Adventure, July 1, 1928 — page 155: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE THRALDOM OF SINGAN saw the reason why Quental would not wake up. The man lay with his eyes closed and his mouth wide open. For the first time he noticed a sharp, pungent smell that issued through the porthole, and, lying on the floor in front of the berth, he saw an ivory opium pipe. Upon a little table at the bedside was a china bowl in which was a kind of skewer and a small spirit lamp that was still alight. “Guess he thought he wanted some- thing to calm his nerves,” said John Eade to himself. “I thought he was an opium smoker the moment I saw him. Darned fool!” With that reflection he went below. There was no one to be seen on deck, not even a night watch. The serang, too, had apparently turned in. He found the heat in his cabin almost insufferable—a kind of wet heat that caused a man to perspire, though he never moved a little finger. The prox- imity of the engine room made matters worse, though the atmosphere of the night itself was like that of a vapor bath. The cabin porthole was open when Eade undressed. He could see nothing without, though he was conscious that the thickets and undergrowth of the jungle were tangled and massed against the very side of the ship. He could hear noises, too, continuous and, to him, more or less inexplicable: the ceaseless droning of in- sects, movements in the water, the stir- ring of animals in the tree-tops. He put out the oil lamp which tended to make the room even hotter than it was, and for more than an hour tried in vain to get to sleep. The situation was novel enough to his experience, quite apart from the heat. The little ship on which he found himself was a kind of floating mystery: an opium drugged captam; a little French woman, painted, fascinating and playing some deep game of her own; and finally, a murderous Chinese, with the features of Milton’s Satan and the manners of a cultured man, who had got on board as a stowaway! He had made neither head nor tail of the whole thing when he drifted into a 149 . kind of semi-conscious condition that was neither sleep nor wakefulness. He was aware that he tossed continually from one side of his bunk to the other, that once or twice he groaned aloud, and probably swore. There were brief intervals, however, when he actually did sleep; and from one of these intermittent dozes he awakened with a start, springing from his berth, to find himself standing trembling in -the middle of the little cabin. There was a crash in the jungle outside the porthole, a crash followed by a half smothered, guttural exclamation that might have been an oath. He heard bare feet running lightly, swiftly, on the deck above him. And then, other sounds in the jungle—the breaking of a rotten branch, a splash in the water, and lastly, a momentary flash, like some gigantic will-o’-the-wisp. OHN EADE didn’t know why he was trembling. He had an idea that something terrible had happened, which might have seemed terrible only because it had got mixed up with something in his dreams—something he couldn’t remember. It took him a mo- ment to realize that he wasn’t wholly awake; and then, for a few seconds, he was inclined to believe that everything had been only imagination. He stood listening, and could hear nothing. The jungle was silent now, except for the insects. He could hear no one moving anywhere on board. No sound but the throbbing of the running engines. Fumbling, he found a box of matches, and lit the lamp. Then he thought that he had best look over the ship, to see if everything was all right. He felt ill at ease; and a breath of air, at any rate, would do him good. Hastily putting on a pair of slippers, he left his cabin, and passed along the alley- way by the engine room to the after well- deck. There was a sort of moon now, a blurred light in the sky behind the mist. As soon as his eyes had grown accustomed comicloooks.com