Karain swept his hand over it.  “All mine!” He struck the deck with his long staff; the gold head flashed like a falling star; very close behind him a silent old fellow in a richly embroidered black jacket alone of all the Malays around did not follow the masterful gesture with a look.  He did not even lift his eyelids.  He bowed his head behind his master, and without stirring held hilt up over his right shoulder a long blade in a silver scabbard.  He was there on duty, but without curiosity, and seemed weary, not with age, but with the possession of a burdensome secret of existence.  Karain, heavy and proud, had a lofty pose and breathed calmly.  It was our first visit, and we looked about curiously.

The bay was like a bottomless pit of intense light.  The circular sheet of water reflected a luminous sky, and the shores enclosing it made an opaque ring of earth floating in an emptiness of transparent blue.  The hills, purple and arid, stood out heavily on the sky:  their summits seemed to fade into a coloured tremble as of ascending vapour; their steep sides were streaked with the green of narrow ravines; at their foot lay rice-fields, plantain-patches, yellow sands.  A torrent wound about like a dropped thread.  Clumps of fruit-trees marked the villages; slim palms put their nodding heads together above the low houses; dried palm-leaf roofs shone afar, like roofs of gold, behind the dark colonnades of tree-trunks; figures passed vivid and vanishing; the smoke of fires stood upright above the masses of flowering bushes; bamboo fences glittered, running away in broken lines between the fields.  A sudden cry on the shore sounded plaintive in the distance, and ceased abruptly, as if stifled in the downpour of sunshine.  A puff of breeze made a flash of darkness on the smooth water, touched our faces, and became forgotten.  Nothing moved.  The sun blazed down into a shadowless hollow of colours and stillness.

It was the stage where, dressed splendidly for his part, he strutted, incomparably dignified, made important by the power he had to awaken an absurd expectation of something heroic going to take place—­a burst of action or song—­upon the vibrating tone of a wonderful sunshine.  He was ornate and disturbing, for one could not imagine what depth of horrible void such an elaborate front could be worthy to hide.  He was not masked—­there was too much life in him, and a mask is only a lifeless thing; but he presented himself essentially as an actor, as a human being aggressively disguised.  His smallest acts were prepared and unexpected, his speeches grave, his sentences ominous like hints and complicated like arabesques.  He was treated with a solemn respect accorded in the irreverent West only to the monarchs of the stage, and he accepted the profound homage with a sustained dignity seen nowhere else but behind the footlights and in the condensed falseness of some grossly tragic situation.  It was almost impossible to remember who he was—­only