The air, hot and steamy, smelled of strange earth. As Rudolph followed a
Malay porter toward the gang-plank, he was painfully aware that Mrs.
Forrester had turned from the rail and stood waiting in his path.
"Without saying good-by?" she reproached him. The injured wonder in her
eyes he thought a little overdone.
"Good-by." He could not halt, but, raising his cap stiffly, managed to
add, "A pleasant voyage," and passed on, feeling as though she had
murdered something.
He found himself jogging in a rickshaw, while equatorial rain beat like
down-pouring bullets on the tarpaulin hood, and sluiced the Chinaman's
oily yellow back. Over the heavy-muscled shoulders he caught glimpses of
sullen green foliage, ponderous and drooping; of half-naked barbarians
that squatted in the shallow caverns of shops; innumerable faces, black,
yellow, white, and brown, whirling past, beneath other tarpaulin hoods,
or at carriage windows, or shielded by enormous dripping wicker hats, or
bared to the pelting rain. Curious odors greeted him, as of sour
vegetables and of unknown rank substances burning. He stared like a
visionary at the streaming multitude of alien shapes.
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