“Why, we are going on!” Kit exclaimed. “What will become of our passengers and freight for St. Pierre?”
“Well, they’ll have to go on to Trinidad and come back with us,” the purser answered. “You know we touch here on the way back. That happens sometimes, and people who live in this part of the world have to get used to it. If they will build their cities where there is no harbor, only an open roadstead, they must take the consequences. We can’t keep a mail steamer waiting for a storm that is supposed to be coming.”
When they reached Barbadoes, Kit felt quite at home again. It was not worth while, he knew, for him to have any hopes of getting out to the Sea View plantation to see his friends the Outerbridges, for nearly half of all their freight was for Barbadoes, and in the few hours that they lay in the roadstead he was busy every minute, even at night. He found time, however, to write a hurried note to Mr. Outerbridge, saying that he was now assistant purser of the Trinidad, that they were on their way to Port of Spain, and that when they returned in a few days it would be a great pleasure to him if any of them happened to be in the town.
Leaving Barbadoes late in the evening, the Trinidad steamed very slowly across toward the island of Trinidad, as Captain Fraser did not care to go through the narrow passage before daylight.
“You’ll have to be out early in the morning if you want to see the ship run into the muddy water of the Orinoco,” Mr. Clark told Kit that evening while they were preparing their papers for the last port. “It’s a curious sight, that you can’t see anywhere else, that I know of. You know the numerous mouths of the river Orinoco all empty about here—some into the Gulf of Paria, where we are going, and some below it. The immense body of muddy water runs along shore with a rush, and makes—well, I’m not going to tell you what it makes. If you turn out by daylight you will see for yourself.”
With this hint Kit was sure to be out early; and he found that he was not the only watcher, for some of the crew who had seen the curious thing scores of times were out to see it again. When they were a short distance above the very narrow entrance to the Gulf of Paria, a dangerous channel that is called the Dragon’s Mouth, he saw ahead a distinct line drawn across the water—a wall of water, it looked like—a wall of muddy water two or three feet higher than the clear water of the ocean.
“That’s just what it is, sir,” one of the sailors told him when he asked a question. “You see that big body of fresh muddy water runs down out of the Orinoco. When you see the line, that’s where the river water running north meets the sea water running south. But the ocean’s the stronger, sir, and it backs the river water up into that ridge you see. Oh, yes, sir; we’ll run through that and you’ll never know it.”
So they did, the ship being too large and heavy to be visibly affected by the slight difference in water levels; and in a few moments more they were in the Dragon’s Mouth, with the high rocks of Trinidad on one side and the equally high hills of Venezuela on the other, and both so close that Kit could easily have thrown a stone against Trinidad or against the coast of South America. Then in a short time they were through the dangerous channel and in the broad Gulf of Paria; and by eleven o’clock they were at anchor in smooth and shallow water about a mile away from the wharves of the city of Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad.
Kit thought himself pretty well accustomed to the heat of the tropics after his experiences at Sisal and Barbadoes; but he had never found anything before that was quite equal to the stifling heat of Port of Spain.
“We are on the line of greatest heat here,” Mr. Clark explained when he went into the city with him to introduce him to the agents. “It is hotter here than right on the equator. You understand about the isothermal lines, I suppose! This place is ten degrees north of the equator, but the ‘line of greatest heat,’ as they call it, runs directly through here.”