Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/297

 their children, and dwells upon hearty meals and quiet nights, then in sympathy the punkali moves slowly, sentimentally, and stops.

"Tarek! Pull!" cries a voice from the inner room, and Ûmat, awakening with a start, bursts into voluble reproaches, addressed to himself in the guttural speech of the Kelantan people. Then he very calmly relapses into slumber.

If you sail up the cast coast of the Malay Penin- sula, past the long sandy beaches, backed by a fringe of casuarina trees, which are the shores of Pahang and Trengganu, you at last reach the spot where the bulk of the waters of the Kelantan River used once upon a time to empty themselves into the China Sea. The principal mouth is now a mile or two farther up the coast, but the groves of palm trees slow that the people have been less fickle than the river, and that the villages have continued to thrive in spite of the fact that the highways of traffic have deserted them. It is here that Ûmat was born and bred, one of a family of fisher folk, successive genera- tions of whom have dwelt at Kuala Kelantan ever since the beginning of things.

If you look at Ûmat's round, splay-featured face and observe it carefully, you may read therein much that bears upon the history of his people. The pre- vailing expression is one of profound, calm patience, not the look of conscious waiting and of the pain of hope long deferred, which is the restless European substitute therefor, but the contented endurance of