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A week before we touched at Beira, the Portuguese had rearranged all the harbor buoys, but, after the casual habits of their race, had made no mention of the fact. The result was that the Kanzlar was hung up for twenty-four hours.
One of the others had been described to us as the "tough" hotel, and at the other, a few weeks previous, a friend had found a puff-adder barring his bedroom door. The choice was somewhat difficult. On her way from Lorenço Marquez to Beira our ship, the Kanzlar, kept close to the shore, and showed us low-lying banks of yellow sand and coarse green bushes.
They came over the side with the gratitude of sailors whom the Kanzlar might have picked up from a desert island, where they had been marooned and left to rot. They observed the gilded glory of the Kanzlar smoking-room, its mirrors and marble-topped tables, with the satisfaction and awe of the California miner, who found all the elegance of civilization in the red plush of a Broadway omnibus.
It rang down the curtain on the mirage which once a month comes to mock Chinde with memories of English villages, of well-kept lawns melting into the Thames, of London asphalt and flashing hansoms. With a jangling of bells in the engine-room the mirage disappeared, and in five minutes to the exiles of Chinde the Kanzlar became a gray tub with a pennant of smoke on the horizon line.
He claims his absence at Tete, at the time of the visit of the Kanzlar, alone prevented his social position being publicly recognized. That justice may be done, he, now, is officially, though tardily, created a member of Chinde's respectable society.
We tried to comfort ourselves by thinking that we were undoubtedly occupying the same mud-bank which had been used by the strategic Judson to further the course of empire. The Kanzlar could not cross the bar to go to Chinde, so the Adjutant, which belongs to the same line and which was created for these shallow waters, came to the Kanzlar, bringing Chinde with her.
They would be very much surprised if they thought you saw in their struggle against native and Portuguese barbarism, fever, and savage tribes, a life of great good and value, full of self-renunciation, heroism, and self-sacrifice. On the day they boarded the Kanzlar the pains of nostalgia were sweeping over the respectable members of Chinde society like waves of nausea, and tearing them.
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