orth-east monsoon. I noticed that the fruit-trees planted along the
shore were old, and that scores of them had ceased bearing. 'They will
last my day,' said he. 'Let my sons plant others if they so will.' He
always spoke in this careless way of his children, and I believe he had
many, for an islander keeps as many wives as he can afford; but they
lived about the villages, and could not be told from the other
inhabitants by any sign of rank or mark of favour he showed them.

"For a long while I believed that Aoodya must be a daughter of his.
She always denied it, but owned that she had never known her mother and
had lived in Hamid's house ever since she could remember. Anyhow, he
took the greatest care of me, and never allowed me to join the
expeditions which sailed twice a year from the island--to Palawan for
paddy, and to the north of Borneo with oil and nuts and pandanus mats.
He may have mistrusted me; but more likely he forbade it out of care for
me and the music I played; for the _prahus_ regularly came back with
three or four of their number missing--either capsized on the voyage or
blown away towards Tawi-Tawi, where the pirates accounted for them.

"Though I might not sail abroad he allowed me to join the tuburing
parties off the shore. We would work along the reefs there in rafts of
bamboo, towing with us two or three dug-outs filled with mashed
_tubur_-roots. At the right spot the dug-outs would be upset, and after
a while the fish came floating up on their sides, or belly uppermost, to
be speared by us; for the root puddles the water like milk, and
stupefies them somehow without hurting the flesh, which in an hour or so
is fit to eat.

"We had been tuburing one afternoon, and put back with our baskets
filled to a spit of the shore where we had left an old islander, Kotali
by name, alone and tending a fire for our meal. Coming near we saw him
stretched on the sand by his cooking-pots, and shouted to wake him, for
his fire was low. Kotali did not stir. I was one of the first to jump
ashore and run to him. He lay with his legs drawn up, his hands
clenched, his eyes wide open and staring at us horribly. The man was as
dead as a nail.

"I never saw people worse frightened. 'The Berbalangs!' said someone in
a dreadful sort of whisper, and we started to run back to the raft for
our lives--I with the rest, for the panic had taken hold of me, though I
could see no sign of an enemy. I supposed these B