Excerpt
Over Yonder.
It was very, very hot. That is to say, it was as hot as it knows how to be in Johnstown, Guiana, which means a damp, sticky, stifling kind of heat. The sun made the muddy river look oily, and the party of three seated under the great fig-tree which shaded the boarding-house by the wharf seemed as if they were slowly melting away like so much of the sugar of which the wharves and warehouses and the vessels moored in the river smelt.
Let us be quite correct: it was more the smell of treacle, and the casks and sugar bags piled up under an open-sided shed all looked gummy and sticky; while the flies—there, it was just as if all the flies in the world, little and big, had been attracted to hum, buzz, and in some cases utter useless cries for help when they had managed to get their wings daubed with the sweet juice and strove vainly to rise in the air.
Captain David Banes, a weather-beaten sailor of about forty, took off his Panama hat, drew a yellow silk handkerchief out of the crown, and dabbed the drops off his face, brow, and the top of his head, which looked as if it had been rubbed and polished till all the hair for a broad space had been cleared away.
Then he said: “Phe-ew!” put the handkerchief back, and nursed his hat upon his knees, as he stared across the rough table, upon which coffee and breakfast-cups were standing, at the sun-burned gentleman who looked something like a modern yachtsman, though it was a good seventy years ago.
The latter looked back at him half-smilingly, took out a handkerchief and wiped his face, and glanced across at another sun-burned individual, to wit, a young man something like him in face, who was driving away flies from the sugar-basin, at which interference with their sweet pleasure they buzzed angrily, and the moment a spoonful of sugar had been taken out settled back.
“It’s hot, Brace,” said the second personage.
“Yes, I know,” said the young fellow, smiling. “I found that out myself.”
“Ay, youngster,” said the captain, “and it don’t want a man o’ genous to find that out. I always say this is the hottest place there is, for I never found a hotter. I dessay it is worse in our cook’s oven, but I never tried that.”
He looked first at one and then at the other, as if he expected them to laugh; but as they did not he screwed up his face, coughed unnecessarily, and then said:
“Yes, it is hot, gentlemen. Wants to be if you mean to grow sugar.”
“And coffee, captain,” said the second personage; and just then there was a dismal creaking sound made by a windlass, a musical yo-yo-ing came from a vessel moored to the wharf, and a big sugar hogshead was wound up to a certain height, the crane which bore it was swung round, and as the wheels creaked the great hogshead began to descend slowly towards a gaping hole in the vessel’s deck, while the captain swung himself round as if bound to follow the motion of the crane and the cask of sugar, and then lowered himself imitatively by bending his back till the cask disappeared, when he started upright, banged the table with his fist, and exclaimed sharply:
“I don’t believe they’re using a bit of dunnage, and if they don’t the first storm they get those hogsheads’ll be rempaging about in that hold, and if they don’t mind that vessel’ll sink, to the bottom of the sea, the sea....