VOYAGE IN THE DARK

By dRAVrikm GuENP: PUSHED open the swing cantina doors of the Vice- 1 _ Consulate in Vera Cruz, and there was the Consul going through his weekly lottery tickets—seriously as if it were a game of skill. I wanted to find a boat for Tabasco, ind I heard there was one going that night. The Consul was American : he regarded me as a fool : he had never known a foreigner use one of those boats before.

"Are they very small ? "

" Small ! " He said : "I wouldn't go in one of those Mexican boats for a thousand dollars."

"Aren't they safe ? "

"They don't often sink," he said, "unless they hit a norther."

"But the norther season's over ? "

"You. can't tell. Anyway," he said- grimly, "they insure you for 5,000 pesos when you buy your ticket."

Time was short, so I took a guide—a bright, dapper young man like a hairdresser's assistant—round town shopping. As we got on to a tramcar, the guide met a friend, a big man in overalls who laughed all the time. We left the tramcar at the first stop and sat in a cantina and drank beer. "He is always like. that,r. the guide said, "always latighing." Nothing one said failed to feed that enormous flame of mirth; it roared like a draught in a chimney, sucking up words like scraps of paper. He was employed in the customs office, the guide said, and" I am a customs officer for my sweetheart too," the man bellowed mysteriously. It was like trying to read Rabelais in the original. His boisterous company melted the constraint between me and the guide—we were all friends together. , The time of the guide's employment wore out : he said it was too late in the afternoon to find another client, so he might as well stay on with me—as a friend. He came from Tabasco years, oh years ago in the same boat that I was to travel in: the' Ruiz Cano.' He said," Nothing—nothing will ever make me go on that boat again." The boat, I felt, couldn't be as bad as all That. But it was.

We came to it in a taxi with my single suitcase, bumping over the Vera Cruz quay. An English pleasure liner of about ten thousand tons, a few coaling steamers, out in the gulf a grey gunboat. "There's the Ruiz Cano '," the taximan said. I couldn't see it anywhere : I looked right over the top of the ship where it lay against the quay—a barge of about a hundred tons with a few feet of broken rail, an old funnel you could almost touch with your hand, a bell hanging on a worn piece of string, an oil lamp, and a bundle of turkeys. One little rotting lifeboat dangled inadequately from the davits. Forty-two hours at sea in the Atlantic in the Gulf of Mexico—I have never in my life been more frightened.

We climbed over the rail with the suitcase and a sailor led the way down a ladder into the engine room, where one old greasy auxiliary motor sat like an elephant neglected in its tiny house. There were two cabins close beside the engine, dark padlocked cells with six wooden shelves in each. I laid my bag on one and went gloomily up into the fading tropical afternoon. I said, "Let's go and have a drink."

We went back to the plaza and ordered a couple of tequilas each and some beer. After the tequilas I began to feel better,. and . my friend blossomed too—he wished he could accompany me. He would like to prove, he said, that a Mexican was as good "a sport" is an Englishman. He would come as a friend—not as a guide. He would charge nothing. We would ride together across Chiapas—and have interesting conversations.

"Why not ? " I said.

"I have no clothes."

"We could take a taxi to your house.".

"No time." "Then we could buy them in Tabasco." The second tequila worked—wildly—in his eyes. "All right," he said, "it is agreed. I will prove that a Mexican is as good a sport.. . . Just as I am, I will come with you." We shook hands drunkenly A little boy carrying a mongrel dog stopped on the pave- ment and stared. My friend summoned him : he was a nephew whom he was looking after while his sister was away in Mexico City. He said, "I am going with this Englishman tonight to Tabasco. Just as I am. To prove that a Mexican is as good a sport. . . . Can you look after yourself while I am away ? Three, four weeks."

The little boy clapped his hands with excitement. In the nine-year-old eyes hero-worship woke. He flung his arms around his uncle's neck and embraced that little dapper dashing man furiously. A couple of English people at a near-by -table watched with intense disapproval, suspecting I don't know what Latin iniquities. We bought some ham and got into a taxi, all three. The driver wouldn't take the dog, so it ran behind, gatecrashing past the sentry at the entrance to the docks: It was quite dark now, and not a light showed on the barge, except an oil lamp in the bow. Little knots of people stood on the quay, somebody wept and the turkeys rustled. My friend began to explain to everyone : they gathered round in admiration : "I am going tonight to Tabasco. Just as I am. No clothes. Because this Englishman and I are friends. I am going to prove to him that a Mexican. . ." I felt myself moved by an immense self-esteem : to have evoked such a friendship in a few hours. The little boy stood holding his mongrel. An old night-watchman appeared at the edge of the group and offered to take last messages to my friend's sister. . . . Then we climbed on board, and the little boy went ecstatically homeward, his uncle's adventure in his heart.

Suddenly we were alone in the dark : and it was cold. I said I had a jumper down below which he could have. We sat on a bench and shivered. The water lapped like doubt and the turkeys moved. Then the captain came on board—a stout man in shirt-sleeves who only grunted when my friend whipped out his fading saga—" no clothes . . . just as I am . . . as good a sport . . ." The captain went into his tiny deck house and changed his trousers in the dark. The crew came on board—and the other passengers : two young girls travelling with their brother, an old woman, a family which immediately wrapped itself in rugs and lay down among the turkeys on the deck. The girls sang softly in the stern, and the engine began to shake : everything knocked and rattled, and we moved a couple of feet out from the quay.

I looked at my friend : a wild doubt came up into his eyes like a face at a window. He muttered—something about. his nephew—couldn't leave him alone—and scrambled on to the lifeboat. The old davits creaked under the strain —we were three feet from the quay. He gathered himself together and jumped, landing on his hands. He called out, "If only I had my clothes," and waved rather shame- facedly. But he soon recovered his cheerfulness and began to tell everyone on the quay about his nephew. . . . We moved, shakily, out of earshot.

There was no light at all on the little deck and none below : only the oil lamp in the bows. The searchlights of the English liner moved right over our heads, missing us alto- gether, and the captain began to enter his log by tire light of an electric torch a sailor held for him. After an hour one bare globe went on outside the sleeping cells, above a tin washbasin, and the wind rose. We chugged in almost complete darkness out into the Gulf.