On the Thursday evening, precisely two weeks after we had struggled with our bags through a snow-clotted Kentish railway station, we stood in the ship’s bow and watched a cloud of flying-fish flicking and splashing magically from the indigo-tinted water. The sun’s setting turned the sky to a thousand shades of glory, and gave us the sensation of cool. I breathed in, and for the first time in many days the air bore an indefinable promise of solid land, far-distant traces of smoke and dust and vegetation that the olfactory organs can only perceive when they have been long without. We went to bed surrounded by nothing but the heave and swell of open sea, and woke in the morning with the Western Ghats rising blue-grey into the haze of the horizon. As the brutal sun travelled overhead, the land drew us ever nearer, until by the afternoon passengers crowded the rails to see the city of Bombay approach.

When we were close enough to pick out the peculiar architecture of the yacht club, my heart began to quail: Land was a solid, pulsating, cacophonous, and even from this distance, malodorous wall of people, and the water was not much less heavily populated, by boats of all shapes and sizes. Perhaps we could just wait on board for a few hours, or days, until they all went away. But we were being met, it seemed, by shipping agents who would nurse us and our luggage through customs, and here, as elsewhere, company pride would undoubtedly demand that each man fight to ensure that his client be early through the process. I shook my head and went down to my suffocating cabin to assemble my last-minute things, to be startled five minutes later when the great engines fell silent.

We were, as I’d anticipated, claimed instantly by a round and obsequious brown-faced man in a tropical suit, accompanied by a pair of uniformed chuprassis. He introduced himself as Mr Cook and apologised five times in the first quarter hour for this “unseasonable” great heat which his great city was inflicting on ourselves, since at this time of year we might have justifiably anticipated a more gentle climate, a temperature more suited to our English selves, a less trying degree of mercury. After the fifth such synonymous phrase I wished him violently struck mute, but I was too flattened by the “unseasonable tropical humidity” to do so myself.