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Srikanta will beat them all to find us in this darkness. Won't it be fun to swim to Satua's reef and to come across in the morning to our bank and then walk back home along the river? What can the beggars do?'

I had heard the name of the reef before. 'But Satua's reef is such a long way off!' I protested.

'You call that a long way?' said Indra in utter indifference. 'It is hardly twelve or fifteen miles. If your arms get tired, all you have got to do is to keep afloat on your back: besides, you will get plenty of half-burnt logs of wood floating by you, logs with which dead bodies have been burnt.'

As soon as I realised the meaning of Indra's programme of escape, the stout heart within me contracted to a very small point. After rowing for a while longer I asked, 'But what will become of your dinghy?'

'The other day,' said Indra, 'I made my escape just in this way. Next day I came back and took my dinghy from them. I said somebody else must have taken it for the night without my knowledge, and that it wasn't I.'

Then the escape he had been picturing was no idle dream or fancy, but an actual possibility, as proved by his previous experience!

The canoe went up to an opening between two reefs, through which water flowed as in a canal: at its mouth were tied a number of fishermen's boats in a row, their lamps burning dimly. We went round one of the reefs to the other side, where the force of the water had created several passages for its flow, and the mouth of each of these openings was hidden from the view of the rest by clumps of casuarina trees. Passing through one