There was no time even to pry the lid off, though. Getting the pigs and loading them aboard only took four days, but it seemed longer to Jack than all the time he’d spent in New Spain before. He avoided going ashore, and could not set foot on dry land without entertaining a moment’s phant’sy that Minerva would sail away and leave him stranded in that town, where anything that moved was pursued by a cloud of mosquitoes, and anything that didn’t was shortly buried in wind-blown sand.