Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/315

 inches high upon his head, and tumbled raggedly about his neck and ears. Sělěma was about to be- come the mother of his first-born, and for Ûmat to cut his hair in such circumstances would have been to invite disaster. He would not kill the fowls for the cook now, nor would he even drive a stray dog from the compound with violence, lest he should chance to do it a hurt; for he must shed no blood and do no injury to any living thing during his wife's pregnancy. One day he was sent on an errand up- river, and did not return for two nights. On inquiry it appeared that he camped in a friend's house and learned next day that his host's wife was also expect- ing shortly to give birth to a child. Therefore he had had to spend at least two nights in the house. Why? Because, if he had failed to do so, he might have brought death to Sělčma. Why should this be the result? Allah alone knoweth, but such is the teaching of the men of old, the very wise ones who lived aforetime.

But mat's chief privation was that he was for bidden to sit in the doorway of his house. This, to a Malay, was serious, for the seat in the doorway, at the head of the stair-ladder which leads to the ground, is to him much what the chimney corner is to an English peasant. It is here that he sits and looks. out patiently at life, as the European stares into the heart of a fire; it is here that his neighbours come to gossip with him, and it is in the doorway of his own or his friends' houses that the rumours that fill his narrow world are borne to him. To obstruct a door-