Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/138

 forgathering with other white men. Therefore, I had made the most of it, and looking back, I fear that I had occupied the rostrum during the greater part of that evening. I had told my audience of the pĕnanggal—the "Undone One"—that horrible wraith of a woman who has died in childbirth, who comes to torment and prey upon small children in the guise of a ghastly face and bust, with a comet's tail of blood-stained entrails flying in her wake; of the mâti-ânak, the weird little white animal which makes beast noises round the graves of children, and is supposed to have absorbed their souls; and of the pôlong, or familiar spirits, which men bind to their service by raising them up from the corpses of babies that have been stillborn, the tips of whose tongues they bite off and swallow after the infant has been brought to life by magic agencies. It was at this point that young Middleton began to pluck up his cars; and I, finding that one of my hearers was al last showing signs of being interested, launched out will renewed vigour, until my sorely tried companions, one by one, went off to bed, each to his own quarters.

Middleton was staying with me at the time, and he and I sat for a while in silence, after the others had gone, looking at the moonlight on the river. Middleton was the first to speak.

"That was a curious myth you were telling us about the pôlong." he said. "There is an incident connected with it which I have never spoken of before, and have always sworn that I would keep to