Poyning being a casualty, he was to stand no watch that night, and the rest of us arranged the spells so that of Philipson and Ah Sing, our best navigators, always one was at the helm. I completed my first trick with the latter at four o'clock. It wasn't yet dawn, but there had already sprung out of the east a wide fawn-coloured wash which battled with the light of the setting moon. On our starboard bow stretched untold miles of flat rice-land, broken here and there by trees that seemed to rise straight from the silver bosom of the flood. Great sailing junks, with their steep poops and huge chocolate lugsails and three masts raking like the ribs of a fan, loomed vague and dark against the neutral tints of the river. Then, in a wink, the moon whitened, there was a glory of brightness over the mighty expanse of water in our wake; and where one instant before all had been veiled in a gossamer grey mist, now everything took on sudden startling tinges of orange, opal, and pink. The greenery of the river bank became a golden green, the vast flood flared up into bright mustard, and hull and mast and sail of the native shipping sharpened into clean-cut blotches of Vandyke brown. Wisps of smoke rose from the poop braziers of these craft as the blue-cottoned junkmen cooked their breakfast, and now and again a shrill chanty came to us across the water as they put out the long bow-sweep and pulled upon it three and four abreast. Philipson was in rare spirits when he came aft to relieve me. I stayed with him a few minutes while he picked up his landmarks and reckoned the amount of westing we had made in the night. 'Seventy miles if it is an inch,' said Saunders Philipson. 'The best she has ever done.' 'Where d'you expect to fetch to-day?' 'Kiukiang, bar hitches. By about dusk. And Hankow the same time to-morrow. It could not fall out better. All serene, Mirlees. Get your sleep, for we shall want that cabin to feed in before long.' The day passed without event, and so close to our leader's schedule that we might have been a passenger service. Hour after hour we forged ahead, the engine running smoothly and tirelessly as the wings of the great gulls over our heads, and a little before nightfall we had drawn within view of the hills that reach away south of Kiukiang. Here we tied up in an inlet at one end of the bund, and slept on board, creeping out again before the break of day, and pushing on up stream till dusk. At last, two ranks of light like the lamps of a long street began to blink out of the grey shadows ahead, and we came into a great expanse of water swarming with craft of every conceivable build, from liner and ocean-going tramp down to the lorchas and wupans and crazy houseboats of the amphibious population of these parts. To the right of us lay Hankow, with its long bund and its hulks running out into the river and its opulent business houses behind; on the southern bank, the battlemented, sombre city of Wuchang.