The interval between Mr. Darby’s leaving the promenade deck of the Utopia and his landing, if we may be allowed the paradox, in the sea was so packed with experiences that he had no time for thought. Immediately after the awful discovery that he had hopelessly lost his balance, he saw the grey side of the ship shoot past him at a prodigious speed and flick out of sight clean under his feet. The fact was that Mr. Darby had been fortunate enough to turn a complete somersault in the air. Fortunate, for next moment he struck the sea in a sitting position, backside foremost, and so took the full shattering crash of it in that least vulnerable part of his person. There followed a dim twilight, a smarting of the eyes and nose, and a soft, singing, titillating invasion of the ears. He was sinking, sinking: the water was rushing upwards all round him. He gasped for breath and took in a huge, stifling draft of sea-water. An excruciating tightness constricted his chest: he felt that he was going to burst and flung out his arms in a desperate struggle. The water thinned, grew lighter, air and pale daylight burst upon him: he took a sobbing gulp of air. But at that moment something fell out of the sky and hit him a stunning blow on the shoulder, and he went under again. Again he flung out his arms and the top of his head bumped against something floating above him. The thought shot through his mind that the Utopia was passing over him; but at the same moment his head rose into light and air again. Something was floating beside him. He made a frantic grab, missed it, made another and caught hold of it. It was a life-buoy. With both hands Mr. Darby held on to it for dear life, while he coughed and gasped and retched till he felt that his eyes would burst from his head. When he had enough breath to think of something other than breathing he looked about him. The water seemed to be flowing past him as if it were a river. With his hands he pulled himself up an inch or two and saw far ahead of him and already growing blurred with mist a vast grey floating bucket with a white rim round the top of it and a short stout scarlet post sticking out of it. From the top of the post a long streamer of grey gauze drooped lazily to the water level. It was Mr. Darby’s last view of the Utopia, and also the first stern-on view of her he had had. He was so exhausted by his desperate struggle and so relieved by the respite provided by the life-buoy that he had not yet had time to realize the hopelessness of his plight. But now, at the spectacle of the fast-receding Utopia, the appalling truth began slowly to dawn on him. The full horror of the accident which had befallen him, so far from being over, was, he now realized, yet to come. The discovery struck a chill to his heart so overpowering that for a moment he almost lost consciousness. He gripped the life-buoy in an agony of fear, still gazing with a growing despair at the diminishing silhouette of his recent home. An absurd impulse prompted him to call Punnett. ‘Punnett … ah … Punnett!’ he shouted; but the shout was no more than the thin, reedy croak of a frog.
A voice close behind him made him start so violently that he very nearly lost his hold on the life-buoy. ‘All right, sir. Hold on, sir. I’ll be there in a moment.’
Mr. Darby looked behind him and discovered Punnett gravely seated in a life-buoy similar to the one he himself was grasping. ‘But … but … but … my … my dear Punn …!’ A violent attack of coughing interrupted Mr. Darby, and during the time it took him to recover, Punnett, using his hands as paddles, approached him and laid a hand on his life-buoy.
‘Look out, Punnett, look out!’ Mr. Darby bubbled anxiously. ‘Don’t … ah … don’t tip it up.’
‘All right, sir,’ replied Punnett reassuringly. ‘You can rely on me, sir. You’ll find it much more comfortable, if I might suggest it, sitting in the buoy as I am. Just pull yourself up and slip into it. I’ll hold on to it: there’s no occasion for alarm, sir.’
Instructed by the invaluable Punnett, Mr. Darby with some difficulty hauled himself up, got his knees on to the buoy and, by a startling manoeuvre which was largely accident, found himself suddenly seated as if on an unusually comfortable commode.
‘That’s better, isn’t it, sir?’ Punnett enquired.
Mr. Darby heaved a profound sigh. ‘Much better!’ he said in the voice of a very old man. ‘It’s wonderful. But it’s cold, Punnett, fearfully cold.’
The little man’s face was pinched and blue: his teeth chattered feebly.
‘Don’t worry about that, sir,’ Punnett replied. ‘You’ll be complaining of the heat in an hour.’
By degrees Mr. Darby sank into a stupor and for half an hour or so he and Punnett sat silent in their life-buoys like a pair of halcyons, brooding, as those fabulous birds are said to do, on their floating nests. So sunk was Mr. Darby in his stupor that the gradual brightening and thinning of the mist to a gauze of diaphanous gold totally escaped him, and even when the sun rose from the sea and stared him full in the face he failed to remark upon it. But at length the sun’s invigorating warmth did what its light had failed to do: Mr. Darby awoke and began once more to look about him. He felt weak and hungry, but his teeth were no longer chattering. He was slowly recovering.
‘Feeling better, sir?’ asked Punnett.
‘Very much better, Punnett,’ Mr. Darby replied in a voice that was almost his own, and for the first time he turned a speculative regard upon Punnett. Except for a certain disorder here and there, unavoidable in the trying circumstances, Punnett’s appearance had all its old formal correctness. His hair, it is true, was plastered sleekly over his eyes, its customary parting shattered; his collar had collapsed disastrously about his neck, and his suit, sodden with seawater, was unbelievably crumpled; but despite these trifles, he was still unmistakably the gentleman’s gentleman. Mr. Darby in his pyjamas, on the other hand, appeared to Punnett at his most informal. Yet, except for his face, which bore heavy traces of his predicament, his appearance was perfectly usual. He looked simply as he looked every morning when he sat and blinked for a moment on the edge of his bed before putting his feet to the ground and beginning the day’s adventures.
‘Yes, very much better!’ Mr. Darby repeated.’ But do explain, Punnett!’
‘Explain, sir?’
‘How you come to be … ah … here.’
‘Well, you see, sir,’ said Punnett, ‘when you fell overboard, sir, it seemed to me, seeing there was a mist, that if I wasted time giving the alarm, you’d be gone before they could stop her and get a boat launched. So I heaved a lifebuoy after you, sir, heaved in another for myself, and dived after it. That’s all, sir. Everything considered, it seemed the best thing to do, sir. Still, I thought for a moment I had done you in, if I may say so, sir, with that life-buoy.’
Mr. Darby nodded. ‘So did I, Punnett.’
‘Yes, sir. When I saw you go under I said to myself: “There’s such a thing as being too accurate, Punnett,” I said.’
‘To be shaw!’ said Mr. Darby. ‘But you saved my life, Punnett, as sure as I’m … ah … sitting here. You saved my life at the risk, the eminent risk, of your own. I shall never be able to thank you.’
Mr. Darby held out his hand and Punnett took it apologetically. ‘Not at all, sir. It was a mere nothing, sir. I’m accustomed to that sort of thing.’
‘To … ah …?’
‘To diving and swimming, sir. In my younger days, sir, I did a good deal of high diving. In point of fact, I was on the halls for some years, high-diving from the flies into a tank under the soubriquet of Astro the Falling Star, sir.’
‘Under the what did you say, Punnett?’
‘The … well, the nom de guerre, sir. Not a very safefprofession. I gave it up before it was too late and accepted the post of instructor at the Wandsworth Baths. So you see, it came fairly natural to follow you overboard, sir. In fact, it quite took me back to the halls. Besides, I promised Mrs. Darby you should come to no harm.’
At the mention of Sarah and the rush of associations that the thought of her called up, Mr. Darby awoke again to their precarious position. He glanced at the water. It was clear and pale as an aquamarine, and it was still streaming slowly past him like a river. The mist had vanished. A small grey plume on the horizon showed a last trace of the lost Utopia. He glanced at the sky. Already it was a deep cloudless blue.
‘Then you think, Punnett,’ he asked tentatively and a little shamefacedly, ‘that we shall not … ah … come to harm?’
‘With luck we shan’t, sir, and we’ve been lucky so far. You couldn’t have gone over at a better time, sir. The tide’s going in, and judging by the strength of the current it’ll be going in for another two hours at least.’
‘Ah!’ said Mr. Darby. ‘So there’s a current, Punnett?’
‘Yes, sir. Didn’t you notice it? It’s been taking us along at a good three miles an hour, sir.’
Mr. Darby shuddered. So far from reassuring him, the discovery that they were not stationary but travelling at three miles an hour alarmed him considerably.
‘But what’s the good if it, Punnett, unless, of course, we … ah … encounter a ship?’
‘If I was to turn you about, sir,’ said Punnett, ‘you’d get a better idea of the uses of the current. Allow me, sir!’
Up to this point they had been facing south-east and Mr. Darby had failed to observe that they were all the while slowly and steadily travelling backwards, but now, by a few adroit kicks Punnett swung his own and Mr. Darby’s lifebuoys round to face north-west.
Having recovered from his apprehensions at this manœuvre, Mr. Darby looked ahead of him and instantly gasped with amazement; for there, separated from him by a belt of water which seemed at the first glance little wider than stone’s throw, a gorgeous and astounding scene presented itself.
Mr Darby gaped at it like a dying fish. ‘But … ah … but God bless my soul, Punnett, what’s this?’
Punnett made a gesture of the right hand as of one effecting an introduction of mutual friends. ‘The Mandratic Peninsula, sir! The part we see is Mandras, of course. And isn’t it fortunate, if you’ll forgive my passing the remark, sir, that you haven’t lost your spectacles?’
Mr. Darby stared at Punnett and then raised his hands to his eyes. Punnett was right: through thick and thin his spectacles had stuck to him. ‘If you’d been an experienced diver, sir,’ said Punnett with exquisite tact, ‘you’d have lost them for certain.’
But the remark escaped Mr. Darby, for, strong in the assurance of unimpaired eyesight, he was gazing entranced at the land of his dreams. The water in which he sat was a clear crystalline blue, but it faded, as it receded from him, to a limpid green, and Mandras came to meet this green in a long stretch of silver sands that shimmered in the heat. And these sands jutted into little spits and promontories, swung back into curving bays, or shrank away to mere threads in deeply indented creeks. Out of the sand rose pink rocks, small as boulders near the sea, but large and more closely massed the further they lay up the shore until at last they huddled themselves into low and rugged cliffs, among which and above which screens of a vivid green vegetation hid the interior. Here and there among the green stood what seemed to be a tree which was not green, but pink or violet or scarlet; and towering in a vast dome above all these climbing rocks and trees, rose Umfo, the great ankle-bone of the Peninsula, its white marble crown weathered to the colour of old ivory.
Mr. Darby continued to gaze spell-bound at this enchanting scene which, as though it were the rim of a vast wheel, moved or seemed to move slowly past him, for the current was carrying Mr. Darby and Punnett parallel with the coast.
‘If only we could get closer in,’ Mr. Darby murmured reflectively.
‘Leave that to the current, sir,’ said Punnett. ‘If the tide holds for another half-hour it’ll float us into the Sampoto. The Sampoto is tidal, sir, for ten miles. Once we’re in it, we can easily paddle ourselves ashore, sir.’
‘You were right about the heat, Punnett,’ said Mr. Darby, searching vainly in his pyjama pocket for a handkerchief to mop his brow. ‘My pyjama coat is bone-dry already. I wish I could say the same for my trousers.’
But the water’s warm enough here, sir.’
‘Oh, it’s warm enough, Punnett, but it’s damp, and to sit in the damp, as we have been doing for the last … well, goodness knows how long, is said to induce a certain … ah … very distressing malady. I refer, of course, to aneroids.’
In the course of this brief conversation they had opened a wide bay shaped like a wine-strainer, for from the lowest point of its concavity a narrow channel curled away inland, and almost at once the current began to change its course and to carry them no longer parallel to the coast, but straight for the river’s mouth. Mr. Darby expected Punnett to remark upon this reassuring event, but Punnett said nothing, and Mr. Darby saw that he was staring somewhat grimly at the Peninsula. Following the direction of his stare, Mr. Darby saw that behind the leafy screens that guarded the interior seven vast white pillars rose into the air, whose summits wavered slightly and dissolved. A more attentive scrutiny proved them to be pillars of smoke.
‘What’s the meaning of it, Punnett?’ Mr. Darby asked a little timorously.
Punnett shook his head. I don’t know, sir. There must be something unusual on. If it was three bonfires, I should have said they were holding a funeral, the funeral of a chief. But seven’s a novelty, sir. I don’t understand it.’
‘And you … ah … you don’t like the look of it, Punnett?’ asked Mr. Darby, still more apprehensively.
‘You never like the looks of things you can’t explain, sir. But I dare say it’s nothing to worry about; in fact, if it’s something very unusual, it may keep them so occupied that they won’t bother about us, and that’ll be all to the good, sir. You see, sir, it’ll be a much more ticklish job this time, a matter of diplomacy, sir, not just of what you might call artillery as it was last time when I had the camera with me.’
The camera, Punnett! You forgot the camera?’
‘Well, sir. It was the camera or you, sir, and I fixed on you.’
Mr. Darby gasped as he realized for the first time the gravity of their position. He recalled in a flash, hair-raising adventures, retailed by Punnett, in which the camera, that admirable weapon of offence, had proved the one salvation. ‘We’d have been hard put to it, sir, if it hadn’t been for the camera.’ ‘If we hadn’t had the camera it’ud have been all up with us, sir.’ How often had Punnett uttered those testimonials to his invaluable weapon. And now, here they were, between the devils of Mandratia and the deep sea, without the protection of so much as a vest-pocket kodak. Mr. Darby’s mind, directed by the unhappy absence of the camera and those seven ominous columns of smoke soaring mysteriously and inexplicably into the still air, began now to regard the enchanting Mandras from a closely realistic angle. The thought that if they were extremely lucky they would soon be high and dry on the Peninsula with a tribe of savages as their neighbours, seemed to him, now that it was on the point of realization, extremely disquieting. And what if this not very enviable good luck deserted them? In that case, the tide would turn before they reached land and they would drift out to sea again and to almost certain death by starvation, sunstroke, or drowning. Mr. Darby disliked both alternatives extremely: he contemplated them in silence for twenty minutes and the more he contemplated them, the more he loathed them.
Emerging at last from this abstraction he raised his eyes and quite suddenly his courage gave way. For Mandras had now drawn very near and become immensely real. The tide in fact was already carrying them up the Sampoto. On either side of them her walls of dense and sinister foliage towered into the sky, concealing behind their many-patterned surface Heaven knew what sinister and horrible surprises. Mr. Darby no longer liked the look of Mandratia. He felt none of that delight which he had so often anticipated in thought and dream at the prospect of stepping ashore: he was, in fact, quite frankly terrified.
‘I don’t like it, Punnett!’ he said, and his voice trembled as he spoke.
‘You don’t like what, sir?’
‘Anything!’ said Mr. Darby comprehensively.
At that moment Punnett, who had been glancing from time to time into the water, put his hands on either side of his lifebuoy and, giving himself a smart push, stood up. The water reached no further than half-way up his thighs. He stood there like a large black heron, looking down on Mr. Darby, and Mr. Darby, staring up at him, realized with a feeling that nearly approached panic, that they had arrived.