For Jacinta by Harold Bindloss

Deep stillness hung over the dingy mangroves, and there was not a breath of air astir, while Austin, who lay among the palm oil puncheons beside the creek, was oppressed by a sense of suffocation. A few yards away two Spaniards lay, apparently asleep, huddled, shapeless heaps of ragged clothing, beneath a strip of tarpaulin raised on poles, and it was then, though there was no sun visible, a little past the hottest part of the afternoon. A yellow vapour that seemed suffused with heat had obscured the heavens for a week or more, and the swamps lay sweltering beneath it waiting for the rain. Austin longed for it ardently, for there was an almost unendurable tension in the atmosphere.

He had shaken off the fever, but he was worn and dazed by toil, for the strain was not without its effect upon him, and he had become subject to curious tricks of fancy. He had brought the coal from Dakar, and it now lay piled upon a down river beach; but he had obtained only two or three men, and the steamy heat of the swamp belt had melted the sustaining energy out of the _Cumbria_'s company. Individually, he felt that it was a hopeless struggle they were making. They had untrammelled nature against them, and, he could almost fancy, the malevolent spirits of the bush the negroes believed in. A man, he admitted, could believe in anything in that country, and he had of late been troubled by a feeling that something sinister and threatening was hovering near him.