Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/177

 improvised cigarettes at the dâmar-torch which provided the only light, and at last had broken the silence which so long had held them.

The talk flitted lightly over many subjects, all of a concrete character; for talk among natives plays for the most part around facts, rarely around ideas. and the peace of soul induced by repletion is not stimulating to the mind. Che' Sĕman, the owner of the house, and his two sons, Âwang and Ngah, discussed the prospects of the crops then growing in the fields behind the village. Their cousin, Abdullah, who clanced to be passing the night in his relatives' house, told of a fall which his wife's step-mother's brother had come by when climbing a cocoanut tree. Mat, his bîras (for they had married two sisters, which established a definite relationship between them according to Malay ideas), added a few more or less repulsive details to Abdullah's description of the corpse after the accident. These were well received. and attracted the attention of the two remaining men, Pôtek and Kassim, who had been discussing the price of rice and the varying chances of gêtah-hunting: whereupon the talk became general. Pôtek and Kassim had recently come across the mountains from Dûngun, in Trĕnggânu, where the claimant to the sultanate of Pahang was at that time collecting the force, which later invaded and conquered the country. They told all that they had seen and heard, multiplying their figures with the daring recklessness common to a people who rarely regard arithmetic as one of the exact sciences; but even this