Explore "The Road to Glory" by E. Alexander Powell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was so hot that the little group of sailors under the forward awnings lay stretched upon the deck, panting like hunted rabbits, while rivers of perspiration coursed down their naked chests and backs. The unshaded portions of the deck were as hot to the touch as the top of a stove; bubbles of pitch had formed along the seams between the planks, and turpentine was exuding, like beads of sweat, from the spars. Though occasional puffs of land-wind stirred the folds of the American flag which drooped listlessly from the taffrail sufficiently to disclose the legend _Friendship, of Salem_ in raised and gilded letters on the stern, they brought about as much relief to the exhausted men as a blast from an open furnace door. Even the naked Malays who were at work under the direction of a profane and sweating first mate, transferring innumerable sacks of pepper from a small boat to the vessel's hold, showed the effects of the suffocating atmosphere by performing their task with more than ordinary listlessness and indolence.
Half a mile away the nipa-thatched huts of Qualla Battoo, built amid a thicket of palms on the sandy shores of a cove where a mountain torrent debouched into the sea, seemed to flicker like a scene on a moving-picture screen in the shifting waves of heat. Immediately at the back of the town rose the green wall of the Sumatran jungle, which bordered the yellow beach in both directions as far as the eye could reach. Behind this impenetrable screen of vegetation, over which the miasma hung in wreathlike clouds, rose the purple peaks of the Bukit Barisan Range, of which Mount Berapi, twelve thousand feet high, is the grim and forbidding overlord. Upon this shore a mighty surf pounds unceasingly. Farming far to seaward, the tremendous rollers come booming in with the speed of an express train, gradually gathering volume as they near the shore until they tower to a height of twenty feet or more, when, striking the beach, they break upon the sands with a roar which on still nights can be heard up-country for many miles.