o have been transformed into the glorious metal
that the little fleets of Solomon and Huram sailed so far to seek. The
Aurea Chersonese was a breathing, pulsating reality.

BUSUK

The Story of a Malayan Girlhood

They called her Busuk, or "the youngest" at her birth. Her father,
the old punghulo, or chief, of the little kampong, or village, of
Passir Panjang, whispered the soft Allah Akbar, the prayer to Allah,
in her small brown ear.

The subjects of the punghulo brought presents of sarongs run with gold
thread, and not larger than a handkerchief, for Busuk to wear about
her waist. They also brought gifts of rice in baskets of cunningly
woven cocoanut fibre; of bananas, a hundred on a bunch; of durians,
that filled the bungalow with so strong an odor that Busuk drew up
her wrinkled, tiny face into a quaint frown; and of cocoanuts in
their great green, oval shucks.

Busuk's old aunt, who lived far away up the river Maur, near the foot
of Mount Ophir, sent a yellow gold pin for the hair; her husband,
the Hadji Mat, had washed the gold from the bed of the stream that
rushed by their bungalow.

Busuk's brother, who was a sergeant in his Highness's the Sultan's
artillery at Johore, brought a tiny pair of sandals all worked in
many-colored beads. Never had such presents been seen at the birth
of any other of Punghulo Sahak's children.

Two days later the Imam Paduka Tuan sent Busuk's father a letter
sewn up in a yellow bag. It contained a blessing for Busuk. Busuk
kept the letter all her life, for it was a great thing for the high
priest to do.

On the seventh day Busuk's head was shaven and she was named Fatima;
but they called her Busuk in the kampong, and some even called her
Inchi Busuk, the princess.

From the low-barred window of Busuk's home she could look out on the
shimmering, sunlit waters of the Straits of Malacca. The loom on which
Busuk's mother wove the sarongs for the punghulo and for her sons
stood by the side of the window, and Busuk, from the sling in which
she sat on her mother's side, could see the fishing praus glide by,
and also the big lumber tonkangs, and at rare intervals one of his
Highness's launches.

Sometimes she blinked her eyes as a vagrant shaft of sunlight straggled
down through the great green and yellow fronds of the cocoanut palms
that stood about the bungalow; sometimes she kept her little black
eyes fixed gravely on the flying shuttle which her mother threw d