Page:Malay Sketches.pdf/112

 where you instinctively know the mud and sea meet, and there they watch the gradually receding tide with melancholy abstraction, as though they took no real interest in the daily toil of sustaining life.

Last, there is something else here, and, if you are not quite a stranger, you will look first, look longest, and look always for this other thing. Perhaps it is the extraordinary fitness of her surroundings (I say her advisedly), perhaps the art with which nature has designed the body of the saurian to make your think her a log, or a stranded palm-branch, a half-buried spar of a wrecked boat, or even a lighter or darker ridge of the surrounding mud—certain it is that as the crocodile lies there, basking in the sun which makes air and water and blistering slime shimmer and dance before your eyes, you will not notice the creature, nay, even when pointed out to you, it is ten to one that you will not even then realise that she is there.

But get nearer, speak no word and let your rowers pull a long and noiseless stroke till some one with a quick eye and a steady hand can put a bullet in the reptile's neck. As that great mouth suddenly opens, disclosing the rows of shining teeth, as it shuts again with the noise of a steel trap, as the horrible scaly claws dig deep into the mud in their agony and