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heavily doom-laden voice as he shuffled away with Geary. ‘And here I was thinking this was going to be a bloody picnic.’
     
    The voyage followed the pattern of all such voyages, with the passengers sorting themselves into groups, cliques and love affairs, and it was quite obvious that more than a few of them were not spending the nights in their own bunks. The warmth and the moon were working havoc on people out from England for the first time, and the passenger list entered a state of grave dissolution, with Ira startled to find himself fighting off the advances of the over-eager daughter of a well-heeled British nobleman across the vast bed of her expensive first-class cabin.
    Trying to avoid her when the ship put into Bombay, he found himself thrown with Sammy into the arms of Geary and Lawn on a trip ashore that turned into nothing more than a voyage through the red light district of Grant Road, where women of every conceivable shade whined at them behind barred windows as they rode past in rickshaws. It was his first sight of the Far East, with its barefooted coolies stinking of garlic, their blue-brown skins shining with sweat, and he noticed uncomfortably Geary’s tendency to treat them all as subhumans.
    Bombay was followed by Colombo and Penang and soon afterwards by Singapore and Hong Kong with its acres of bobbing junks, then as they approached the entrance to the Yangtze, the water grew more oozy and yellow, with the brown patched sails of junks standing out on the horizon like drab moths. A coastal steamer approached and passed, then they were in the mouth of the river--still thirty miles wide with a thin brown line in the distance across the expanse of yellow water, all there was to be seen of the land.
    Suddenly, Ira was caught by a sense of unease he hadn’t so far felt. In Moshi his responsibility in China had seemed remarkably small, and he’d felt he was being well paid, but now, unexpectedly, the country seemed huge and unknown and it struck him with tremendous force how small England was and how narrow an outlook it gave a man. Even East Africa, largely British in influence, had left him unfitted, he realised, for this unknown land with its teeming millions. Even here, before he’d set foot ashore, he was aware of its size and foreign-ness, and the thought that he was proposing to lose himself somewhere in its hidden centre unnerved him a little.
    On the river and by the coast, where the foreign concessions and the treaty ports existed by the power of the gunboats, China was Westernised, he knew, but he and Sammy and two other pilots, as yet un-named, for around four hundred dollars a month, were gaily going to place their lives in the hands of the unreliable Lawn and Geary up-river in that part of China which was still untouched by European civilisation and which, with its ancient customs and its lack of amenities, still seemed to have one foot firmly in the Middle Ages.
    He’d talked to one or two old China hands at the bar and it appeared that what Lao had told him in the security of Moshi airfield was not quite correct. Certainly there was a Nationalist uprising going on up-country, with one government in Canton trying to overthrow another government in Peking in some sort of Bolshevik leftover from the Russian Revolution, run until his death by a left-wing Chinese intellectual called Sun Yat-Sen, but it hadn’t yet become clear whose side General Tsu was on, and it was quite obvious that China was not so much being saved from voracious warlords as being divided up in a vast upheaval, with a constant shifting of power from one group of soldier-politicians to another. Warlords were busily aligning and re-aligning themselves, it seemed, not for the good of the country but for their own private ends, and General Tsu was not so much the saviour of his people as a rapacious old rogue who was busy feathering his own nest.
    As he considered it, Ira found it hard for the first time to imagine China