![]() ![]() ![]() Moreover, they disliked Arsat, first as a stranger, and also because he who repairs a ruined house, and dwells in it, proclaims that he is not afraid to live amongst the spirits that haunt the places abandoned by mankind. They would have preferred to spend the night somewhere else than on this lagoon of weird aspect and ghostly reputation. The polers ran along the sides of the boat glancing over their shoulders at the end of the day's journey. The steersman, pointing with his paddle, said, 'Arsat is there. ![]() Near it, two tall nibong palms, that seemed to have come out of the forests in the background, leaned slightly over the ragged roof, with a suggestion of sad tenderness and care in the droop of their leafy and soaring heads. A little house, perched on high piles, appeared black in the distance. A fleecy pink cloud drifted high above, trailing the delicate coloring of its image under the floating leaves and the silvery blossoms of the lotus. The forests receded from the marshy bank, leaving a level strip of bright-green, reedy grass to frame the reflected blueness of the sky. The creek broadened, opening out into a wide sweep of a stagnant lagoon. Darkness oozed out from between the trees, through the tangled maze of the creepers, from behind the great fantastic and unstirring leaves the darkness, mysterious and invincible the darkness scented and poisonous of impenetrable forests. The short words of the paddlers reverberated loudly between the thick and somber walls of vegetation. Here and there, near the glistening blackness of the water, a twisted root of some tall tree showed amongst the tracery of small ferns, black and dull, writhing and motionless, like an arrested snake. Immense trees soared up, invisible behind the festooned draperies of creepers. The narrow creek was like a ditch: tortuous, fabulously deep filled with gloom under the thin strip of pure and shining blue of the heaven. It glided through, brushing the overhanging twigs, and disappeared from the river like some slim and amphibious creature leaving the water for its lair in the forests. The course of the boat had been altered at right-angles to the stream, and the carved dragon-head of its prow was pointing now at a gap in the fringing bushes of the bank. The water gurgled aloud and suddenly the long straight reach seemed to pivot on its center, the forests swung in a semicircle, and the slanting beams of sunset touched the broadside of the canoe with a fiery glow, throwing the slender and distorted shadows of its crew upon the streaked glitter of the river. The steersman dug his paddle into the stream, and held hard with stiffened arms, his body thrown forward. Astern of the boat the repeated call of some bird, a cry discordant and feeble, skipped along over the smooth water and lost itself, before it could reach the other shore, in the breathless silence of the world. For the last three miles of its course the wandering, hesitating river, as if enticed irresistibly by the freedom of an open horizon, flows straight into the sea, flows straight to the east - to the east that harbors both light and darkness. The white man, turning his back upon the setting sun, looked along the empty and broad expanse of the sea-reach. And the white man's canoe, advancing up stream in the short-lived disturbance of its own making, seemed to enter the portals of a land from which the very memory of motion had for ever departed. The churnedup water frothed alongside with a confused murmur. Nothing moved on the river but the eight paddles that rose flashing regularly, dipped together with a single splash while the steersman swept right and left with a periodic and sudden flourish of his blade describing a glinting semicircle above his head. ![]() In the stillness of the air every tree, every leaf, every bough, every tendril of creeper and every petal of minute blossoms seemed to have been bewitched into an immobility perfect and final. At the foot of big, towering trees, trunkless nipa palms rose from the mud of the bank, in bunches of leaves enormous and heavy, that hung unstirring over the brown swirl of eddies. The forests, somber and dull, stood motionless and silent on each side of the broad stream. At the end of the straight avenue of forests cut by the intense glitter of the river, the sun appeared unclouded and dazzling, poised low over the water that shone smoothly like a band of metal. The white man rested his chin on his crossed arms and gazed at the wake of the boat. The Malay only grunted, and went on looking fixedly at the river. 'We will pass the night in Arsat's clearing. The white man, leaning with both arms over the roof of the little house in the stern of the boat, said to the steersman. ![]()
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