Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/426

 ished utterly. The valley was no longer one of nature's inviolate and secret places, and the river was no more the strong, unfettered, vainglorious monster of my memory. It was in chains, a thrall to man, and to me it seemed to bear its gyves with a subdued and chastened sadness at once bitter and heartbroken.

The next morning I left the Falls of the Kine-cleft Bank and rode fifty miles to the residency of Kuala Lipis. My way took me through country which had once been wild, where now the great trunk road strung village to village, like onions on a string, and the whole line of my ride was marked by newly oc- cupied plantations, and by signs of the commercial progress and material development which white men and their civilization bring in their train. Then as I neared my home and turned my thoughts to the piles of official correspondence which I knew must be awaiting my return; caught sight of the hurrying telegraph peons, and remembered how at the end of that infernal wire there sat men whose business it was to impede me with instructions concerning matters which they imperfectly compreltended; as I heard the pat, pat of the tennis balls on the court within the dismantled stockade and saw the golfers. driving off from a neighbouring tee-suddenly the thought came to me of what my life in that district had wont to be less than a decade earlier. And then, though all the changes around me had been things for which I had worked and striven with all my heart and soul, somehow it seemed to me for the