Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/206

 received by the assembled elders as a suggestion that was manifestly ridiculous. Ku-ish, they observed sententiously, was in the jungle, the portals of which were closed to all save the Sâkai. Unaided by them, neither white man nor Malay could ever hope to set hands upon him. They would take no part in the hunt. I could not bring any material pressure to bear, as I had undertaken that no harm should befall them at the meeting, and when we had once separated they could vanish quite as effectively as Ku-ish had done. They were fully aware of all this, and were irritatingly placid and happy. It looked like an absolute impasse.

At length a very aged man, the principal Sâkai elder present, a wrinkled and unimaginably dirty old savage, scarred by encounters with wild beasts, and gray with skin diseases and wood-ashes, lifted up his voice and spoke, shaking his straggling mop of grizzled hair in time to the cadence of his words.

"There is a custom, Tian," he said. "There is a custom when such things befall. The Porcupine hath killed the Gob, and our tribe must repay sevenfold. Seven lives for the life of a Gob. It is the custom."

He spoke in Malay, which gave him an unusual command of numerals, and he had attained to a degree of civilization and experience which enabled him to perform the brain-cracking feat of counting up to ten.

The proposal sounded generous, but a little in- quiry presently revealed the old chief's real inten-


 * Gob-Stranger, i. ., any person who is not a Såkai.