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It took us a little over twelve hours' swift steaming to run down to the mouth of the river on the upper course of which our progress had been so slow and painful; from source to mouth, according to our itinerary and to Lyra's calculations, the course of the stream down which we had thus come was about 1,500 kilometres in length about 900 miles, perhaps nearly 1,000 miles from its source near the 13th degree in the highlands to its mouth in the Madeira, near the 5th degree.
The one somewhat reminiscent of Egypt and crocodiles, lisping palms and Arabs, of long and lotos-eating days of keff, in which even the lazy hours loiter in shady nooks, and the wind holds its breath in sympathy with the general doziness, and seems to be listening to something; the other of vivid Greek life, with its shepherds: "'Piping on hollow reeds to their pent sheep, Calm be thy Lyra's sleep,
One of the dangers of having a very definite point of view is the temptation of abusing it to read the whole riddle of the painful earth. Annie has permitted herself to think of Lyra's position as one which would be impossible in a state of things where there was neither poverty nor riches, and there was neither luxury on one hand to allure, nor the fear of want to constrain on the other.
She listened with so keen a relish for the report of Putney's sayings that Annie felt as if she had been turning the affair into comedy for Lyra's amusement. "Oh dear, I wish I could hear him! I thought I should have died last night when he came back, and began to scare everybody blue with his highly personal remarks. I wish he'd had time to get round to the Northwicks."
"Why, that you're very much out of health, or " Lyra made another of her tantalising stops. "Or what?" "Or Dr. Morrell is very much in love." "Lyra, I can't allow you to say such things to me." "No; that's what I've kept saying to myself all the time. But you would have it out of me. I didn't want to say it." It was impossible to resist Lyra's pretended deprecation. Annie laughed.
A generous benefactor gave a copy of De Lyra's 'Commentaries, which was set upon a desk in St. Mary's Chancel for reference. A large gift of books came from Richard Courteney, the Chancellor of the University; and as a mark of gratitude he was allowed free access to the library during the rest of his life.
We had enough to do to clear the ship at night of these our visitors, but we were by no means left in solitude; for the Lyra's anchorage was completely crowded with native boats.
Brandreth's love affair with Miss Chapley broken off, and Lyra's lamentable triumph over Miss Northwick, and Mrs. Munger's duplicity, and Ralph's escapade all because I wanted to do good!" A note of exaggeration had begun to prevail in her self-upbraiding, which was real enough, and the time came for him to suggest, "I think you're a little morbid, Miss Kilburn." "Morbid! Of course I am!
The things that we carried were necessities food, medicines, bedding, instruments for determining the altitude and longitude and latitude except a few books, each in small compass: Lyra's were in German, consisting of two tiny volumes of Goethe and Schiller; Kermit's were in Portuguese; mine, all in English, included the last two volumes of Gibbon, the plays of Sophocles, More's "Utopia," Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, the two latter lent me by a friend, Major Shipton of the regulars, our military attaché at Buenos Aires.
From time to time, at Lyra's bidding, the young fellow explained to Annie some curious feature of the processes; in the room where the stockings were knitted she tried to understand the machinery that wrought and seemed to live before her eyes.
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