he sounds from the
bush, and the din of the surf, remained to show that the world was
alive. The moon, too, had been smothered by a cloud bank, and night lay
huddled close round him, with a texture like black velvet.

Then, with a jump he was on his feet, and trembling violently. Another
old friend was in his neighborhood--a steamer. Her masthead light had
just twinkled into view. He got up and began walking nervously toward
her along the hard, white sands. He saw her first in the northwest,
coming from some port in the Bight of Biafra probably, and the odds were
she was heading south along the Coast.

Presently he picked up her red port light. Yes, he admitted to himself
with a sigh, she was making for one of the ports to southward, for Sette
Camma perhaps, or Loango, or Landana, or Kabenda, and he calmed himself
down with the discovery. Had she been heading north, he had it in him to
have swum out to her through the surf and the sharks, and chanced being
picked up. He was sick of this savage Africa which lay behind him. The
sight of those two lights, the bright white, and the duller red, let him
know how ravenous was his hunger to see once more a white man and a
white man's ship, and to feel the sway of a deck, and to smell the
smells of oil, and paint, and Christian cookery, from which he had been
for such a weary tale of days divorced.

The steamer drew on till she came a-beam, and the red port light was
eclipsed, and "carrying no stern light," was Captain Kettle's comment.
There was a small glow from her deck and two or three of her ports were
lit, but for the most part she crept along as a mysterious black ship
voyaging into a region of blackness. It was too dark to make out more
than her bare existence, but Kettle took a squint at the Southern Cross,
which hung low in the sky like an ill-made kite, to get her bearings,
and so made note of her course, and from that tried to deduce her
nationality.

From the way she was steering he reckoned she came from Batanga or
Cameroons, which are in German territory, and so set her down as sailing
originally from Marseilles or Hamburg, and anyway decided that she was
not one of the Liverpool boats which carry all the West Coast trade to
England. But as he watched, she seemed to slew out of her course. She
lengthened out before him across the night, as her bows sheered in
toward the land, till he saw her broadside on, and then she hung
motionless as a black blot against th