Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/107

 It was to the salt lick of Mîsong that my friend. Pandak Âris came one day, with two Sâkai companions, from his house below the rapids. When I knew him, he was an old man of seventy or thereabout, wizened and dry, with deep furrows of wrinkle on face and body. His left arm was shrivelled and powerless, and he bore many ugly scars besides. His closely cropped hair was white as hoarfrost, and from his chin there depended a long goat's beard of the same hue, which waggled to and fro with the notion of his lips. Two solitary yellow fangs were set in his gums, and his mouth was a cavern stained to a dark red colour with betel-nut juice. His words came indistinctly through his quid and the wad of coarse tobacco which he held wedged between his upper lip and his toothless gums; but he had many things to tell concerning the jungles in which he had lived so long, and of the Sâkai folk with whom he had associated, and, whenever I chanced to tie up my boat for the night at his bathing-raft, we were wont to sit talking till the dawn was reddening in the east, for age had made of him a very bad sleeper.

In his youth he had come across the Peninsula from Rĕmbau, near its western seaboard, to the interior of Pahang, on the other side of the main range of mountains, which run from north to south. He had had no special object in his journey, but had drifted aimlessly, as young men will, to the fate that awaited him, he knew not where. She proved to be a Jĕlai girl whose people lived near the limits of