Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/26

 idea. The mere fact that their poor vocabulary was straightway beggared by the effort to express their admiration, left them mentally gasping; wherefore Kria, son of Mat, a very ordinary young Malay, endowed, as it chanced, with few of the forceful qualities of his race, found himself of a sudden an object of almost superstitious hero-worship.

Kria presently made the discovery anent solitude which is attributed to Adam. He was a Malay and a Muhammadan, to whom the naked, pantheistical Sâkai is a dog of indescribable uncleanliness. Thirty miles down river there was a Malay village where many maidens of his own breed were to be had, almost for the asking, from their grateful parents by a man so well-to-do as Kria had now become; but these ladies were hard-bit, ill-favoured young women, prematurely gnarled by labour in the rice-fields and tanned to the colour of the bottom of a cooking-pot by exposure to sun and weather. Or dinarily, however, the aggressive plainness of these damsels might not have affected the issue; but it chanced that the particular devil whose province it is to look after mésalliances was as busy here in this hidden nook of the forest as ever he is in Mayfair. It was surely by his contrivance that Kria, Malay and Muhammadan that he was, fixed his heart upon a Sâkai girl—herself the daughter of Sakai, nude, barbarous, and disreputable—and the blame may with greater certainty be allotted to him, because Kria's first meeting with her was in no sense of his seeking.