t-breaking struggle on this
coast where he felt like a prisoner. All this was nearly within his
reach. Let only Dain return! And return soon he must--in his own
interest, for his own share. He was now more than a week late! Perhaps
he would return to-night. Such were Almayer's thoughts as, standing on
the verandah of his new but already decaying house--that last failure of
his life--he looked on the broad river. There was no tinge of gold on it
this evening, for it had been swollen by the rains, and rolled an angry
and muddy flood under his inattentive eyes, carrying small drift-wood and
big dead logs, and whole uprooted trees with branches and foliage,
amongst which the water swirled and roared angrily.

One of those drifting trees grounded on the shelving shore, just by the
house, and Almayer, neglecting his dream, watched it with languid
interest. The tree swung slowly round, amid the hiss and foam of the
water, and soon getting free of the obstruction began to move down stream
again, rolling slowly over, raising upwards a long, denuded branch, like
a hand lifted in mute appeal to heaven against the river's brutal and
unnecessary violence. Almayer's interest in the fate of that tree
increased rapidly. He leaned over to see if it would clear the low point
below. It did; then he drew back, thinking that now its course was free
down to the sea, and he envied the lot of that inanimate thing now
growing small and indistinct in the deepening darkness. As he lost sight
of it altogether he began to wonder how far out to sea it would drift.
Would the current carry it north or south? South, probably, till it
drifted in sight of Celebes, as far as Macassar, perhaps!

Macassar! Almayer's quickened fancy distanced the tree on its imaginary
voyage, but his memory lagging behind some twenty years or more in point
of time saw a young and slim Almayer, clad all in white and
modest-looking, landing from the Dutch mail-boat on the dusty jetty of
Macassar, coming to woo fortune in the godowns of old Hudig. It was an
important epoch in his life, the beginning of a new existence for him.
His father, a subordinate official employed in the Botanical Gardens of
Buitenzorg, was no doubt delighted to place his son in such a firm. The
young man himself too was nothing loth to leave the poisonous shores of
Java, and the meagre comforts of the parental bungalow, where the father
grumbled all day at the stupidity of native gardener