of unceasing duty. For utter
surrender to in indolence you cannot beat a sailor ashore when that mood
is on him--the mood of absolute irresponsibility tasted to the full.
It seems to me that I thought of nothing whatever, but this is an
impression which is hardly to be believed at this distance of years.
What I am certain of is that I was very far from thinking of writing a
story, though it is possible and even likely that I was thinking of the
man Almayer.

I had seen him for the first time, some four years before, from the
bridge of a steamer moored to a rickety little wharf forty miles up,
more or less, a Bornean river. It was very early morning, and a slight
mist--an opaline mist as in Bessborough Gardens, only without the
fiery flicks on roof and chimney-pot from the rays of the red London
sun--promised to turn presently into a woolly fog. Barring a small
dug-out canoe on the river there was nothing moving within sight. I had
just come up yawning from my cabin. The serang and the Malay crew
were overhauling the cargo chains and trying the winches; their voices
sounded subdued on the deck below, and their movements were languid.
That tropical daybreak was chilly. The Malay quartermaster, coming up
to get something from the lockers on the bridge, shivered visibly. The
forests above and below and on the opposite bank looked black and dank;
wet dripped from the rigging upon the tightly stretched deck awnings,
and it was in the middle of a shuddering yawn that I caught sight
of Almayer. He was moving across a patch of burned grass, a blurred,
shadowy shape with the blurred bulk of a house behind him, a low house
of mats, bamboos, and palm leaves, with a high-pitched roof of grass.

He stepped upon the jetty. He was clad simply in flapping pajamas of
cretonne pattern (enormous flowers with yellow petals on a disagreeable
blue ground) and a thin cotton singlet with short sleeves. His arms,
bare to the elbow, were crossed on his chest. His black hair looked
as if it had not been cut for a very long time, and a curly wisp of
it strayed across his forehead. I had heard of him at Singapore; I had
heard of him on board; I had heard of him early in the morning and late
at night; I had heard of him at tiffin and at dinner; I had heard of
him in a place called Pulo Laut from a half-caste gentleman there, who
described himself as the manager of a coal-mine; which sounded civilized
and progressive till you heard that the mine coul