"Do you see that mass of trees in the deep shadow?" asked Nichols, pointing toward the shore "There’s a house behind them—the old consulate bungalow. Years ago, when the China trade was flourishing, all ships used to stop at Anjer for mail and orders; for this reason, I suppose, our government used to keep a consul here, though he wasn’t much but a postmaster. Anjer was the first port of call after the long outward passage; every man who has sailed to the East remembers it with affection. You crossed the Indian Ocean in the ’roaring forties’ then swung abruptly north through the southeast trades. At length, one morning, fresh from a three months’ chase of the empty horizon, you sighted Java Head, that black old foreland looming out of the water like a gigantic sperm whale; and before the day had gone, you’d entered the Straits of Sunda, with Java to starboard, close aboard, and Sumatra in the distance to port; had passed Princess Island, sighted and drawn abreast of Krakatoa, taken your cross-bearings on the Button and the Cap, turned off at Twart-the-Way; and, toward sunset, had drifted into Anjer Roads, before the last puffs of the sea-breeze. "You had reached the land again. Reached it?—you’d plunged into its very heart. And such a heart—and such a land. The Gateway of the East, the Portal of the Dawn—a scene of love and longing, the ecstasy of life, rich with tumultuous growth, and charged with the passionate odour of blooming flowers. You had come to it from the ocean, remember; from wide expanses of waste and emptiness, from the high sky and the brooding night and the homeless wind, from the mental standpoint of one who had forgotten his measure of comparison, who had lost his grip on reality. The very strangeness of the limited and circumscribed sea, with shores on every hand, with mountains piling the whole horizon, inspired a sensation of wonder and curiosity, as if this had been your first view of the terrestrial world. But ere this sensation, the breaking of the sea-habit, the shortening of the focus, the opening of the door, had fairly possessed you, other allurements were striving for the mastery. There was the hand of the East, held out in alien greeting; there was the breath of romance in the nostrils, the call of love in the heart, the smells, the voices, the colours, the whisper of adventure, the touch of magic and mystery. All this, in the old days, was meant to you by Anjer, by that cluster of bamboo houses beyond the fringe of the banyan trees, that point, that lighthouse, those hills climbing the eastern sky, and this secluded anchorage, where we happened to drift before the tide—deserted now, as you see it, and quite forgotten, but once the toll-keeper of the sailing fleets of the world" Nichols waved a hand. "What about the old consulate bungalow?" someone asked,