After he had gained a permanent footing on board the Sofala he allowed his perennial hope to rise high.  To begin with, it was a great advantage to have an old man for captain:  the sort of man besides who in the nature of things was likely to give up the job before long from one cause or another.  Sterne was greatly chagrined, however, to notice that he did not seem anyway near being past his work yet.  Still, these old men go to pieces all at once sometimes.  Then there was the owner-engineer close at hand to be impressed by his zeal and steadiness.  Sterne never for a moment doubted the obvious nature of his own merits (he was really an excellent officer); only, nowadays, professional merit alone does not take a man along fast enough.  A chap must have some push in him, and must keep his wits at work too to help him forward.  He made up his mind to inherit the charge of this steamer if it was to be done at all; not indeed estimating the command of the Sofala as a very great catch, but for the reason that, out East especially, to make a start is everything, and one command leads to another.

He began by promising himself to behave with great circumspection; Massy’s somber and fantastic humors intimidated him as being outside one’s usual sea experience; but he was quite intelligent enough to realize almost from the first that he was there in the presence of an exceptional situation.  His peculiar prying imagination penetrated it quickly; the feeling that there was in it an element which eluded his grasp exasperated his impatience to get on.  And so one trip came to an end, then another, and he had begun his third before he saw an opening by which he could step in with any sort of effect.  It had all been very queer and very obscure; something had been going on near him, as if separated by a chasm from the common life and the working routine of the ship, which was exactly like the life and the routine of any other coasting steamer of that class.

Then one day he made his discovery.

It came to him after all these weeks of watchful observation and puzzled surmises, suddenly, like the long-sought solution of a riddle that suggests itself to the mind in a flash.  Not with the same authority, however.  Great heavens!  Could it be that?  And after remaining thunderstruck for a few seconds he tried to shake it off with self-contumely, as though it had been the product of an unhealthy bias towards the Incredible, the Inexplicable, the Unheard-of—­the Mad!

This—­the illuminating moment—­had occurred the trip before, on the return passage.  They had just left a place of call on the mainland called Pangu; they were steaming straight out of a bay.  To the east a massive headland closed the view, with the tilted edges of the rocky strata showing through its ragged clothing of rank bushes and thorny creepers.  The wind had begun to sing in the rigging; the sea along the coast, green and as if swollen a little above the line of the horizon, seemed to pour itself over, time after time, with a slow and thundering fall, into the shadow of the leeward cape; and across the wide opening the nearest of a group of small islands stood enveloped in the hazy yellow light of a breezy sunrise; still farther out the hummocky tops of other islets peeped out motionless above the water of the channels between, scoured tumultuously by the breeze.