Like a demon in a pantomime, the pitch black head of a fireman popped up through an iron hatch, hung over the side gleaming with sweat and drank greedily the brackish water of the lake, flicking it dexterously with straight fingers into a cavernous mouth. Then he began to pass armfuls of short logs from the firewood stacked on the deck to an invisible comrade by the boilers.
A shutter or door was opened in the bowels of the ship and a noise of hammering issued. Hammering and oaths in an unknown tongue. A blast of scorching, oil-saturated air reached Dick. It was as concrete as a hot hand laid on his face.
'By Jove, the heat must be terrific down there.' he said, 'it's sufficiently torrid on deck.'
It had been cool enough that morning when they left the fishing village where the oxen had been embarked. Dawn had streaked the motionless water with fragile pink and silver. The boat rode so low in the water that Norah's head on her pillow had been almost level with the lake. Never before had she felt so near nature, absorbed into beauty, trespassing on mystery.
Her thoughts had jerked back to Archie. Poor lad, how this beauty would have bored him and how he would have glowered at Dick's rhapsodies....
Poor Archie, you couldn't help liking him, even if you didn't love him. And she must have done that once, unimaginable as it now was."
"Dead Love," mused Ross, "seems to leave slighter memory even than its mortal begetters. If Archie had died, she would still have remembered every detail of his body and habits. But the love he had once inspired—that had passed like a last year's sunrise, leaving at the most a certain sadness for a glory ephemeral.
She stared over the side. The steamer was following a deep-water channel, indiscernible to other eyes than Alibaba's, winding her way very close to shore through a screen of densely wooded islets, black against the pale sky of dawn, the debris of the crater wall. Here and there, among many islands that were merely cliffs crowned with tightly packed trees, glimpses of enticing coves and silvery beaches called to the lovers to linger.
But, like the comrades of Odysseus, Alibaba stopped his ears and signed to the tall negro at the helm whose high cheekbones and white beretta-like cap lent him a certain episcopal dignity, as he spun the wheel and steered the vessel out into the lake.
What was the use, thought Norah, of letting her mind dwell on Archie now she had left him for good. If she had endured something of the agony of a Samson pulling down the pillars of the loyalty that supported her world, she did not mean to look over her shoulder at the ruins.