i had finished my hundred up—or rather he had—with the colonel and we strolled into the smoking room for a smoke and a drink rotund the fire before turning in. there were three other men already round the fire and they widened their circle to take us in. i didn't know them, hadn't spoken to them or indeed to anyone except the colonel in the large gaudy uncomfortably comfortable hotel. i was run down, out of sorts generally, and—like a fool, i thought now—had taken a week off to eat, or rather to read the menus of interminable table d'h?te dinners, to play golf and to walk on the "front" at torquay.

i had only arrived the day before, but the colonel (retired) a jolly tubby little man—with white moustaches like two s's lying side by side on the top of his stupid red lips and his kind choleric eyes bulging out on a life which he was quite content never for a moment to understand—made it a point, my dear sir, to know every new arrival within one hour after he arrived.

we got our drinks and as, rather forgetting that i was in england, i murmured the eastern formula, i noticed vaguely one of the other three glance at me over his shoulder for a moment. the colonel stuck out his fat little legs in front of him, turning up his neatly shoed toes before the blaze. two of the others were talking, talking as men so often do in the comfortable chairs of smoking rooms between ten and eleven at night, earnestly, seriously, of what they call affairs, or politics, or questions. i listened to their fat, full-fed, assured voices in that heavy room which smelt of solidity, safety, horsehair furniture, tobacco smoke, and the faint civilized aroma of whisky and soda. it came as a shock to me in that atmosphere that they were discussing india and the east: it does you know every now and again. sentimental? well, i expect one is sentimental about it, having lived there. it doesn't seem to go with solidity and horsehair furniture: the fifteen years come back to one in one moment all in a heap. how one hated it and how one loved it!

i suppose they had started on the durbar and the king's visit. they had got on to indian unrest, to our position in india, its duties, responsibilities, to the problem of east and west. they hadn't been there of course, they hadn't even seen the brothel and café chantant at port said suddenly open out into that pink and blue desert that leads you through africa and asia into the heart of the east. but they knew all about it, they had solved, with their fat voices and in their fat heads, riddles, older than the sphinx, of peoples remote and ancient and mysterious whom they had never seen and could never understand. one was, i imagine, a stockjobber, plump and comfortable with a greasy forehead and a high colour in his cheeks, smooth shiny brown hair and a carefully grown small moustache: a good dealer in the market; sharp and confident, with a loud voice and shifty eyes. the other was a clergyman: need i say more? except that he was more of a clergyman even than most clergymen, i mean that he wore tight things—leggings don't they call them? or breeches?—round his calves. i never know what it means: whether they are bishops or rural deans or archdeacons or archimandrites. in any case i mistrust them even more than the black trousers: they seem to close the last door for anything human to get in through the black clothes. the dog collar closes up the armour above, and below, as long as they were trousers, at any rate some whiff of humanity might have eddied up the legs of them and touched bare flesh. but the gaiters button them up finally, irremediably, for ever.

i expect he was an archdeacon: he was saying:

"you can't impose western civilization upon an eastern people—i believe i'm right in saying that there are over two hundred millions in our indian empire—without a little disturbance. i'm a liberal you know, i've been a liberal my whole life—family tradition—though i grieve to say i could not follow mr. gladstone on the home rule question. it seems to me a good sign, this movement, an awakening among the people. but don't misunderstand me, my dear sir, i am not making any excuses for the methods of the extremists. apart from my calling—i have a natural horror of violence. nothing can condone violence, the taking of human life, it's savagery, terrible, terrible."

"they don't put it down with a strong enough hand," the stock-jobber was saying almost fiercely. "there's too much liberalism in the east, too much namby-pambyism. it's all right here, of course, but it's not suited to the east. they want a strong hand. after all they owe us something: we aren't going to take all the kicks and leave them all the halfpence. rule 'em, i say, rule 'em, if you're going to rule 'em. look after 'em, of course: give 'em schools, if they want education—schools, hospitals, roads, and railways. stamp out the plague, fever, famine. but let 'em know you are top dog. that's the way to run an eastern country: i'm a white man, you're black; i'll treat you well, give you courts and justice; but i'm the superior race, i'm master here."

the man who had looked round at me when i said "here's luck!" was fidgeting about in his chair uneasily. i examined him more carefully. there was no mistaking the cause of his irritation. it was written on his face, the small close-cut white moustache, the smooth firm cheeks with the deep red-and-brown glow on them, the innumerable wrinkles round the eyes, and above all the eyes themselves, that had grown slow and steady and unastonished, watching that inexplicable, meaningless march of life under blazing suns. he had seen it, he knew. "ah," i thought, "he is beginning to feel his liver. if he would only begin to speak. we might have some fun."

"h'm, h'm," said the archdeacon. "of course there's something in what you say. slow and sure. things may be going too fast, and, as i say, i'm entirely for putting down violence and illegality with a strong hand. and after all, my dear sir, when you say we're the superior race you imply a duty. even in secular matters we must spread the light. i believe—devoutly—i am not ashamed to say so—that we are. we're reaching the people there, it's the cause of the unrest, we set them an example. they desire to follow. surely, surely we should help to guide their feet. i don't speak without a certain knowledge. i take a great interest, i may even say that i play my small part, in the work of one of our great missionary societies. i see our young men, many of them risen from the people, educated often, and highly educated (i venture to think), in board schools. i see them go out full of high ideals to live among those poor people. and i see them when they come back and tell me their tales honestly, unostentatiously. it is always the same, a message of hope and comfort. we are getting at the people, by example, by our lives, by our conduct. they respect us."

i heard a sort of groan, and then, quite loud, these strange words:

"kasimutal rameswaramvaraiyil terintavan."

"i beg your pardon," said the archdeacon, turning to the interrupter.

"i beg yours. tamil, tamil proverb. came into my mind. spoke without thinking. beg yours."

"not at all. very interesting. you've lived in india? would you mind my asking you for a translation?"

"it means 'he knows everything between benares and rameswaram.' last time i heard it, an old tamil, seventy or eighty years old, perhaps—he looked a hundred—used it of one of your young men. the young man, by the bye, had been a year and a half in india. d'you understand?"

"well, i'm not sure i do: i've heard, of course, of benares, but rameswaram, i don't seem to remember the name."

i laughed; i could not help it; the little anglo-indian looked so fierce. "ah!" he said, "you don't recollect the name. well, it's pretty famous out there. great temple—hindu—right at the southern tip of india. benares, you know, is up north. the old tamil meant that your friend knew everything in india after a year and a half: he didn't, you know, after seventy, after seven thousand years. perhaps you also don't recollect that the tamils are dravidians? they've been there since the beginning of time, before we came, or the dutch or portuguese or the muhammadans, or our cousins, the other aryans. uncivilized, black? perhaps, but, if they're black, after all it's their suns, through thousands of years, that have blackened them. they ought to know, if anyone does: but they don't, they don't pretend to. but you two gentlemen, you seem to know everything between kasimutal—that's benares—and rameswaram, without having seen the sun at all."

"my dear sir," began the archdeacon pompously, but the jobber interrupted him. he had had a number of whiskies and sodas, and was quite heated. "it's very easy to sneer: it doesn't mean because you've lived a few years in a place..."

"i? thirty. but they—seven thousand at least."

"i say, it doesn't mean because you've lived thirty years in a place that you know all about it. ramisram, or whatever the damned place is called, i've never heard of it and don't want to. you do, that's part of your job, i expect. but i read the papers, i've read books too, mind you, about india. i know what's going on. one knows enough—enough—data: east and west and the difference: i can form an opinion—i've a right to it even if i've never heard of ramis what d'you call it. you've lived there and you can't see the wood for the trees. we see it because we're out of it—see it at a distance."

"perhaps," said the archdeacon "there's a little misunderstanding. the discussion—if i may say so—is getting a little heated—unnecessarily, i think. we hold our views. this gentleman has lived in the country. he holds others. i'm sure it would be most interesting to hear them. but i confess i didn't quite gather them from what he said."

the little man was silent: he sat back, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. then he smiled:

"i won't give you views," he said. "but if you like i'll give you what you call details, things seen, facts. then you can give me your views on 'em."

they murmured approval.

"let's see, it's fifteen, seventeen years ago. i had a district then about as big as england. there may have been twenty europeans in it, counting the missionaries, and twenty million tamils and telegus. i expect nineteen millions of the tamils and telegus never saw a white man from one year's end to the other, or if they did, they caught a glimpse of me under a sun helmet riding through their village on a fleabitten grey indian mare. well, providence had so designed it that there was a stretch of coast in that district which was a barren wilderness of sand and scrubby thorn jungle—and nothing else—for three hundred miles; no towns, no villages, no water, just sand and trees for three hundred miles. o, and sun, i forgot that, blazing sun. and in the water off the shore at one place there were oysters, millions of them lying and breeding at the bottom, four or five fathoms down. and in the oysters, or some of them, were pearls."

well, we rule india and the sea, so the sea belongs to us, and the oysters are in the sea and the pearls are in the oysters. therefore of course the pearls belong to us. but they lie in five fathoms. how to get 'em up, that's the question. you'd think being progressive we'd dredge for them or send down divers in diving dresses. but we don't, not in india. they've been fishing up the oysters and the pearls there ever since the beginning of time, naked brown men diving feet first out of long wooden boats into the blue sea and sweeping the oysters off the bottom of the sea into baskets slung to their sides. they were doing it centuries and centuries before we came, when—as someone said—our ancestors were herding swine on the plains of norway. the arabs of the persian gulf came down in dhows and fished up pearls which found their way to solomon and the queen of sheba. they still come, and the tamils and moormen of the district come, and they fish 'em up in the same way, diving out of long wooden boats shaped and rigged as in solomon's time, as they were centuries before him and the queen of sheba. no difference, you see, except that we—government i mean—take two-thirds of all the oysters fished up: the other third we give to the diver, arab or tamil or moorman, for his trouble in fishing 'em up.

we used to have a pearl fishery about once in three years. it lasted six weeks or two months just between the two monsoons, the only time the sea is calm there. and i had, of course, to go and superintend it, to take government's share of oysters, to sell them, to keep order, to keep out k. d.'s—that means known depredators—and smallpox and cholera. we had what we called a camp, in the wilderness, remember, on the hot sand down there by the sea: it sprang up in a night, a town, a big town of thirty or forty thousand people, a little india, asia almost, even a bit of africa. they came from all districts: tamils, telegus, fat chetties, parsees, bombay merchants, sinhalese from ceylon, the arabs and their negroes, somalis probably, who used to be their slaves. it was an immense gamble; everyone bought oysters for the chance of the prizes in them: it would have taken fifty white men to superintend that camp properly; they gave me one, a little boy of twenty-four fresh-cheeked from england, just joined the service. he had views, he had been educated in a board school, won prizes, scholarships, passed the civil service 'exam'. yes, he had views; he used to explain them to me when he first arrived. he got some new ones i think before he got out of that camp. you'd say he only saw details, things happen, facts, data. well, he did that too. he saw men die—he hadn't seen that in his board school—die of plague or cholera, like flies, all over the place, under the trees, in the boats, outside the little door of his own little hut. and he saw flies, too, millions, billions of them all day long buzzing, crawling over everything, his hands, his little fresh face, his food. and he smelt the smell of millions of decaying oysters all day long and all night long for six weeks. he was sick four or five times a day for six weeks; the smell did that. insanitary? yes, very. why is it allowed? the pearls, you see, the pearls; you must get them out of the oysters as you must get the oysters out of the sea. and the pearls are very often small and embedded in the oyster's body. so you put all the oysters, millions of them, in dug-out canoes in the sun to rot. they rot very well in that sun, and the flies come and lay eggs in them, and maggots come out of the eggs and more flies come out of the maggots; and between them all, the maggots and the sun, the oysters' bodies disappear, leaving the pearls and a little sand at the bottom of the canoe. unscientific? yes, perhaps; but after all it's our camp, our fishery—just as it was in solomon's time? at any rate, you see, it's the east. but whatever it is, and whatever the reason, the result involves flies, millions of them and a smell, a stench—lord! i can smell it now.

there was one other white man there. he was a planter, so he said, and he had come to "deal in," pearls. he dropped in on us out of a native boat at sunset on the second day. he had a red face and a red nose, he was unhealthily fat for the east: the whites of his eyes were rather blue and rather red; they were also watery. i noticed that his hand shook, and that he first refused and then took a whisky and soda—a bad sign in the east. he wore very dirty white clothes and a vest instead of a shirt; he apparently had no baggage of any sort. but he was a white man, and so he ate with us that night and a good many nights afterwards.

in the second week he had his first attack of d. t. we pulled him through, robson and i, in the intervals of watching over the oysters. when he hadn't got d. t., he talked: he was a great talker, he also had views. i used to sit in the evenings—they were rare—when the fleet of boats had got in early and the oysters had been divided, in front of my hut and listen to him and robson settling india and asia, africa too probably. we sat there in our long chairs on the sand looking out over the purple sea, towards a sunset like blood shot with gold. nothing moved or stirred except the flies which were going to sleep in a mustard tree close by; they hung in buzzing dusters, billions of them on the smooth leaves and little twigs; literally it was black with them. it looked as if the whole tree had suddenly broken out all over into some disease of living black currants. even the sea seemed to move with an effort in the hot, still air; only now and again a little wave would lift itself up very slowly, very wearily, poise itself for a moment, and then fall with a weary little thud on the sand.

i used to watch them, i say, in the hot still air and the smell of dead oysters—it pushed up against your face like something solid—talking, talking in their long chairs, while the sweat stood out in little drops on their foreheads and trickled from time to time down their noses. there wasn't, i suppose, anything wrong with robson, he was all right at bottom, but he annoyed me, irritated me in that smell. he was too cocksure altogether, of himself, of his school board education, of life, of his 'views'. he was going to run india on new lines, laid down in some damned manual of political science out of which they learn life in board schools and extension lectures. he would run his own life, i daresay, on the same lines, laid down in some other text book or primer. he hadn't seen anything, but he knew exactly what it was all like. there was nothing curious, astonishing, unexpected, in life, he was ready for any emergency. and we were all wrong, all on the wrong tack in dealing with natives! he annoyed me a little, you know, when the thermometer stood at 99, at 6 p.m., but what annoyed me still more was that they—the natives!—were all wrong too. they too had to be taught how to live—and die, too, i gathered.

but his views were interesting, very interesting—especially in the long chairs there under the immense indian sky, with the camp at our hands—just as it had been in the time of moses and abraham—and behind us the jungle for miles, and behind that india, three hundred millions of them listening to the piping voice of a board school boy, are the inferior race, these three hundred millions—mark race, though there are more races in india than people in peckham—and we, of course, are superior. they've stopped somehow on the bottom rung of the ladder of which we've very nearly, if not quite, reached the top. they've stopped there hundreds, thousands of years; but it won't take any time to lead 'em up by the hand to our rung. it's to be done like this: by showing them that they're our brothers, inferior brothers; by reason, arguing them out of their superstitions, false beliefs; by education, by science, by example, yes, even he did not forget example, and white, sitting by his side with his red nose and watery eyes, nodded approval. and all this must be done scientifically, logically, systematically: if it were, a commissioner could revolutionize a province in five years, turn it into a japanese india, with all the riots as well as all the vakils and students running up the ladder of european civilization to become, i suppose, glorified board school angels at the top. "but you've none of you got any clear plans out here," he piped, "you never work on any system; you've got no point of view. the result is"—here, i think, he was inspired, by the dead oysters, perhaps—"instead or getting hold of the east, it's the east which gets hold of you."

and white agreed with him, solemnly, at any rate when he was sane and sober. and i couldn't complain of his inexperience. he was rather reticent at first, but afterwards we heard much—too much—of his experiences—one does, when a man gets d. t. he said he was a gentleman, and i believe it was true; he had been to a public school, cheltenham or repton. he hadn't, i gathered, succeeded as a gentleman at home, so they sent him to travel in the east. he liked it, it suited him. so he became a planter in assam. that was fifteen years ago, but he didn't like assam: the luck was against him—it always was—and he began to roll; and when a man starts rolling in india, well—he had been a clerk in merchants' offices; he had served in a draper's shop in calcutta; but the luck was always against him. then he tramped up and down india, through ceylon, burma; he had got at one time or another to the malay states, and, when he was very bad one day, he talked of cultivating camphor in java. he had been a sailor on a coasting tramp; he had sold horses (which didn't belong to him) in the deccan somewhere; he had tramped day after day begging his way for months in native bazaars; he had lived for six months with, and on, a tamil woman in some little village down in the south. now he was 'dealing in' pearls. "india's got hold of me," he'd say, "india's got hold of me and the east."

he had views too, very much like robson's, with additions. 'the strong hand' came in, and 'rule'. we ought to govern india more; we didn't now. why, he had been in hundreds of places where he was the first englishman that the people had ever seen. (lord! think of that!) he talked a great deal about the hidden wealth of india and exploitation. he knew places where there was gold—workable too—only one wanted a little capital—coal probably and iron—and then there was this new stuff, radium. but we weren't go-ahead, progressive, the government always put difficulties in his way. they made 'the native' their stalking-horse against european enterprise. he would work for the good of the native, he'd treat him firmly but kindly—especially, i thought, the native women, for his teeth were sharp and pointed and there were spaces between each, and there was something about his chin and jaw—you know the type, i expect.

as the fishing went on we had less time to talk. we had to work. the divers go out in the fleet of three hundred or four hundred boats every night and dive until midday. then they sail back from the pearl banks and bring all their oysters into an immense government enclosure where the government share is taken. if the wind is favourable, all the boats get back by 6 p.m. and the work is over at 7. but if the wind starts blowing off shore, the fleet gets scattered and boats drop in one by one all night long. robson and i had to be in the enclosure as long as there was a boat out, ready to see that, as soon as it did get in, the oysters were brought to the enclosure and government got its share.

well, the wind never did blow favourably that year. i sat in that enclosure sometimes for forty-eight hours on end. robson found managing it rather difficult, so he didn't like to be left there alone. if you get two thousand arabs, tamils, negroes, and moormen, each with a bag or two of oysters, into an enclosure a hundred and fifty yards by a hundred and fifty yards, and you only have thirty timid native 'subordinates' and twelve native policemen to control them—well, somehow or other he found a difficulty in applying his system of reasoning to them. the first time he tried it, we very nearly had a riot; it arose from a dispute between some arabs and tamils over the ownership of three oysters which fell out of a bag. the arabs didn't understand tamil and the tamils didn't understand arabic, and, when i got down there, fetched by a frightened constable, there were sixty of seventy men fighting with great poles—they had pulled up the fence of the enclosure for weapons—and on the outskirts was robson running round like a districted hen with a white face and tears in his blue eyes. when we got the combatants separated, they had only killed one tamil and broken nine or ten heads. robson was very upset by that dead tamil, he broke down utterly for a minute or two, i'm afraid.

then white got his second attack. he was very bad: he wanted to kill himself, but what was worse than that, before killing himself, he wanted to kill other people. i hadn't been to bed for two nights and i knew i should have to sit up another night in that enclosure as the wind was all wrong again. i had given white a bed in my hut: it wasn't good to let him wander in the bazaar. robson came down with a white face to tell me he had 'gone mad up there again'. i had to knock him down with the butt end of a rifle; he was a big man and i hadn't slept for forty bight hours, and then there were the flies and the smell of those dead oysters.

it sounds unreal, perhaps a nightmare, all this told here to you behind blinds and windows in this—"he sniffed—" in this smell of—of—horsehair furniture and paint and varnish. the curious thing is it didn't seem a nightmare out there. it was too real. things happened, anything might happen, without shocking or astonishing. one just did one's work, hour after hour, keeping things going in that sun which stung one's bare hands, took the skin off even my face, among the flies add the smell. it wasn't a nightmare, it was just a few thousand arabs and indians fishing tip oysters from the bottom of the sea. it wasn't even new, one felt; it was old, old as the bible, old as adam, so the arabs said. one hadn't much time to think, but one felt it and watched it, watched the things happen quietly, unastonished, as men do in the east. one does one's work,—forty eight hoursat a stretch doesn't leave one much time or inclination for thinking,—waiting for things to happen. if you can prevent people from killing one another or robbing one another, or burning down the camp, or getting cholera or plague or small-pox, and if one can manage to get one night's sleep in three, one is fairly satisfied; one doesn't much worry about having to knock a mad gentleman from repton on the head with the butt end of a rifle between-whiles.

i expect that's just what robson would call 'not getting hold of india but letting india get hold of you.' well, i said i wouldn't give you views and i won't: i'm giving you facts: what i want, you know, too is to give you the feeling of facts out there. after all that is data for your views, isn't it? things here feel so different; you seem so far from life, with windows and blinds and curtains always in between, and then nothing ever happens, you never wait for things to happen, never watch things happening here. you are always doing things somehow—lord knows what they are—according i suppose to systems, views, opinions. but out there you live so near to life, every morning you smell damp earth if you splash too much in your tin bath. and things happen slowly, inexorably by fate, and you—you don't do things, you watch with the three hundred millions. you feel it there in everything, even in the sunrise and sunset, every day, the immensity, inexorableness, mystery of things happening. you feel the whole earth waking up or going to sleep in a great arch of sky; you feel small, not very powerful. but who ever felt the sun set or rise in london or torquay either? it doesn't: you just turn on or turn off the electric light.

white was very bad that night. when he recovered from being knocked down by the rifle, i had to tie him down to the bed. and then robson broke down—nerves, you know. i had to go back to the enclosure and i wanted him to stay and look after white in the hut—it wasn't safe to leave him alone even tied down with cord to the camp bed. but this was apparently another emergency to which the manual system did not apply. he couldn't face it alone in the hut with that man tied to the bed. white was certainly not a pretty sight writhing about there, and his face—have you ever seen a man in the last stages of d.t.? i beg pour pardon, i suppose you haven't. it isn't nice, and white was also seeing things, not nice either: not snakes you know as people do in novels when they get d.t., but things which had happened to him, and things which he had done—they weren't nice either—and curious ordinary things distorted in a most unpleasant way. he was very much troubled by snipe: hundreds of them kept on rising out of the bed from beside him with that shrill 'cheep! cheep!' of theirs: he felt their soft little feathered bodies against his bare skin as they fluttered up from under him somewhere and flew out of the window. it threw him into paroxysms of fear, agonies: it made one, i admit, feel chilly round the heart to hear him pray one to stop it.

and robson was also not a nice sight. i hate seeing a sane man break down with fear, mere abject fear. he just sat down at last on a cane-bottomed chair and cried like a baby. well, that did him some good, but he wasn't fit to be left alone with white. i had to take white down to the enclosure, and i tied him to a post with coir rope near the table at which i sat there. there was nothing else to do. and robson came too and sat there at my side through the night watching white, terrified but fascinated.

can you picture that enclosure to yourself down on the sandy shore with its great fence of rough poles cut in the jungle, lighted by a few flares, torches dipped in cocoanut oil: and the white man tied to a pole raving, writhing in the flickering light which just showed too robson's white scared little free? and in the intervals of taking over oysters and settling disputes between arabs and somalis and tamils and moormen, i sat at the table writing a report (which had to go by runner next morning) on a proposal to introduce the teaching of french in 'english schools' in towns. that wasn't a very good report. white gave us the whole history of his life between ten p.m. and four a.m. in the morning. he didn't leave much to the imagination; a parson would have said that in that hour the memory of his sins came upon him—o, i beg your pardon. but really i think they did. i thought i had lived long enough out there to have heard without a shock anything that men can do and do do—especially white men who have 'gone under'. but i hadn't: i couldn't stomach the story of white's life told by himself. it wasn't only that he had robbed and swindled himself through india up and down for fifteen years. that was bad enough, for there wasn't a station where he hadn't swindled and bamboozled his fellow white men. but it was what he had done when he got away 'among the natives'—to men, and women too, away from 'civilization', in the jungle villages and high up in the mountains. god! the cold, civilized, corrupted cruelty of it. i told you, i think, that his teeth were pointed and spaced out in his mouth.

and his remorse was the most horrible thing, tied to that post there, writhing under the flickering light of the flare: the remorse of fear—fear of punishment, of what was coming, of death, of the horrors, real horrors and the phantom horrors of madness.

often during the night there was nothing to be heard in the enclosure but his screams, curses, hoarse whispers of fear. we seemed alone there in the vast stillness of the sky: only now and then a little splash from the sea down on the shore. and then would come a confused murmur from the sea and a little later perhaps the wailing voice of one man calling to another from boat to boat across the water "abdulla! abdulla!" and i would go out on to the shore. there were boats, ten, fifteen, twenty, perhaps, coming in from the banks, sad, mysterious, in the moonlight, gliding in with the little splashing of the great round oars. except for the slow moving of the oars one would have thought they were full of the dead, there was not a movement on board, until the boats touched the sand. then the dark shadows, which lay like dead men about the boats, would leap into life—there would rise a sudden din of hoarse voices, shouting, calling, quarrelling. the boats swarmed with shadows running about, gesticulating, staggering under sacks of oysters, dropping one after the other over the boats' sides into the sea. the sea was full of them and soon the shore too, arabs, negroes, tamils, bowed under the weight of the sacks. they came up dripping from the sea. they burst with a roar into the enclosure: they flung down their sacks of oysters with a crash. the place was full of swaying struggling forms: of men calling to one another in their different tongues: of the smell of the sea.

and above everything one could hear the screams and prayers of the madman writhing at the post. they gathered about him, stared at him. the light of the flares fell on their dark faces, shining and dripping from the sea. they looked calm, impassive, stern. it shone too on the circle of eyes: one saw the whites of them all round him: they seemed to be judging him, weighing him: calm patient eyes of men who watched unastonished the procession of things. the tamils' squat black figures nearly naked watched him silently, almost carelessly. the arabs in their long dirty nightshirts, blackbearded, discussed him earnestly together with their guttural voices. only an enormous negro, towering up to six feet six at least above the crowd, dressed in sacks and an enormous ulster, with ten copper coffee pots slung over his back and a pipe made of a whole cocoanut with an iron tube stuck in it in his hand, stood smiling mysteriously.

and white thought they weren't real, that they were devils of hell sent to plague and torture him. he cursed them, whispered at them, howled with fear. i had to explain to them that the sahib was not well, that the sun had touched him, that they must move away. they understood. they salaamed quietly, and moved away slowly, dignified.

i don't know how many times this didn't happen during the night. but towards morning white began to grow very weak. he moaned perpetually. then he began to be troubled by the flesh. as dawn showed grey in the east, he was suddenly shaken by convulsions horrible to see. he screamed for someone to bring him a woman, and, as he screamed, his head fell back: he was dead. i cut the cords quickly in a terror of haste, and covered the horror of the face. robson was sitting in a heap in his chair: he was sobbing, his face in his hands.

at that moment i was told i was wanted on the shore. i went quickly. the sea looked cold and grey under the faint light from the east. a cold little wind just ruffled the surface of the water. a solitary boat stood out black against the sky, just throbbing slowly up and down on the water close in shore. they had a dead arab on board, he had died suddenly while diving, they wanted my permission to bring the body ashore. four men waded out to the boat: the corpse was lifted out and placed upon their shoulders. they waded back slowly: the feet of the dead man stuck out, toes pointing up, very stark, over the shoulders of the men in front. the body was laid on the sand. the bearded face of the dead man looked very calm, very dignified in the faint light. an arab, his brother, sat down upon the sand near his head. he covered himself with sackcloth. i heard him weeping. it was very silent, very cold and still on the shore in the early dawn.

a tall figure stepped forward, it was the arab sheik, the leader of the boat. he laid his hand on the head of the weeping man and spoke to him calmly, eloquently, compassionately. i didn't understand arabic, but i could understand what he was saying. the dead man had lived, had worked, had died. he had died working, without suffering, as men should desire to die. he had left a son behind him. the speech went on calmly, eloquently, i heard continually the word khallas—all is over, finished. i watched the figures outlined against the grey sky—the long lean outline of the corpse with the toes sticking up so straight and stark, the crouching huddled figure of the weeping man and the tall upright sheik standing by his side. they were motionless, sombre, mysterious, part of the grey sea, of the grey sky.

suddenly the dawn broke red in the sky. the sheik stopped, motioned silently to the four men. they lifted the dead man on to their shoulders. they moved away down the shore by the side of the sea which began to stir under the cold wind. by their side walked the sheik, his hand laid gently on the brother's arm. i watched them move away, silent, dignified. and over the shoulders of the men i saw the feet of the dead man with the toes sticking up straight and stark.

then i moved away too, to make arrangements for white's burial: it had to be done at once.

* * * * *

there was silence in the smoking-room. i looked round. the colonel had fallen asleep with his mouth open. the jobber tried to look bored, the archdeacon was, apparently, rather put out.

"its too late, i think," said the archdeacon, "to—dear me, dear me, past one o'clock". he got up. "don't you think you've chosen rather exceptional circumstances, out of the ordinary case?"

the commissioner was looking into the few red coals that were all that was left of the fire.

"there's another tamil proverb," he said: "when the cat puts his head into a pot, he thinks all is darkness."