“What is one to do?” the captain repeated after a vast interval, and suddenly becoming active and savage and blasphemous, decided to burn the Santa Rosa without further delay.  Everyone aboard was pleased by that idea, everyone helped with zest; they pulled in the cable, cut it, and dropped the boat and fired her with tow and kerosene, and soon the cuberta was crackling and flaring merrily amidst the immensities of the tropical night.  Holroyd watched the mounting yellow flare against the blackness, and the livid flashes of sheet lightning that came and went above the forest summits, throwing them into momentary silhouette, and his stoker stood behind him watching also.

The stoker was stirred to the depths of his linguistics. “Saueba go pop, pop,” he said, “Wahaw” and laughed richly.

But Holroyd was thinking that these little creatures on the decked canoe had also eyes and brains.

The whole thing impressed him as incredibly foolish and wrong, but—­what was one to do?  This question came back enormously reinforced on the morrow, when at last the gunboat reached Badama.

This place, with its leaf-thatch-covered houses and sheds, its creeper-invaded sugar-mill, its little jetty of timber and canes, was very still in the morning heat, and showed never a sign of living men.  Whatever ants there were at that distance were too small to see.

“All the people have gone,” said Gerilleau, “but we will do one thing anyhow.  We will ’oot and vissel.”

So Holroyd hooted and whistled.

Then the captain fell into a doubting fit of the worst kind.  “Dere is one thing we can do,” he said presently, “What’s that?” said Holroyd.

“’Oot and vissel again.”

So they did.

The captain walked his deck and gesticulated to himself.  He seemed to have many things on his mind.  Fragments of speeches came from his lips.  He appeared to be addressing some imaginary public tribunal either in Spanish or Portuguese.  Holroyd’s improving ear detected something about ammunition.  He came out of these preoccupations suddenly into English.  “My dear ’Olroyd!” he cried, and broke off with “But what can one do?”

They took the boat and the field-glasses, and went close in to examine the place.  They made out a number of big ants, whose still postures had a certain effect of watching them, dotted about the edge of the rude embarkation jetty.  Gerilleau tried ineffectual pistol shots at these.  Holroyd thinks he distinguished curious earthworks running between the nearer houses, that may have been the work of the insect conquerors of those human habitations.  The explorers pulled past the jetty, and became aware of a human skeleton wearing a loin cloth, and very bright and clean and shining, lying beyond.  They came to a pause regarding this...

“I ’ave all dose lives to consider,” said Gerilleau suddenly.

Holroyd turned and stared at the captain, realising slowly that he referred to the unappetising mixture of races that constituted his crew.