Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/293



was eight hours later that the Laminian made her way under half-speed into the road stead at Puerto Locombia.

She drifted guardedly in over shoals of translucent verdancy, with her screw churning the lettuce-green waters into coiling and copperas-tinted eddies.

A long iron pier ran out into this green-watered roadstead, its trestles spanned by the single track of a narrow-gauge railway. On either side of the concrete breakwater that lipped the sea-edge of the town itself stretched away two curves of white sand with their intermittently whitening surf. Then came scattering clumps of lonely palms, then a lower mist-hung coast of ooze and mangrove and steaming lagoon.

Behind the concreted crescent of shore-line, to which the roadstead pier seemed like an arrow set in a drawn bow, stood irregular lines