Great Expectations

Our oarsmen were so fresh, by dint of having occasionally let her drive

with the tide for a minute or two, that a quarter of an hour's rest

proved full as much as they wanted. We got ashore among some slippery

stones while we ate and drank what we had with us, and looked about.

It was like my own marsh country, flat and monotonous, and with a

dim horizon; while the winding river turned and turned, and the great

floating buoys upon it turned and turned, and everything else seemed

stranded and still. For now the last of the fleet of ships was round

the last low point we had headed; and the last green barge, straw-laden,

with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like

a child's first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a

little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles stood crippled in the mud

on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy

stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck

out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building

slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud.

We pushed off again, and made what way we could. It was much harder work

now, but Herbert and Startop persevered, and rowed and rowed and rowed

until the sun went down. By that time the river had lifted us a little,

so that we could see above the bank. There was the red sun, on the low

level of the shore, in a purple haze, fast deepening into black; and

there was the solitary flat marsh; and far away there were the rising

grounds, between which and us there seemed to be no life, save here and

there in the foreground a melancholy gull.

As the night was fast falling, and as the moon, being past the full,

would not rise early, we held a little council; a short one, for clearly

our course was to lie by at the first lonely tavern we could find. So,

they plied their oars once more, and I looked out for anything like a

house. Thus we held on, speaking little, for four or five dull miles. It

was very cold, and, a collier coming by us, with her galley-fire smoking

and flaring, looked like a comfortable home. The night was as dark by

this time as it would be until morning; and what light we had, seemed

to come more from the river than the sky, as the oars in their dipping

struck at a few reflected stars.