Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/273

 Saïdyah! I have thought of you while spinning and weaving, and while pounding the rice in the block that carries three times twelve notches made by my hand. Here I am under the ketapan, the first day of the new moon. Be welcome. Saïdyah, I will be your wife!”

That was the music which sounded in his ear, and prevented him from listening to all the news people told him on the way.

At last he saw the ketapan. Or rather he saw a dark space which covered many stars before his eyes. That must be the diati-wood, near the tree where he was to see Adinda again, next day at sunrise. He searched in the dark, and felt the stems of many trees. Soon he found a well-known unevenness on the south side of a tree, and laid his finger in a nick which Si-Panteh had cut in it with his hatchet, in order to exorcize the evil spirit who was the cause of the tooth-ache of Si-Panteh’s mother, shortly before the birth of his little brother. This was the ketapan he sought.

Yes, this indeed was the spot where for the first time he had seen Adinda with other eyes than the rest of his playfellows, because there for the first time she had refused to take part in a game that, after all, she had played with all the children, boys and girls, only a little while before. There she had given him the melatti.

He sat down at the foot of the tree, and looked up at the stars. And when one of them set, he took it as a greeting on his return to Badoor. And he wondered whether Adinda would now be asleep. And whether she had correctly marked the moons in her rice-block. It would grieve him so very much if she had missed one, as though it were not enough six-and-thirty! And whether she had painted pretty shawls and skirts. And also he asked himself with some curiosity who might now be living in his fathers house. And his youth came back to him, and his mother, and how the buffalo had saved him from the tiger, and he could not help musing on what might have become of Adinda if that buffalo had been less faithful.

He particularly watched the setting of the stars in the west, and with every star that vanished over the horizon he calculated