The steersman dug his paddle into the stream, and held hard with stiffened arms, his body thrown forward.  The water gurgled aloud; and suddenly the long straight reach seemed to pivot on its centre, the forests swung in a semicircle, and the slanting beams of sunset touched the broadside of the canoe with a fiery glow, throwing the slender and distorted shadows of its crew upon the streaked glitter of the river.  The white man turned to look ahead.  The course of the boat had been altered at right-angles to the stream, and the carved dragon-head of its prow was pointing now at a gap in the fringing bushes of the bank.  It glided through, brushing the overhanging twigs, and disappeared from the river like some slim and amphibious creature leaving the water for its lair in the forests.

The narrow creek was like a ditch:  tortuous, fabulously deep; filled with gloom under the thin strip of pure and shining blue of the heaven.  Immense trees soared up, invisible behind the festooned draperies of creepers.  Here and there, near the glistening blackness of the water, a twisted root of some tall tree showed amongst the tracery of small ferns, black and dull, writhing and motionless, like an arrested snake.  The short words of the paddlers reverberated loudly between the thick and sombre walls of vegetation.  Darkness oozed out from between the trees, through the tangled maze of the creepers, from behind the great fantastic and unstirring leaves; the darkness, mysterious and invincible; the darkness scented and poisonous of impenetrable forests.

The men poled in the shoaling water.  The creek broadened, opening out into a wide sweep of a stagnant lagoon.  The forests receded from the marshy bank, leaving a level strip of bright green, reedy grass to frame the reflected blueness of the sky.  A fleecy pink cloud drifted high above, trailing the delicate colouring of its image under the floating leaves and the silvery blossoms of the lotus.  A little house, perched on high piles, appeared black in the distance.  Near it, two tall nibong palms, that seemed to have come out of the forests in the background, leaned slightly over the ragged roof, with a suggestion of sad tenderness and care in the droop of their leafy and soaring heads.

The steersman, pointing with his paddle, said, “Arsat is there.  I see his canoe fast between the piles.”

The polers ran along the sides of the boat glancing over their shoulders at the end of the day’s journey.  They would have preferred to spend the night somewhere else than on this lagoon of weird aspect and ghostly reputation.  Moreover, they disliked Arsat, first as a stranger, and also because he who repairs a ruined house, and dwells in it, proclaims that he is not afraid to live amongst the spirits that haunt the places abandoned by mankind.  Such a man can disturb the course of fate by glances or words; while his familiar ghosts are not easy to propitiate by casual wayfarers upon whom they long to wreak the malice of their human master.  White men care not for such things, being unbelievers and in league with the Father of Evil, who leads them unharmed through the invisible dangers of this world.  To the warnings of the righteous they oppose an offensive pretence of disbelief.  What is there to be done?