That was how he came to find himself alone in the smoking room one breathless hot morning some days out from Singapore, amid the dead cheroots and the empty glasses, with a pile of ill-gotten profits before him, a very dry throat, and a great call for swifter action and yet newer worlds. It was all too easy. This globe-trotting thing threatened to become monotonous....
"And not even a drink on tap," he complained, for the virtuous steward—also Dutch—had retired long ago beyond the troubling of a bell push. "A fellow might just as well be back home with the lid down."
He stumbled out on deck in the dawn that came pouring up from behind the earth like a cloud of luminous, pearly smoke. The Lombock had made harbor some time during the night and now lay anchored in a river mouth off the fringe of a toy town—one of those island cities apparently built of matches and cigar boxes that have a thousand years of history behind them and no sense of dignity and not so much as a brick block to support the same.
The water front was a tangle of crazy jetties, of string-tied fishing boats and bird-cage houses, some on stilts and some on floating shingles, to rise and fall with the tide. There stood the inevitable ancient fort, clad in creepers, and there were the usual rows of godowns, lime-washed and naked. A little mosque sprouted from a nest of palms, like a moldy turnip trying to grow the wrong way. Up along the wooded rise nestled a few solid dwellings, with garden walls and tended terraces. But Tunstal discovered no wonders—nothing to claim a star in any guidebook—and he looked indifferently at that age-old land with its great green, jungled slopes shouldering back and back until they faded in dim blue.
The early stir of little brown men, the raffle of small craft propelled by pictorial pirates in kilted sarongs, the amphibious urchin who paddled a log and besought a chance to dive for coppers; the mounting heat, the lifting river mists, the first saffron tinting of the sun, and even the complex and curious odor that wafted overstream, of jasmine and mud flats and ripe fish, of swamps and hearths and the indescribable exhalation of the human forcing house—he had observed these things before in places quite similar.
Wherefore he yawned in the face of the immemorial East and moved toward the lowered gangway to meet the first mate, a lean and leathery mariner, whom he hailed with boisterous outcry.
"Hello chief—you're the very chap I need."
The mate paused to turn his patient, almost mournful regard that seemed never to focus short of the horizon.
"I'm going ashore," announced Mr. Tunstal, "for a taste of local ginger."
"Ginger?" inquired Nivin.