experience. Sooner or later the importunate longing for the jungle, which is born
in the hearts of all forest dwellers, would rise up and drive her back to her own
people, but of this she knew nothing, and for the time she was happy.
In the Sâkai camp it was not until day had dawned that the demon-worshippers,
looking at one another through heavy sleepless eyes, set in pallid faces, among
the draggled greenery in the house, noted that two of their number were missing.
The quick sight of the jungle people soon spied the trail of a man and a woman,
and, following it, they crowded down to the place where the boat had been
moored. Here they squatted on the ground and began to smoke. 'Rĕj-ă-
rŏj!'—'She is lost!'—they said laconically, in the barbarous jargon of the jungle
people, and then relapsed into silence.
'May they be devoured by a tiger!' snarled Ku-îsh, the Porcupine, deep down in
his throat, and, at the word, all his hearers shuddered. The curse is the most
dreadful that the jungle people know, and if you shared your home with the great
cats, as they do, you would regard it with equal fear and respect. Ku-îsh said
little more, but he went back to the camp and unslung an exceedingly ancient
match-lock, which hung from a beam of the roof in the Chief's hut. It was the
only gun in the camp, and was the most precious possession of the tribe, but no
man asked him what he was doing, or tried to stay him when he presently
plunged into the jungle heading down stream.
Two days later, in the cool of the afternoon, Kria left Chêp in the house busy
with the evening's rice, and, accompanied by a small boy, his son by a former
marriage, he went to seek for fish in one of the swamps at the back of the
village. These marshy places, which are to be found in the neighbourhood of
many Malay Kampongs, are ready-made rice fields, but since the cultivation of a
pâdi swamp requires more exacting labour than most Malays are prepared to
bestow upon it, they are often left to lie fallow, while crops are grown in
clearings on the neighbouring hills. In dry weather the cracked, parched earth,
upon which no vegetation sprouts, alone marks the places which, in the rainy
season, are pools of stagnant water, but so sure as there is a pond, there also are
the little muddy fish which the Malays call rûan and sĕpat. Where they vanish to
when the water in which they live is licked up by the sunrays, or how they
support life during a long season of drought, no man clearly knows, but it is
believed that they burrow deep into the earth, and live in the moist mud
underfoot until better times come with the heavy tropic rain.
Kria carried two long jôran, or native fishing rods, over his shoulder, and his