Lionel, heaped with blankets, lay at Roger's feet. His teeth were chattering. The wet rag round his forehead had slipped over his eyes. The debile motion of the hand which tried to thrust the rag away, so that he might see, told of an intense petulant weakness. By him lay a negro, wasted to a skeleton, who watched Roger with a childish grave intentness out of eyes heavy with death.
The boat ground slowly past a snag. Roger, raising himself upon a box, looked out painfully over the river bank to the immense distance beyond, where, in a dimness, mists hung. To the right, a mile or two from the river, was forest, sloping to an expanse of water, intensely blue. Beyond the water was grass sloping up to forest. The forest jutted out, immense, dark, silent. Nothing lay beyond it but forest, trees towering up, trees fallen, uprooted, rotting, a darkness, a green gloom. Over it was the sky, of hard, bright blue metal, covered with blazing films. Outside it, like captains halted at the head of a horde, were solitary, immense trees, with ruddy boles. To each side of them, the forest stretched, an irregular wilderness of wood, grey, rather than green, in the glare aloft; below, darker. The water at the foot of the slope opened out in bays, ruffled by the wind, shimmering. Reeds grew about the bays. A cluster of tall, orange-blossomed water-plants hid the rest from Roger's sight as the boat loitered on.
To the left it was a sometimes swampy plain-land, reaching on into the mists, with ants' nests for milestones. Little gentle hills rose up, some of them dotted with thorn-trees. They were like the stumps of islands worn away by the river, when, long ago, it had brimmed that plain-land from the forest to the far horizon.
Far ahead, to the left of the river, Roger noticed a slightly larger hill. It held his gaze for a few minutes. It stood up from the plain exactly like a Roman camp which he had visited in England long before, one Christmas Day. He liked to look at it. There was comfort in looking at it. It was like a word from Europe, that hill beyond there, greyish in the blinding light. It was like a Roman camp, like military virtue, order, calm, courage, dignity. He needed some such message. He was in command of a shipload of suffering. He was wandering on into the unknown, in charge of dying men. Smoke was rising from below the hill, a single spire of smoke. He hailed the singer.
"Merrylegs," he cried, "what is the smoke there?"
"Jualapa," said the man, standing up to look. "Jualapa."
"It can't be Jualapa," said Lionel petulantly, struggling to lift his blankets. "Oh, stop that noise, Roger. It shakes my head to pieces."
"Jualapa," cried the rowers excitedly. "Jualapa." They dropped their paddles. Standing on the thwarts they peered under the sharps of their hands at the rising smoke. They rubbed their bellies, thinking of meat. One of them, beating his hands together, broke into a song about Jualapa.
Roger, stumbling forward, shaken by sickness, bade them to give way, quietly. The jabbering died down as the tholes began again to grunt. Merrylegs, still clapping his hands, broke into another song.
Jualapa is near. Yes, Jualapa is near. Not like Marumba.
We will eat meat in Jualapa. Much meat. Much meat.
The men of Little Belly will eat meat in Jualapa.