The quarrel was as bitter as polemic theology. Spiller was a rank atheist, a scorner, a scoffer, a pagan, a heathen. If Banks had written a new creed, he would have begun it: "I believe in the Simoom Rocks to the west of the Maldivhs." He clung to their existence pathetically, and when an impecunious skipper of a storm-disgruntled tramp wanted to borrow a couple of hundred rupees from him, and remarked incidentally that he had seen broken water in the supposed position of the discredited reef, Banks forked out with enthusiasm and took down a lying statement joyfully.
But when the Simoom was ready for sea again, that same tramp skipper, who was a wild disgrace to the respectable mystery of the sea, executed a few manoeuvres which let the Palembang get ahead of her. For the tramp (Julius Cæsar was her name) had engines of an obstinate and eccentric character. Sometimes they worked, and sometimes they didn't, and on this particular occasion they refused to be reversed at any price. As the Julius Cæsar wouldn't go astern, her captain shoved her at the crowded shipping ahead and put her through, whooping on the bridge like a maniac. He grazed three other steamers, took a bumpkin off a sailing vessel, slipped between two others, and in one last complicated evolution smashed the jibboom of the Simoom, brought down her fore-topgall'n'-mast, and escaped to sea in a cyclone of curses of which the calm centre was the Palembang.
"I'll report you," said Spiller to Banks, when he left Bombay.
"Go to hell," cried Banks, who rarely swore save in a gale of wind.
"After you," said Spiller, with what is popularly known as truly Oriental politeness; and as a parting taunt he sang out, "What about them rocks?"
"You're an ungrammatical, uneducated man," screamed Banks, dancing furiously.
But Green and Wilson waved their caps to each other. For all their way of passing compliments when one gave the other a Western Ocean relief at midnight, they were good friends.
The Simoom got to sea inside of forty-eight hours, for Banks lost no time. He had made up his mind to waste some on the next chance he had of looking for his blessed rocks, unless the monsoon blew too hard.
They had a fairly decent show running down the coast on the inside of the Laccadivhs, and, taking the usual circumbendibus to the eastward between Keeling and the Chagos Archipelago, picked up beautiful "passage" winds and south-east trades, and went home booming. Green found Banks a first-class "old man," and the Simoom as comfortable as a good bar parlour, compared with the sorry old bug-haunted Palembang, where a man's toes got sore with the pedicuring work of cockroaches. He made up his mind to stick to her, as he evidently suited Banks. They both got cracked a little on the Simoom Rocks, and gradually talked themselves into the belief of a shark's-tooth reef a mile long with one special fang that rivalled a young peak of Teneriffe.
The Palembang came into Liverpool River about three weeks after the Simoom, and Green, back at work after ten days at home, had a high time with Wilson. But the skippers passed each other with their noses in the air as high as squirrels' tails, and never swopped a word in a fortnight.