Patrick O'Brian - The Thirteen Gun Salute

The headland, the gap and the island were coming closer, much closer. Jack, bending and peering forward, saw that the high land was deflecting the breeze so that it would head him in mid-passage: there was a slight cross-ruffle on the ebbing tide. His mind at once began computing speed, inertia, distance, most desirable course, and presented him with the answer in something less than a second, a hundred yards short of the rock. A few moments more and he bore up, gathered way, and with the greater impetus shot through the gap right in the wind's eye, his mainsail shivering, rounded the cape and ran down its farther side. The saving of five insignificant minutes was no very great triumph; indeed the caper had a faint, very faint air of showing away; but it was pleasant to feel the old skills unimpaired.

The coast in this part of Pub Prabang was much indented, and the fjord they were now entering had a companion beyond it. These deep narrow bays were separated by Cape Bughis, and in his chart Jack called this one East Bughis Inlet and the next West Bughis Inlet, although in the Diane it was called Frenchmen's Creek, since Ambelan, with the Corn�e in its harbour, lay on the eastern shore. The road from a number of fishing villages and little towns to Prabang followed the coast wherever it could, and it crossed the bottom of both these inlets: Jack's idea was to land far down in the first, walk along the shore to the road and so round to the western side of the next, from which he could view the Corn�e over the water. In spite of all his swimming he felt in need of a walk, and he was by no means disinclined to see how the French were coming along. He knew they were careening their ship, a perilous business on a coast with such considerable tides, and he wanted to see their progress, if only from a professional point of view. On its outward voyage the boat had crossed the mouth of West Bughis Inlet, but Jack had not sailed down it, though the wind was fair. He wished to avoid any sort of indiscretion that might have a bad effect on Fox's dealings with the Sultan; but it seemed to him that his behaviour could not be thought improper if, in the course of a walk, he looked at the Corn�e from the other side of the bay, particularly as French officers had often brought telescopes to peer at the Diane from Prabang. Then, having gazed his fill and taken a fresh set of bearings, he would walk on, crossing the next promontory to the farther strand, where, touching wood, he would find the boat hauled up and smoke rising from the evening fire.

While the very word 'supper' was sounding in his head both Yusuf and Bonden caught a fish, a fine silvery fish, a two or three pounder with crimson eyes and crimson fins. 'Padang fish, tuan!' cried Yusuf. 'Good, good, very good fish!'

'So much the better,' said Jack, and he let fly the sheet, bringing the cutter gently to the shore: he stepped neatly out, his shoes and his ditty-bag slung round his neck, shoved the boat off, called out 'This evening, then, in Parrot Bay,' and sat down on the warm sand to dry his feet.

Warren replied cheerfully, but Bonden, though back in his rightful place in the stern sheets, shook his head with a despondent look: he would have liked the Captain to take at least a hanger and a brace of pistols, if not a musket and a couple of well-armed hands as well.

The sand here was pinkish-white, quite unlike the volcanic black of Prabang itself, and delightfully firm. Jack, dryfoot and shod, stretched out at a fine pace, his eyes half-closed against the glare, and presently he reached the bottom of the bay and, above highwater-mark, the road. Five minutes after striking into it he was in the grateful shade of sago-paims; they stood deep on either side almost the whole way to the village, and they were completely uninhabited - no people, no animals, scarcely a bird - except for myriads of insects which he could rarely see and never identify but which kept up a continual din, so all-pervading that after a few minutes he was unaware of it except on those rare occasions when it suddenly stopped entirely. The sago-palms were not very beautiful, being thick and short, while their dull-green crowns were rather dusty, and presently he found their company and the loneliness oppressive It was a relief to walk out of the shade at last and into the rice paddies outside the village at the bottom of West Bughis Inlet, people were working in them and some looked up as he went by, but without any particular interest, far less astonishment. Much the same applied to the village itself, sparsely inhabited at this time of day, and from here the reason, for their indifference was evident, since the whole bong bay was now open before him, with Ambelan on the eastern side, its harbour quite crowded and two Chinese junks lying just offshore. Of course these people were used to strangers.

Beyond the village the road mounted to the crest of the long rocky headland that formed the inlet's other arm, and at the top of the hill Jack, now in a fine state of sweat, turned off right-handed to walk out to a point where he would be opposite the little port. There was a path, he found, winding among the boulders and the low, wind-stunted vegetation, and soon he saw why: dotted along the edge of the sea below him there were great fallen rocks by the score, well out from the strand, and on many of them stood fishermen with long bamboos, casting beyond the moderate surf of the tide, now on the make; and each group of rocks had a corresponding side-path leading down to it.

When he had travelled something like a mile he took one of these and dropped down the slope, going rather more than half way, to the clearly-defined division between the zone where the wind was strong enough and steady enough to keep the trees and bushes short and the zone in the lee of the farther cape, where everything grew in its usual wild profusion, trees, rattans, screw-pines, and all along the shore itself coconutpalms soaring up in a thousand graceful attitudes. A few paces from where he stopped there was a little platform with a spring coming out of the cliff-face, a dense growth of soft fern, and an astonishing display of orchids growing on the rock, the deep moss, the trees and bushes, orchids of every size, shape and colour. 'Lord, I wish Stephen were here,' he said, sitting on a convenient mound and taking a small telescope and an azimuth compass from his ditty-bag.

He said it again some time later, when a large black and white bird laboured across the field of his glass, carrying a heavy fish in its talons. The glass was only a pocket telescope of no great power, but with the sun shining full on the opposite shore and the air as clear as air could be he had a brilliant view of the Corn�e. She had indeed been heaved down on a bank a little north of the town - her copper blazed in the sun - heaved down on her larboard side to a number of uncommon great trees, one of which, or perhaps the creeper that enveloped it, a mass of crimson flowers from top to bottom. 'Oh if only my roses would do that,' cried his mind in a parenthesis, running back to the mildewed, aphis-ridden, much-loved shrubs of Ashgrove Cottage.

But something was wrong. Something was amiss. There were all the frigate's belongings in neatly-squared tarpaulined heaps; there were her guns, intelligently placed to deal with any attack from band or sea; there were her people's tents; but where were the people themselves? A few were creeping about on her copper; a few were busy on a staging against a place where the sheathing had been removed far down under her starboard bow; but there was none of the feverish activity usual on such occasions, with all hands kept hard at it, calls piping, starters flying. Some of them could even be seen playing boules in a smooth bare place under the coconut palms, watched by scores of their shipmates. The others were presumably sleeping in the shade.