Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/195

 strokes. Thus they journeyed on in silence through a shadowy world. The wonderful virgin forest-im- mense banks of vegetation rising sheer from the river's brink on either hand-made of the stream a narrow defile between lowering walls of darkness. The boughs and tree-tops overhead, converging closely, reduced the sky to a slender, star-bespangled ribbon. A steel-like glint played here and there upon the surface of the running water, and its insistent roar. sinking now and again to a mere murmur, was bleut with mysterious whisperings. Once in a long while an argus pheasant would yell its ringing chal- lenge from its drumming-ground on a neighbouring hill-cap or the abrupt bark of a spotted deer, or the cry of some wild beast would momentarily break in upon the stillness. Sentul and Chêp were travelling on a half-freshet, and this, in the far upper country, where the streams tear over their beds of rocks or pebbles through the gorges formed by their high banks, and where each drains a big catchment area, means that their boat was tilted downriver at a head- long pace. The dawn was breaking when the fugi- tives reached their destination-the Malay village in which Sentul had his home; and by then a good fifty miles separated them from the Sâkai camp, and they felt themselves to be safe from pursuit.

To understand this, you must realize what the Sakai of the interior is. Men of the aboriginal race who have lived for years surrounded by Malay habi- Latious are as different from him as are the fallow deer in an English park from the sambhur of the