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By Root 1533 0

desprit by then so they ain’t easy to stop. So we build a fence across an’ we stick two of the swivel cannon through it. Think of the effect, Mr Paris. There they are, plottin’ mischief agin us, like the varments they are. Then they see this fence.’ The mate paused again to make a spreading gesture with his palms to show the breadth and impenetrable nature of the barricade. He rolled his ferret’s eyes to indicate the consternation of the negroes, faced with this obstacle to their plans. ‘They see the mouths of the guns pokin’ through,’ he said. ‘Think of the effect on ’em. It’s all in the mind, sir.’ Barton tapped his head and winked at Paris, to whom it came now that the mate was a considerable artist. The rain, which had been threatening so long, now began to fall, the first slow and heavy drops making distinct and separate sounds of impact on the deck and the stretched canvas of the slave awning.

The rain came down on the shore party as they worked among the mangrove thickets in the tidal swampland bordering the estuary, chopping at the bases of the stems, knee-deep sometimes in the salt mud, stumbling and cursing among the arching roots of the mangroves. The rain obliterated all sight except of what was immediately before them and all sound but that of itself. It fell with a loud continuous drumming on the patient leaves, so thick and fleshy that they barely dipped under the onslaught. Within a minute the men were wet to the skin, their clothes clinging to them. Under the eyes of Haines they worked on without a pause, figures so completely beset by water as to seem almost submerged, the deluge from above indistinguishable from the sprays they shook on themselves as they wrenched at the branches.

The downpour ended abruptly, as at some signal. The surge of the sea came back to them with a curious kind of tentativeness, like a vessel filling slowly. From somewhere nearby there came the low, bubbling celebration of pigeons, then a series of fugitive chatterings from further in among the dripping trees. It grew hotter. The sun was concealed but all-pervasive, spreading below the leaden skin of the sky with the energy of poison, until the whole was suffused and livid with it. Each of the men there, sweat replacing rain as they toiled on in the sickly heat, felt in some fashion that the sky was infected.

Steam rose from the ground, from the foliage of the trees and their soaked clothing. Their sweat prickled them and the stinging creatures of the swampland, taking to the air again, guzzled the sweat as a sauce to the blood. There was a sweet heavy smell of flowers and odours of decay rose from the spongy ground and from the brackish slime of the fallen mangrove leaves.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ Sullivan groaned, slithering in mud, bedevilled by mosquitoes, grasping at the wet stems to force them down enough for a blow of his axe.

‘I thowt you had finished wi’ that gibrish, long ago,’ Billy Blair said, slapping at his neck, his small, blunt-nosed, belligerent face moist and furious beneath the red kerchief round his brows. ‘You said as much, anyway. But it is dawnin’ on me that you canna be trusted, Sullivan.’ Billy felt an equal fury at the wretched discomfort of the work and at Sullivan’s inconsistency in the matter of religion for adding to the baffling nature of the universe.

‘I was born for better things,’ Sullivan said, pausing to wipe away sweat and mucus from around his mouth, and leaving a smear of blood from the numerous small cuts on the back of his hand.

‘Yeh,’ sneered Billy, ‘playin’ the fiddle in a crimp-house.’

‘You can keep your snot-box out of me fiddlin’,’ Sullivan said, on a note of anger rare with him.

These two might have fallen out further if McGann had not chosen this moment to voice some thoughts. His life was given over to small stratagems; his motive for philosophizing now was to obtain a breathing-space. ‘Well, takin’ it a’ in a’,’ he said, ‘we are still men, aren’t we?’ Sun and rain and a salty diet had set up a flaking process on McGann’s face; strips of dead skin hung from brows and