Perhaps you can see now how hard it came for us to believe, as we hastened on his rescue toward Colootullah, that this kind of a man, that this particular man, had fallen the victim to a loathsome vice.
By what we could piece out from Sutton's report, at the time of the accident, Wickwire had never dropped into the river at all. He must have landed in one of the empty coal barges alongside—there had been one missing next morning which later was picked up near the Howrah Bridge—and so reached shore.
"He got hisself shook in his wits," said the captain, breaking a silence. "Is that how you make it?"
"Something of the kind," I agreed, and recalled a lad from Milford Haven I once was shipmates with who took a clip over the head from a falling block and for a month thereafter was dumb, though otherwise hale enough.
"It'd be an almighty clip over the head would strike the chief dumb," said Raff simply— "or anything like it."
Sutton said nothing.
Meanwhile we went plunging on through rain-swept darkness. I never knew the course nor the place where we left our gharri and took to narrower ways afoot, but here the nightmare closed in upon us. We breathed an air heavy with mortality, on pavements made slimy by countless naked feet, in a shaft, in a pit, between dank walls. Shapes drifted by like sheeted corpses, peering, floating up, melting away; from pools and eddies of lamplight sinister faces started out and fingers pointed after us. For we had come to strange waters, the teeming backwaters of the city.
Port Said has its tide rips if you like, is wickeder perhaps in its hectic way; you need to keep to soundings in Singapore, and parts of Macao and Shanghai you do well to navigate with an extra lookout and pressing business somewhere else. But Calcutta at night is the Sargasso Sea. There you wander among the other derelicts, helpless, hopeless, moving always deeper down lost channels, uncharted, fetid, clogged with infinite suggestions of dim horrors—