And suddenly there were flashes and cracks: the captain was firing his Browning in the direction of the dinghy. Almost simultaneously there was a rustling, swirling and splashing as if of a thousand seals diving into the water. But by then Jensen and Gudmundson were pulling on their oars and fairly whipping their dinghy round the nearest headland. When they got back to the ship they did not say a word to anyone. These Nordics know how to keep silent. The captain returned towards dawn: he was morose and angry, but he did not speak a word. Only as Jensen was helping him on board two pairs of blue eyes met in a cold searching stare.

‘Jensen,’ the captain said.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘We sail today.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You’ll get your papers in Surabaya.’

‘Yes, sir.’

That was all. That day the Kandong Bandoeng sailed for Padang. From Padang Captain J. van Toch sent a package to his company in Amsterdam, a package insured for £1,200 sterling. And simultaneously he telegraphed a request for a year’s leave. Urgent reasons of health and that sort of thing. Then he knocked about Padang until he found whoever he had been looking for. He was a savage from Borneo, a Dayak whom English tourists would occasionally hire as a shark hunter, just in order to watch him at work, for the Dayak still operated in the old way, armed only with a long knife. He was evidently a cannibal but he had his fixed scale of charges: five pounds per shark, plus board. Otherwise he was hideous to behold, for his skin had been scraped off both his arms, his chest and his thighs by sharkskin, and his nose and ears were adorned with sharks’ teeth. Everyone called him Shark.

With this Dayak Captain J. van Toch now set out for the island of Tana Masa.

2

Mr Golombek and Mr Valenta

It was hot and the height of the silly season, when nothing, but positively nothing, happens, when there are no politics, when there is not even a European crisis. Yet even then the newspaper readership, sprawled out in agonies of boredom on sandy beaches or in the dappled shade of trees, demoralised by the heat, by nature, by the rural tranquillity and just by the simple healthy life of being on holiday, expects, with hopes dashed anew every day, that at least in their paper they’ll find something new and refreshing, some murder perhaps or a war or an earthquake, in short Something. And if they don’t find it they throw down their papers and angrily declare that there isn’t a thing, not a damned thing, in the paper, that it’s not worth reading at all and that they’ll stop taking it.

And meanwhile there are five or six lonely people sitting in the editorial office because all their colleagues are also on holiday, angrily throwing down their papers and complaining that there isn’t a thing, not a damned thing, in the paper. And the printing shop foreman would emerge from his cubbyhole and say reproachfully: ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, we haven’t got tomorrow’s leader yet.’

‘Well, why not use … let’s say … that article on the economic situation in Bulgaria,’ one of the lonely gentlemen suggested.

The foreman heaved a deep sigh: ‘And who’s going to read that stuff, Mr Editor? It’ll be another day of Nothing-to-Read in the whole paper.’

The six lonely gentlemen raised their eyes to the ceiling as if they might discover Something-to-Read up there.

‘If only Something would happen,’ one of them suggested vaguely.

‘Or maybe … some … interesting report from somewhere,’ suggested another.

‘What about?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Or invent … some new vitamin,’ growled a third.

‘Now, in summer?’ objected a fourth. ‘Why, my dear fellow, vitamins are intellectual stuff, that’s more like something for the autumn …’

‘Christ, it’s hot,’ yawned a fifth. ‘We should have something from the polar regions.’

‘Yes, but what?’

‘Anything. Something like that Eskimo Welzl. Frostbitten fingers, eternal ice - that sort of thing.’

‘Easily said,’ said a sixth. ‘But where do we get it?’

A hopeless silence fell upon the editorial office.

‘I was in jevíčko on Sunday …’, the printing shop foreman spoke up hesitantly.

‘So?’

‘It seems some Captain Van toch is on leave there. Seems he was born in Jevíčko.’

‘Who’s that Vantoch?’

‘Fat chap. Supposed to be a sea captain. They were saying he’s been fishing for pearls.’

Mr Golombek looked at Mr Valenta.

‘And where did he fish for them?’

‘Off Sumatra … and Celebes … somewhere down there. Seems he’s lived there for thirty years.’

‘Hell, it’s an idea,’ Mr Valenta said.