e east that harbours both light and darkness.
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.

The steersman dug his paddle into the stream, and held hard with
stiffened arms, his body thrown forward. The water gurgled aloud; and
suddenly the long straight reach seemed to pivot on its centre, 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 white man turned to look ahead. 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. 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 narrow creek was like a ditch: tortuous, fabulously deep; filled
with gloom under the thin strip of pure and shining blue of the heaven.
Immense trees soared up, invisible behind the festooned draperies of
creepers. 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.
The short words of the paddlers reverberated loudly between the thick
and sombre walls of vegetation. 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 men poled in the shoaling water. The creek broadened, opening out
into a wide sweep of a stagnant lagoon. The forests receded from the
marshy bank, leaving a level strip of bright green, reedy grass to frame
the reflected blueness of the sky. A fleecy pink cloud drifted high
above, trailing the delicate colouring of its image under the floating
leaves and the silvery blossoms of the lotus. A little house, perched
on high piles, appeared black in the distance. 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 car