IT’S MORNING IN this part of the world, Ford. We have come round to another season of the dry monsoon, the time of sweltering heat and the Wayang, where I spent last night. When I came home at dawn, tired but at peace with myself, I was not quite ready to take up my pen and finish this memoir and so I drew a chair up to the table on the veranda and have been gazing down at the Old Port for the last hour. The dock has filled up with lorries, bullock-drawn wagons, men with pushcarts hawking food and drink and clove cigarettes, the daily bustle that will continue until the light fades. Three freighters lie at anchor in the bay, waiting to enter and disgorge their cargoes. Others are tied up at the piers, where men who bend beneath the sacks of bounty ceaselessly flowing to Batavia move like hunchbacked beetles from the ships to warehouses and back again. The South China Sea is a mosaic of blues: cerulean where the ocean floor falls away, turquoise near the reefs, the shade of a blond child’s eyes close to shore. Past the beach, huge shining leaves shaped like hearts, spiky palm fronds, delicate runnels of vines, long strands of chartreuse grass flutter on the trades like a great batik banner. This is the seductive Indonesia Conrad had in mind when he wrote of Almayer dozing on his wharf, having succumbed to the jungle’s sensuousness, hardly able to rouse himself in the scent-laden heat. Were the end of this memoir not in sight, I would very likely unroll the futon I keep out here and sleep away the day.

Given the troubles I had finding my way into this writing, you may be wondering if I am satisfied. All things considered—and by that I mean the intractable nature of key elements in the story that will never fully be known, most obviously the details of Conrad’s manuscript, along with what he thought those last two weeks of his life—I am, though not quite as I had imagined. I am probably not the only memoirist who set out to record his impressions confident that he would eventually reach a point in his narrative where some overarching meaning would poke its head over the horizon and become clearer as he neared the end. That was certainly my expectation. But the moments along the way when I thought the adventures of our troika were beginning to suggest a larger idea or two never developed into anything significant. I have no reasoned explanation to offer, no pithy summary of human nature, no hard-won cautionary lessons, only an image from last night’s shadow show that is self-contained and requires no gloss from me. I will come to it soon, but it must wait its turn while I address a last bit of unfinished business concerning Fox-Bourne.