Explore "My Kaffir" by John Arthur Barry on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
An ideal night in the Indian Ocean, with the stars looking as big as saucers, throbbing away up there in the blue from one horizon to the other; and the sea, a wondrous mass of iridescence through which the sharp fore-foot of the Cape Liner shears, sometimes with a noise like the tinkling of numberless little glass bells, at others with a hoarse rush that casts great blobs and flakes of living light into the air, to fall again in radiant showers of opalescent beauty into the creaming mass that glows and seethes under the bows.
The wind was right aft, and the fore-staysail, hauled down, made a comfortable nest on the fok'sle-head. In the folds of this I lay back and smoked, gazing now on the wonderful spectacle outboard, now up at the big lamp that hung from the fore-topmast-stay, looking mean and yellow, by contrast, under the pure starlight, and wondered mightily the while whether I should ever find my Kaffir.