For Jacinta by Harold Bindloss

The afternoon was wearing through, but it was still almost insufferably hot when Jefferson stood with his hand upon the valve of the _Cumbria_'s forward winch. She lay with her bows wedged into the mangrove forest, which crawled on high-arched roots over leagues of bubbling mire to the edge of one of the foulest creeks in Western Africa. It flowed, thick and yeasty, beneath the steamer's hove-up side, for she lay with a list to starboard athwart the stream. There was a bend close by, and her original crew had apparently either failed to swing her round it, which is an accident that sometimes happens in that country, or driven her ashore to save her sinking.

Her iron deck was unpleasantly hot, and the negroes who crossed it between hatch and surfboat hopped. They, of course, wore no boots, and, indeed, very little of anything at all beyond a strip of cotton round their waists. There was not a breath of wind astir, and the saturated atmosphere, which was heavy with the emanations of the swamps, seemed to seal the perspiration in the burning skin. Jefferson felt the veins on his forehead swollen to the bursting point when he stopped the winch and looked about him while the Spaniards slipped a sling over a palm-oil puncheon in the hold below.