…The serpent was said to be 160 feet long. A creature of this size he reasoned would haunt the estuaries, the great tidal river mouths that poured into the South Atlantic. No mere scout along the inland river would do. Surely the beast came to rest or spawn upstream, perhaps even up a tributary. But something so large must surely feed off of the fertile banks of the coastal shelf, that imaginary and unseen world below the waves before the continental shelf ended abruptly and plunged into the true abyss haunted by exclusively saltwater beasts.

He could hear them—feel then—a hundred submerged leviathans churning the close sea bottom with their mammoth back fins, threatening to tip their narrow, paltry craft.

The Hindoo magician beat his drum savagely as Richard beat his, unable somehow to achieve the abandon of his guide into the tantric mysteries—felling ever more alone and sailing no closer to the island of Truth across this immensity of lies.

He and his companions used a long narrow dugout canoe for their exploration. This craft was more than adequate for the river scouting, but proved unmanageable in the rougher waters just off the coast…

…And there he was, with the sun falling behind the distant rainforest as he struggled, clinging like lichen to the capsized canoe. There followed days and nights of fear, formless, mind-wrenching fright like a ruminary broth in which the fear of being eaten by the ravenous sharks that infested these rich coastal waters might stew like a fricassee of failure. He had about given up hope, floating on the dark tides as they were. He looked down into the sunken, hurt eyes of Douglas Peake, burning weakly at him as he tread water among the nightmare drink of sharks. His countryman, his accuser, was extending his hand so that Richard might help him onto the back of their capsized canoe. Richard gave him a hand, then, seeing a shark’s fin cut the dark water, and beneath it the suggestion of a sinuous back welling the water toward his countryman, he became concerned that he might be dragged in by Douglas as the shark seized him. And so he, intrepid explorer, hunter of the Nile headwaters, declined that begging grip at the last—most heart shattering—moment.

The betrayed eyes of Douglas Peake were alight with the fire of unearthly vengeance, a hate that one—especially a Hindoo, Sufi, Dervish with Christian sympathies and pagan sensibilities—might imagine manifested in a haunting.

“Dick, you damned rogue, Dick!”

He woke with a start to the halt of the paddle wheel’s infernal churning. Voices called out on deck. The Captain of this tub, the one theoretical equal of his on bard this raft to purgatory, was shutting the door to his cramped lodging across the narrow hall.

Indeed, Douglas, indeed. I wonder, Sir, he thought as he pulled on his boots without the aid of his dear wife’s catholic Negro, Chico, who he dearly missed at these times, how, may I inquire, did your bit of roguery expire?

A chill hit him as an image of Peake’s face looking up to his, eyes wells of betrayal, as the shark that Richard had once feared would take him from the back of that log canoe dragged his countryman down into oblivion, never taking his eyes from the mustachioed face of his Judas.

With a wave of his hand to the scar on his cheek from that Somali spear, the image of Douglas Peake, conjured by the last shreds of his Britannic affectations, vanished from the tormented streambed of his mind, overgrown with all of the twisted trees planted by greed rather than seed, and rustling evilly in the un-medicated mirror of a life lived in the wilder places of the world.

With absolute confidence that the imperious tread of his boot, framing the arrogant carriage of his person, would convince at a glance all of the inferiors about him that not a trouble—let alone a disembodied demon head and an acolyte-betrayed—lurked behind his famously magnetic eyes and his devilishly forked beard and mustache, he stepped out on deck next to he who society fancied was made of the same cosmic stuff.

Next to him stood the man whose name he could not trouble himself to remember—thus adding to the clutter of a bric-a-brac mind—who the world had thankfully hung a title from as surely as his ill-fitting Uruguayan Naval Uniform—Good, God, they had to name it a navy!—and who he could not bring himself to address first, though he dearly wished to get their last good morning over with.

The captain of the paddle-steamer, which would forever, like Joseph on the road to Nazareth in a world where no Gospels were to be written, fail to retain a lodging in Burton's encyclopedic mind, said, in quite un-butchered English, “Good morning, Captain.”

He stood, towering over the man, with his hands resting on his hips, looking out beyond the gunwale to the most inadequate harbor ever ill-prepared by man, to the city of “Good Air,” where he was expected to recover the remainder of his remarkable constitution, and declared, with a studied lack of the contempt he felt for the place, “Yaas, Captain, yaas, indeed, a morning it is.”