The Crater

ROBERT GORE-BROWNE
NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
NOTE: No white character in this novel is drawn from life.—R. G.-B.
THE CRATER PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

THE CRATER
Her story, said Ross, aiming his cigar-end at a phosphorescent patch of ocean, was discreditable enough to be true. He drew an immense red handkerchief from the pocket of his pyjamas, and wiped his extensive forehead, muttering, As far as a woman ever tells the truth about herself.
I sat on in silence waiting for the epigrams to end and the narrative to begin.
It was a stifling night off the East Coast of Africa. A wind that blew from the Equator and followed a crowded ship made sleep impossible. Nightly it drove Ross and myself on deck to spend the intolerable hours in talk.
I did not know much about Ross; no one on board did. A big man with a walrus moustache and a bald head, he had joined the vessel at an unusual East Coast port with few possessions—a rifle or two, and a green kit bag. His preposterous opinions were enunciated with the precise utterance of a spinster, and punctuated by pulls at a virulent black cigar. He knew men and cities; he knew Africa at its heart, where are neither men nor cities.
Our mutual acquaintanceship exhausted, we had drifted to anecdotes of the improbabilities that happen daily in that improbable continent.