Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/43

 recovery of a particular girl, when all the time, as everybody knew, there were hundreds and hundreds of others, just as good, to be had for the asking. Their reasonable fears for Pi-Noi's safety were based upon the argument that a person who would beat a man would certainly kill a woman. On the whole, they concluded, it would be at once more wholesome and more pleasant to go away now, and to avoid Kria for the future.

Kria, unaided, tried some very amateurish tracking on his own account, his great love setting at naught the Malay's instinctive horror of entering the jungle unaccompanied. He succeeded only in getting hopelessly bushed, and at last won his way back to his house, almost by a miracle. He was worn out with anxiety and fatigue, foot-sore, heartsore, weary soul and body, and nearly starved to death. The Sâkai seemed to have vanished from the forest for twenty miles around: his trading was at a standstill; he was humiliated to the dust; and his utter impotence was like a load of galling fetters clamped about his soul. Yet all the while his love. of Pi-Noi and his hungry longing for her were only intensified by her absence and her heartlessness. He missed her—was haunted by the sound of her voice—was tortured by elusive wraiths of her which emerged suddenly to mock him from the forest's pitiless depths.

V

The moon had been near the full on the night when the wanderlust, as the Sâkai called it, had