14 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

differences of intellect and class; then you get the
angels of Mons and the miracles at a shrine.

"Yes/' they were saying in the smoking-room, "you
won't find a tougher man than Captain W." They
all knew of him because they all belonged to the
Coast: the captain, the doctor, the shipper.

"If he ran into a broken bottle," the doctor said,
"his face wouldn't look any different."

"He'd take a tug round the world as soon as look
at you."

"He doesn't insure his cargo. He bears the risk
himself. That's why his freight-rates are so cheap."

"Will people take the risk?"

"His word's as good as an insurance company's."

"But when he loses a cargo?"

"He hasn't lost one yet."

In the wireless room on a Saturday night the young
agent waited hour after hour for the League results.
He and the wireless officer shared an esoteric gossip
of the sea: how this or that man had quarrelled with
the 'Old Man and joined another line. The bulbs
flickered overhead; tubes hummed in the little cabin
with its rows of discs and bulbs, as mechanised as was
the engine-room below, a great black polished cliff,
pipes tied up at the joints in blue, yellow or scarlet
bags like hot-water bottles, a solitary negro with a
polishing rag in all the glittering desert of brass and
iron.

Coming in from the bulbs and gossip and the dusk
I overheard the Captain talking to the doctor in the
smoking-room. "Four hundred and sixteen people at
Dakar," he was saying. The subject came up again at
breakfast: plague at Dakar, yellow fever at Bathurst,