So they thought, throwing their weight on the end of their long poles.  The big canoe glided on swiftly, noiselessly, and smoothly, towards Arsat’s clearing, till, in a great rattling of poles thrown down, and the loud murmurs of “Allah be praised!” it came with a gentle knock against the crooked piles below the house.

The boatmen with uplifted faces shouted discordantly, “Arsat!  O Arsat!” Nobody came.  The white man began to climb the rude ladder giving access to the bamboo platform before the house.  The juragan of the boat said sulkily, “We will cook in the sampan, and sleep on the water.”

“Pass my blankets and the basket,” said the white man, curtly.

He knelt on the edge of the platform to receive the bundle.  Then the boat shoved off, and the white man, standing up, confronted Arsat, who had come out through the low door of his hut.  He was a man young, powerful, with broad chest and muscular arms.  He had nothing on but his sarong.  His head was bare.  His big, soft eyes stared eagerly at the white man, but his voice and demeanour were composed as he asked, without any words of greeting—­

“Have you medicine, Tuan?”

“No,” said the visitor in a startled tone.  “No.  Why?  Is there sickness in the house?”

“Enter and see,” replied Arsat, in the same calm manner, and turning short round, passed again through the small doorway.  The white man, dropping his bundles, followed.

In the dim light of the dwelling he made out on a couch of bamboos a woman stretched on her back under a broad sheet of red cotton cloth.  She lay still, as if dead; but her big eyes, wide open, glittered in the gloom, staring upwards at the slender rafters, motionless and unseeing.  She was in a high fever, and evidently unconscious.  Her cheeks were sunk slightly, her lips were partly open, and on the young face there was the ominous and fixed expression—­the absorbed, contemplating expression of the unconscious who are going to die.  The two men stood looking down at her in silence.

“Has she been long ill?” asked the traveller.

“I have not slept for five nights,” answered the Malay, in a deliberate tone.  “At first she heard voices calling her from the water and struggled against me who held her.  But since the sun of to-day rose she hears nothing—­she hears not me.  She sees nothing.  She sees not me—­me!”

He remained silent for a minute, then asked softly—­

“Tuan, will she die?”

“I fear so,” said the white man, sorrowfully.  He had known Arsat years ago, in a far country in times of trouble and danger, when no friendship is to be despised.  And since his Malay friend had come unexpectedly to dwell in the hut on the lagoon with a strange woman, he had slept many times there, in his journeys up and down the river.  He liked the man who knew how to keep faith in council and how to fight without fear by the side of his white friend.  He liked him—­not so much perhaps as a man likes his favourite dog—­but still he liked him well enough to help and ask no questions, to think sometimes vaguely and hazily in the midst of his own pursuits, about the lonely man and the long-haired woman with audacious face and triumphant eyes, who lived together hidden by the forests—­alone and feared.