Two miles farther inland she let go anchor in a wide lagoon. The afternoon had waned. A cloudy twilight was closing down. On every hand stretched a flat, unbroken region of swamp and creeks and rivers. No villages were visible nor groves of trees against the sky-line to mark the situation of a temple. A few small fishing-boats with ragged sails fled at sight of the foreign steamer. The comprador waved his hand to starboard and exclaimed:
“Yonder it is, the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells, as you call it in English. Wait till the tide goes down, and you will find out pretty quick why the Chinese give it that funny name.”
“’Tis a filthy-looking country,” quoth Captain O’Shea. “It looks like one great big sewer, with the yellow water and the sludge and the slime on the banks.”
“It was all very well drained one time, long ago,” explained Charley Tong Sin. “Then there were many people and towns. The Tai Pings destroyed the canals and played the dickens with everything. And nothing has been repaired, so the people don’t live here any more.”
“And where is this place called Wang-Li-Fu?” demanded O’Shea.
“Six miles up that stinking river. You think you will see the Painted Joss to-morrow, Captain?”
“The Stinking River and the Painted Joss! You are loosening up, Charley. I am near the end of me journey when you say things like that. I have heard of them before.”
“Two other foreign men—only two—have seen the Painted Joss, and it was unfortunate for them.” The comprador said this softly and with an evil grin. He had overstepped the mark. Captain O’Shea gripped him by the neck and shook him savagely as he thundered in his ear:
“Any more of that, and I will forget the bargain we made. One of those men was a friend of mine, and by rights I ought to drill ye with a bullet as a favor to him.”
Between chattering teeth Charley Tong Sin, suddenly abject, begged for his life. Presently he moved restlessly from one deck to another, but always a man followed and kept watch of him, as Captain O’Shea had ordered. The ship’s company, most of them off duty and wearied with the stress and hardships of the voyage, gathered under an awning stretched between the deck-houses and talked in low tones. This melancholy, empty landscape had a quality curiously depressing. With the falling tide the swamps and the muddy banks were laid bare and the air became foul and heavy with the smell of decayed vegetation, of ooze, of dead fish. The ebb and flow of salt-water failed to cleanse and sweeten these sluggish streams and stagnant lagoons and abandoned canals.