Chapter 11 - Page 2

splendour and no joy in existence.

Crouching in his shady hiding-place, he closed his eyes, trying to evoke
the gracious and charming image of the white figure that for him was the
beginning and the end of life. With eyes shut tight, his teeth hard set,
he tried in a great effort of passionate will to keep his hold on that
vision of supreme delight. In vain! His heart grew heavy as the figure
of Nina faded away to be replaced by another vision this time--a vision
of armed men, of angry faces, of glittering arms--and he seemed to hear
the hum of excited and triumphant voices as they discovered him in his
hiding-place. Startled by the vividness of his fancy, he would open his
eyes, and, leaping out into the sunlight, resume his aimless wanderings
around the clearing. As he skirted in his weary march the edge of the
forest he glanced now and then into its dark shade, so enticing in its
deceptive appearance of coolness, so repellent with its unrelieved gloom,
where lay, entombed and rotting, countless generations of trees, and
where their successors stood as if mourning, in dark green foliage,
immense and helpless, awaiting their turn. Only the parasites seemed to
live there in a sinuous rush upwards into the air and sunshine, feeding
on the dead and the dying alike, and crowning their victims with pink and
blue flowers that gleamed amongst the boughs, incongruous and cruel, like
a strident and mocking note in the solemn harmony of the doomed trees.

A man could hide there, thought Dain, as he approached a place where the
creepers had been torn and hacked into an archway that might have been
the beginning of a path. As he bent down to look through he heard angry
grunting, and a sounder of wild pig crashed away in the undergrowth. An
acrid smell of damp earth and of decaying leaves took him by the throat,
and he drew back with a scared face, as if he had been touched by the
breath of Death itself. The very air seemed dead in there--heavy and
stagnating, poisoned with the corruption of countless ages. He went on,
staggering on his way, urged by the nervous restlessness that made him
feel tired yet caused him to loathe the very idea of immobility and
repose. Was he a wild man to hide in the woods and perhaps be killed
there--in the darkness--where there was no room to breathe? He would
wait for his enemies in the sunlight, where he could see the sky and feel
the breeze. He knew how a Malay chief should die. The sombre and
desperate fury, that peculiar inheritance of his race, took possession of
him, and he glared savagely across the clearing towards the gap in the
bushes by the riverside. They would come from there. In imagination he
saw them now. He saw the bearded faces and the white jackets of the
officers, the light