This was a long narrow affair with a four-cylinder thirty-horsepower engine.  As she possessed no speed gears, she had either to plunge ahead full speed or come to a stop; there were no compromises.  Her steering was managed by a tiller instead of a wheel, so that a mere touch sufficed to swerve her ten feet from her course.  As the dhow was in no respects built on such nervous lines, she did occasionally some fancy and splashing curves.

The pilot of the launch turned out to be a sandy-haired Yankee who had been catching wild animals for Barnum and Bailey’s circus.  While waiting for his ship, he, being a proverbial handy Yankee, had taken on this job.  He became quite interested in telling us this, and at times forgot his duties at the tiller.  Then that racing-launch would take a wild swoop; the clumsy old dhow astern would try vainly, with much spray and dangerous careening, to follow; the compromise course would all but upset her; the spray would fly; the safari boys would take their ducking; the boat boys would yell and dance and lean frantically against the two long sweeps with which they tried to steer.  In this wild and untrammelled fashion we careered up the bay, too interested in our own performances to pay much attention to the scenery.  The low shores, with their cocoanut groves gracefully rising above the mangrove tangle, slipped by, and the distant blue Shimba Hills came nearer.

After a while we turned into a narrower channel with a good many curves and a quite unknown depth of water.  Down this we whooped at the full speed of our thirty-horsepower engine.  Occasional natives, waist deep and fishing, stared after us open-eyed.  The Yankee ventured a guess as to how hard she would hit on a mudbank.  She promptly proved his guess a rank underestimate by doing so.  We fell in a heap on the bottom.  The dhow bore down on us with majestic momentum.  The boat boys leaned frantically on their sweeps, and managed just to avoid us.  The dhow also rammed the mudbank.  A dozen reluctant boys hopped overboard and pushed us off.  We pursued our merry way again.  On either hand now appeared fish weirs of plaited coco fibre; which, being planted in the shallows, helped us materially to guess at the channel.  Naked men, up to their shoulders in the water, attended to some mysterious need of the nets, or emerged dripping and sparkling from the water with baskets of fish atop their heads.  The channel grew even narrower, and the mudbanks more frequent.  We dodged a dozen in our headlong course.  Our local guide, a Swahili in tarboosh and a beautiful saffron robe, showed signs of strong excitement.  We were to stop, he said, around the next bend; and at this rate we never could stop.  The Yankee remarked, superfluously, that it would be handy if this dod-blistered engine had a clutch; adding, as an afterthought, that no matter how long he stayed in the tropics his nose peeled.  We asked what we should do if we over-carried our prospective landing-place.  He replied that the dod-blistered thing did have a reverse.  While thus conversing we shot around a corner into a complete cul-de-sac!  Everything was shut off hastily, and an instant later we and the dhow smashed up high and dry on a cozy mud beach!  We drew a deep breath and looked around us.