He smiled contentedly, for his mind was made up. He would not ask to be made
master of the Sultan’s marvellous yacht, that was sent out from Liverpool,—
although the possibility made him catch his breath: he would ask nothing for
himself,—he would ask that his Excellency let his son Noa go to Mecca, that he
might become a hadji and then some day—who knows—Noa might become a
kateeb in the attap-thatched mosque back of the palace.
And Noa, unmindful of his father’s dreaming, played with the little Prince,
kicking the ragga ball, or sailing miniature praus out into the river, and off
toward the shimmering straits. But often they sat cross-legged and dropped bits
of chicken and fruit between the palm sleepers of the wharf to the birch-colored
crocodiles below, who snapped them up, one after another, never taking their
small, cruel eyes off the brown faces that peered down at them.
Child-life is measured by a few short years in Malaya. The hot, moist air and the
fierce rays of the equatorial sun fall upon child and plant alike, and they grow so
fast that you can almost hear them!
The little Prince soon forgot his childhood companions in the gorgeous court of
his Highness, the Sultan of Johore, and Noa took the place of his father on the
launch, while the old man silently mourned as he leaned back in its stern, and
alternately watched the sunlight that played along the carefully polished rails,
and the deepening shadows that bound the black labyrinth of mangrove roots on
the opposite shore. The Governor had never noted his repeated protestations and
deep-drawn sighs.
“But who cares,” he thought. “It is the will of Allah! The Prince will surely
remember us when he returns.”
On the very edge of Bander Maharani, just where the almost endless miles of
betel-nut palms shut from view the yellow turrets of the palace, stood the palm-
thatched bungalow in which Anak grew, in a few short years, from childhood to
womanhood. The hot, sandy soil all about was covered with the flaxen burs of
the betel, and the little sunlight that found its way down through the green and
yellow fronds drew rambling checks on the steaming earth, that reminded Anak
of the plaid on the silken sarong that Noa’s father had given her the day she was
betrothed to his son.