The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 518 pages of information about The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories.

The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 518 pages of information about The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories.

Holroyd was roused from meditations that were becoming sinister by the hum of a mosquito.

II.

The next morning Holroyd learnt they were within forty kilometres of Badama, and his interest in the banks intensified.  He came up whenever an opportunity offered to examine his surroundings.  He could see no signs of human occupation whatever, save for a weedy ruin of a house and the green-stained facade of the long-deserted monastery at Moju, with a forest tree growing out of a vacant window space, and great creepers netted across its vacant portals.  Several flights of strange yellow butterflies with semi-transparent wings crossed the river that morning, and many alighted on the monitor and were killed by the men.  It was towards afternoon that they came upon the derelict cuberta.

She did not at first appear to be derelict; both her sails were set and hanging slack in the afternoon calm, and there was the figure of a man sitting on the fore planking beside the shipped sweeps.  Another man appeared to be sleeping face downwards on the sort of longitudinal bridge these big canoes have in the waist.  But it was presently apparent, from the sway of her rudder and the way she drifted into the course of the gunboat, that something was out of order with her.  Gerilleau surveyed her through a field-glass, and became interested in the queer darkness of the face of the sitting man, a red-faced man he seemed, without a nose—­ crouching he was rather than sitting, and the longer the captain looked the less he liked to look at him, and the less able he was to take his glasses away.

But he did so at last, and went a little way to call up Holroyd.  Then he went back to hail the cuberta.  He ailed her again, and so she drove past him. Santa Rosa stood out clearly as her name.

As she came by and into the wake of the monitor, she pitched a little, and suddenly the figure of the crouching an collapsed as though all its joints had given way.  His hat fell off, his head was not nice to look at, and his body flopped lax and rolled out of sight behind the bulwarks.

“Caramba!” cried Gerilleau, and resorted to Holroyd forthwith.

Holroyd was half-way up the companion.  “Did you see dat?” said the captain.

“Dead!” said Holroyd.  “Yes.  You’d better send a boat aboard.  There’s something wrong.”

“Did you—­by any chance—­see his face?”

“What was it like?”

“It was—­ugh!—­I have no words.”  And the captain suddenly turned his back on Holroyd and became an active and strident commander.

The gunboat came about, steamed parallel to the erratic course of the canoe, and dropped the boat with Lieutenant da Cunha and three sailors to board her.  Then the curiosity of the captain made him draw up almost alongside as the lieutenant got aboard, so that the whole of the Santa Rosa, deck and hold, was visible to Holroyd.

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The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.