangerous just
then; and as Sidin, the mate, had sighted the Dutch tricolor flying
above drab hulls that came nosing southward from Amboina way, we had
dodged behind the Bandas till nightfall. The crew laughed at the _babi
blanda_--Dutch pigs; but every man of them would have fled ashore had
they known that among the hampers and bundled spears in our hold lay the
dried head of a little girl, a human sacrifice from Engano. If we got
into Ceram (and got out again), the doctor would reduce the whole affair
to a few tables of anthropological measurements, a few more hampers of
birds, beasts, and native rubbish in the hold, and a score of paragraphs
couched in the evaporated, millimetric terms of science. There would be
a few duplicates for Raffles, some tin-lined cases, including the
clotted head of the little girl, for the British Museum; the total
upshot would attract much less public notice than the invention of a new
"part" for a motor car; and the august structure of science, like a
coral tree, would increase by another atom. In the meantime, we lay
anchored, avoiding ironclads and ghosts.

Dinner we ate below, with seaward port-holes blinded, and sweat dripping
from our chins. Then we lay on the cabin roof again, in breech-clouts,
waiting for a breeze, and showing no light except the red coals of two
Burmah cheroots.

For long spaces we said nothing. Trilling of crickets ashore, sleepy
cooing of nutmeg-p