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Wading in a shallow, mangrove-bordered creek, he blindly probes the bottom with a six-feet length of fencing wire, the modern substitute for the black palm spear. Frequently he trifles thus with coy Fortune for hours, an inch or so separating each prod; and again, in a spasm of indignant impatience, he stabs determinedly into the mud at random.
As to the longboat, she was nowhere visible; but I was not much astonished at that, because, from the glimpse that I was able to catch of the river, I had very little doubt that its characteristics were precisely those of all the other rivers in that region, namely, a somewhat sluggish current of water thick with foul and fetid mud, swampy margins overgrown with mangroves, and numerous shallow, winding creeks, mangrove-bordered, discharging into it on either side; and it was highly probable that, failing to find a firm bank upon which to land along the margin of the river itself, the mutineers had proceeded in search of such a spot up one of the creeks.
The disturbance was all over in less than a minute; the echo of the last explosion died away along the mangrove-bordered shore; the thud of the last falling piece of fractured ordnance, as it crashed through the boughs of the trees, had faintly reached the ears of the flying Englishmen; and the birds were rapidly beginning to persuade themselves that the whole thing had been no more than a peculiarly weird and startling dream, when the whole party which had been joined on the way by the man from the lower battery reached the boat and pulled up for a moment to listen and recover their breath.
Often before vegetation appears, coral chips, shells, small stones, and sharp gravel, are concreted into platter-shaped masses which seem to become the base of blocks of rough conglomerate, capable of resisting the attacks of the sea; and a few yards back, where a mangrove-bordered creek once existed, the mud and decayed fragments of wood have been transformed into a black, cheesy substance which might be mistaken for soft coal.
February 4, 4 P.M. We are steaming over the incandescent sapphire sea, among the mangrove-bordered islands which fringe the Selangor coast, under a blazing sun, with the mercury 88 degrees in the shade, but the heat, though fierce, is not oppressive, and I have had a delightful day.
Daylight and darkness come with a rush in those latitudes, and by the time that the Rosario Islands were abeam the eastern sky had paled from indigo to white that, even as one looked, became flushed with a most delicate and ethereal tint of blush rose, which in its turn warmed as rapidly to a tone of rich amber, against which a cluster of mangrove-bordered islands, occupying what looked like the embouchure of a river, suddenly revealed themselves a point or two on the weather bow.
For an hour or more we ran along between the mangrove-bordered shores against a swiftly flowing, muddy current. The great tangled roots of these trees stood up out of the water like a fretwork of lace, and the interwoven branches above our heads shut out the glassy glare of the sun.
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