There we go in my memory still, a blistered dirty ship with patched sails and a battered mermaid to present _Maud Mary_, sounding and taking thought between high ranks of forest whose trees come out knee-deep at last in the water. There we go with a little breeze on our quarter, Mordet Island rounded and the quap, it might be within a day of us. Here and there strange blossoms woke the dank intensities of green with a trumpet call of colour. Things crept among the jungle and peeped and dashed back rustling into stillness. Always in the sluggishly drifting, opaque water were eddyings and stirrings; little rushes of bubbles came chuckling up light-heartedly from this or that submerged conflict and tragedy; now and again were crocodiles like a stranded fleet of logs basking in the sun. Still it was by day, a dreary stillness broken only by insect sounds and the creaking and flapping of our progress, by the calling of the soundings and the captain’s confused shouts; but in the night as we lay moored to a clump of trees the darkness brought a thousand swampy things to life and out of the forest came screaming and howlings, screaming and yells that made us glad to be afloat. And once we saw between the tree stems long blazing fires. We passed two or three villages landward, and brown-black women and children came and stared at us and gesticulated, and once a man came out in a boat from a creek and hailed us in an unknown tongue; and so at last we came to a great open place, a broad lake rimmed with a desolation of mud and bleached refuse and dead trees, free from crocodiles or water birds or sight or sound of any living thing, and saw far off, even as Nasmyth had described, the ruins of the deserted station, and hard by two little heaps of buff-hued rubbish under a great rib of rock, the quap! The forest receded. The land to the right of us fell away and became barren, and far on across notch in its backbone was surf and the sea. We took the ship in towards those heaps and the ruined jetty slowly and carefully. The captain came and talked. “This is eet?” he said. “Yes,” said I. “Is eet for trade we have come?” This was ironical. “No,” said I. “Gordon-Nasmyth would haf told me long ago what it ees for we haf come.” “I’ll tell you now,” I said. “We are going to lay in as close as we can to those two heaps of stuff—you see them?—under the rock. Then we are going to chuck all our ballast overboard and take those in. Then we’re going home.” “May I presume to ask—is eet gold?” “No,” I said incivilly, “it isn’t.” “Then what is it?” “It’s stuff—of some commercial value.” “We can’t do eet,” he said. “We can,” I answered reassuringly. “We can’t,” he said as confidently. “I don’t mean what you mean. You know so liddle—But—dis is forbidden country.”