Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/31

 first time that she had heard her native tongue spoken with a foreign accent, and the oddity of the thing amused her. Then she stepped lightly into the canoe and squatted in the bow.

The boat resumed its journey up-river, warring with the current; was tugged and hauled over fallen trees and round threatening ridges of rock; was towed up difficult places by long lines of rattan; was manoeuvred inch by inch up rapids, where the waters roared furiously; or glided in obedience to the punters along the smooth, sun-dappled reaches; and all that dreamy afternoon Pi-Noi sat in the bow, her back turned to Kria, her face averted. She was almost motionless, yet to the Malay, whose eyes pursued her, she conveyed an extraordinary impression of being at once absorbed and keenly alert. Nothing that was happening, or that had happened recently in the jungle all about her, was hidden from Pi-Noi, though she seemed barely to move her head, and once she lifted her voice in a thrilling imitation of a bird's call and was answered at once from both sides of the stream. Though she sat consentingly in Kria's boat, he was subtly conscious that she was, in some strange fashion, an integral part of the forest that surrounded them; that she was a stranger to the life of mankind, as he understood it—the life of folk of his own race—who, at best, are only trespassers upon Nature's vast domain. He held his breath fearfully, possessed by the idea that at any moment this girl might vanish whence she had come, and thereafter be lost to him