Behind the boy, crouching darkly in the gathering dusk, lay a continent, before him, and far below, a harbour low-lit by the sun's last rays in which a cargo ship turned sharply, its wake toothpaste white as it worked towards the entrance and the open ocean.
They hadn't given him the shilling he'd been contracted to receive for a supernumary's six-week passage. The previous evening the Chief had cracked his daily ration of twenty-four cans and half of whisky without which the engines didn't run, the cadets had shaken his hand, the ship's master hadn't bothered to say goodbye: all somewhere within the brightly lit machine which heeled across the green waters far below.
He sat on the wall's warm concrete coping kicking his heels against its bricks, his stomach tight against a pang of loneliness, against the knowledge that no-one in the city sprawled below him knew, or cared about him, against the keen anticipation that, come the morning, he would turn his face again to the old continent and begin a journey in the footsteps of Livingstone and Rhodes, Kruger, Moffat, Selous, Jamieson and de Beers, crossing the realms of Tchaka and Mzilikaze, the diamondlands of Kimberley, the goldfields of the Witwatersrand, and the sluggish Limpopo, to a land he didn't know locked deep in its heart. All he had for his journey was the name of the man who would meet him two thousand miles to the north and the bright confidence of youth.

