I being as one already dead, and my wife
being legally divorced from me. While she was yet bound to me, she
sent to me food, by one of the Chief's slaves, and from him I learned
the plot which had undone me. Brother, hast thou any water? I thirst
sore, Little Brother. My mouth is hard and rough as the skin of the
skate, and it is dry as the fish that has been smoked above the fire.
Hast thou no water? Maimunah! My wife! Water, I pray thee! Water!
Water!--O mother! O mother! O mother of mine! Water, mother! Water! I
die! I die! Mother! * * *'

His voice died away into inarticulate moaning, and, in an hour, he was
dead.

Next morning his body was carried out for burial, and for a time his
cage remained unoccupied.

In the cage on Talib's right, there was a man, so haggard, meagre,
filthy, diseased, and brutal in his habits, that it was difficult to
believe that he was altogether human. His hair fell in long, tangled,
matted, vermin-infested shocks, almost to his waist. His eyes,--two
burning pits of fierce fire,--were sunk deep into his yellow,
parchment-coloured face. The cheek-bones were so prominent that they
resembled the sharp edges of a _seladang's_[11] skull, and his temples
stood out like the bosses on the forehead of a fighting ram. The dirt of
ages clung in the thousand wrinkles and creases of his skin; and he
hardly moved save to scratch himself fiercely, as a monkey tears at his
flea-infested hide. A small ration of rice and fish was brought to him
daily by an old and wrinkled hag,--his wife of other years,--who made a
meagre living for him and for herself, by selling sweet-stuff from door
to door. She came to him twice daily, and he tore ravenously at the
food, eating it with horrible noises of animal satisfaction, while she
cooed at him, through toothless gums, with many endearing terms, such as
Malay women use to little children. Not even his misery and degradation
had been able to kill her love, though its wretched object had long
ceased to understand it, or to recognise her, save as the giver of the
food he loved and longed for. He had been ten years in these cages, and
had passed through the entire range of feeling, of which a captive in a
Malay prison is capable. From acute misery to despair, from despair to
stupid indifference, he had at length reached the stage which the Malays
call _kaleh_. It means insensibility, such as few can imagine or
understand, and which is so bestial, that it reduces a fe