He tried to convey the magnitude of the disaster by means of dumb show. The native failed to understand. Being aground mattered little to him; being slung about like a pea in a box he took more or less as a matter of course. The thing--the thing that counted--was the fact that the sahib had taken unto himself the duty of Abdullah Bux, engineer of the Sahib Captain's launch, and had stopped the motor. Abdullah Bux felt that on that account he had a grievance. The launch was lying well down by the head in about a couple of inches of water. Her stem had struck a waterlogged tree trunk almost buried in the soft mud. The impact had lifted her bows well clear of the water, the greater portion of the keel passing over the obstruction until, the bows dropping and plunging into the mud, the boat came to a standstill. Then it was that the swiftly moving propeller had fouled the log, with the result that the three blades were shorn off close to the boss. "Tide still ebbing," remarked Peter. "We're properly on it, Miss Baird." "Yes, unfortunately," was the rejoinder. "There's no way of getting her off till the tide makes?" "Might try kedging her off," suggested Mostyn. "A kedge wouldn't hold in this slime," declared the practical Miss Baird, "even if you were able to lay it out. But you can't. The mud's too soft." Peter sounded with an oar. The blade sank almost without resistance to a depth of three feet in the noxious slime. A tedious wait followed. There was no denying the fact that it was tedious. Peter and the girl sat under the after canopy, but a _tete-a-tete_ under these conditions was very different from one on the promenade-deck of the _West Barbican_ on a tranquil, starlit night. It was hot--insufferably so. Not only did the sun pour fiercely down upon the double awning. The mud, now "dry", was radiating heat--a clammy, evil-smelling heat, as the rotting vegetation left high and dry by the receding tide lay sweltering in the sunshine. The heavy, motionless air, for there was not the faintest suspicion of a breeze, reeked as only the air of an African swamp can--an overpowering, nauseating stench. Thrown in as a makeweight came the reek of hot oil from the badly overheated engine. "Tide's turning," said Peter, breaking the long silence. There was no lull in the change from ebb to flood. At one moment the brownish waters were foaming seawards; at the next a miniature "bore" was breaking over the fringe of the mud-flats, bringing with it a collection of flotsam in the form of branches and trunks of trees. "'Fraid I'm giving you a rotten time," continued Peter apologetically. "Sailing with Preston and Anstey in Durban must have been a joy compared with this--and you told me you didn't like it a bit. You must think I'm a rotten pilot."