“I was weak and hungry, and my mind kept on behaving like a beetle on a pin, tremendous activity and nothing done at the end of it.  Come round just where it was before.  There was sorrowing for the other chaps, beastly drunkards certainly, but not deserving such a fate, and young Sanders with the spear through his neck wouldn’t go out of my mind.  There was the treasure down there in the Ocean Pioneer, and how one might get it and hide it somewhere safer, and get away and come back for it.  And there was the puzzle where to get anything to eat.  I tell you I was fair rambling.  I was afraid to ask by signs for food, for fear of behaving too human, and so there I sat and hungered until very near the dawn.  Then the village got a bit quiet, and I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I went out and got some stuff like artichokes in a bowl and some sour milk.  What was left of these I put away among the other offerings, just to give them a hint of my tastes.  And in the morning they came to worship, and found me sitting up stiff and respectable on their previous god, just as they’d left me overnight.  I’d got my back against the central pillar of the hut, and, practically, I was asleep.  And that’s how I became a god among the heathen—­false god, no doubt, and blasphemous, but one can’t always pick and choose.

“Now, I don’t want to crack myself up as a god beyond my merits, but I must confess that while I was god to these people they was extraordinary successful.  I don’t say there’s anything in it, mind you.  They won a battle with another tribe—­I got a lot of offerings I didn’t want through it—­they had wonderful fishing, and their crop of pourra was exceptional fine.  And they counted the capture of the brig among the benefits I brought ’em.  I must say I don’t think that was a poor record for a perfectly new hand.  And, though perhaps you’d scarcely credit it, I was the tribal god of those beastly savages for pretty nearly four months...

“What else could I do, man?  But I didn’t wear that diving-dress all the time.  I made ’em rig me up a sort of holy of holies, and a deuce of a time I had too, making them understand what it was I wanted them to do.  That indeed was the great difficulty—­making them understand my wishes.  I couldn’t let myself down by talking their lingo badly, even if I’d been able to speak at all, and I couldn’t go flapping a lot of gestures at them.  So I drew pictures in sand and sat down beside them and hooted like one o’clock.  Sometimes they did the things I wanted all right, and sometimes they did them all wrong.  They was always very willing, certainly.  All the while I was puzzling how I was to get the confounded business settled.  Every night before the dawn I used to march out in full rig and go off to a place where I could see the channel in which the Ocean Pioneer lay sunk, and once even, one moonlight night, I tried to walk out to her, but the weeds and rocks and dark clean beat me.  I didn’t get back till full day, and then I found all those silly niggers out on the beach praying their sea-god to return to them.  I was that vexed and tired, messing and tumbling about, and coming up and going down again, I could have punched their silly heads all round when they started rejoicing.  Hanged if I like so much ceremony.