Whatever else has happened to you in your bath, you’ve got cool for a few minutes. Meanwhile the pitiless sun has been rising higher, the exertion of drying yourself has put you into a violent perspiration, and you are about as wet when you give it up in despair as you were when you began.
You get into your pyjamas and shoes, and, if the demoralisation of the tropics has gone far enough with you, and the bar is open, you go and get a cocktail to put a little life into you after a night of gasping, perspiring insomnia. This function is tropically termed “sweetening the bilge-water,” and is greatly in vogue among those who have sat up late in the smoking-room overnight.
Then you pull yourself up on deck by handrails and anything else you can get hold of. The morning air is delicious in its virgin freshness, and you begin to draw new breaths of life. The decks are wet and sloppy, but still cool. In a few hours the pitch will be boiling in the seams, and the planks will be hot enough to melt the rubber soles off your shoes.
The masts and funnels are describing slow arcs across the vault of the Firmament; deck-chairs are skating about, chasing each other around, or huddling themselves in scared heaps in the safest and wettest corners of the deck.
Down below there is the tinkling clatter of crockery, mingled with language from the stewards who are trying to set the table for breakfast. When you have cooled off a bit you nerve yourself to go below again into the furnished oven you call your room and get dressed. Perhaps you have to shave—but this is an added agony which may be passed over in silence.
You stagger back on deck to get cool again. You meet your fellow-sufferers and say things about the ship with disparaging references to round-bottomed old tanks, butter-tubs, steam-rollers, and the like. These things are not exaggerated. I crossed the Pacific from Honolulu to Sydney on a steam-roller called the Alameda, and I am speaking of that which I know.
Then, perhaps after another visit to the bar, you go to breakfast. You eat your meals in the tropics partly because you must repair the exhaustion of perpetual perspiration, and partly because you have paid for them in advance. Naturally, you don’t like the company to get too far ahead of you.
If it wasn’t for this you would probably eat a great deal less and be much better, but human nature is human even in the saloon of a steam-roller on the Pacific with the thermometer standing at 97° Fahr. Thus you eat and drink and loaf your way through the listless, sweltering hours, and vaguely wonder what your liver will be like when you get ashore.
There is another speciality of the tropics to which the tropical glory-mongers have never done full justice. This is the mosquito. Of course, there are mosquitos outside the tropics. A veracious British Columbian once told me that on the Yukon they shoot them with revolvers and catch them in seine nets.