I collected native poisons and weapons, I turned my attention to a hundred little things to keep my mind alert. But that lasted only as long as the strength of Europe was still active in me, and then I dried up. The few Europeans on the station bored me, I stopped mixing with them, I drank and I dreamed. I had only two more years to go before I’d be free, with a pension, and could go back to Europe and begin life again. I wasn’t really doing anything but waiting; I lay low and waited. And that’s what I would be doing today if she … if it hadn’t happened.”

 

The voice in the darkness stopped. The pipe had stopped glowing too. It was so quiet that all of a sudden I could hear the water foaming as it broke against the keel, and the dull, distant throbbing of the engines. I would have liked to light a cigarette, but I was afraid of the bright flash of the lit match and its reflection in his face. He remained silent for a long time. I didn’t know if he had finished what he had to say, or was dozing, or had fallen asleep, so profound was his silence.

Then the ship’s bell struck a single powerful note: one o’clock. He started. I heard his glass clink again. His hand was obviously feeling around for the whisky. A shot gurgled quietly into his glass, and then the voice suddenly began again, but now it seemed tenser and more passionate.

“So … wait a moment … so yes, there I was, sitting in my damned cobweb, I’d been crouching motionless as a spider in its web for months. It was just after the rainy season. Rain had poured down on the roof for weeks on end, not a human being had come along, no European, I’d been stuck there in the house day after day with my yellow-skinned women and my good whisky. I was feeling very ‘down’ at the time, homesick for Europe. If I read a novel describing clean streets and white women my fingers began to tremble. I can’t really describe the condition to you, but it’s like a tropical disease, a raging, feverish, yet helpless nostalgia that sometimes comes over a man. So there I was, sitting over an atlas, I think, dreaming of journeys. Then there’s a hammering at the door. My boy is there and one of the women, eyes wide with amazement. They make dramatic gestures: there’s a woman here, they say, a lady, a white woman.

I jump up in surprise. I didn’t hear a carriage or a car approaching. A white woman, here in this wilderness?

I am about to go down the steps, but then I pull myself together. A glance in the mirror, and I hastily tidy myself up a little. I am nervous, restless, I have ominous forebodings, for I know no one in the world who would be coming to visit me out of friendship. At last I go down.

The lady is waiting in the hall, and hastily comes to meet me. A thick motoring veil hides her face.