It seems to me that I thought of nothing whatever, but this is an
impression which is hardly to be believed at this distance of years.
What I am certain of is that I was very far from thinking of writing a
story, though it is possible and even likely that I was thinking of the
man Almayer.
I had seen him for the first time, some four years before, from the
bridge of a steamer moored to a rickety little wharf forty miles up,
more or less, a Bornean river. It was very early morning, and a slight
mist--an opaline mist as in Bessborough Gardens, only without the
fiery flicks on roof and chimney-pot from the rays of the red London
sun--promised to turn presently into a woolly fog. Barring a small
dug-out canoe on the river there was nothing moving within sight. I had
just come up yawning from my cabin. The serang and the Malay crew
were overhauling the cargo chains and trying the winches; their voices
sounded subdued on the deck below, and their movements were languid.
That tropical daybreak was chilly. The Malay quartermaster, coming up
to get something from the lockers on the bridge, shivered visibly. The
forests above and below and on the opposite bank looked black and dank;
wet dripped from the rigging upon the tightly stretched deck awnings,
and it was in the middle of a shuddering yawn that I caught sight
of Almayer.
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