“Yes.  That’s right.  Go now,” said Lingard, and Jaffir leaped off, becoming invisible long before he struck the water.  Then there was a splash; after a while a spluttering voice cried faintly, “Lit-ing!  Ah, ha!” and suddenly the next thunder-squall burst upon the coast.  In the crashing flares of light Lingard had again and again the quick vision of a white beach, the inclined palm-trees of the grove, the stockade by the sea, the forest far away:  a vast landscape mysterious and still—­Hassim’s native country sleeping unmoved under the wrath and fire of Heaven.

IV

A Traveller visiting Wajo to-day may, if he deserves the confidence of the common people, hear the traditional account of the last civil war, together with the legend of a chief and his sister, whose mother had been a great princess suspected of sorcery and on her death-bed had communicated to these two the secrets of the art of magic.  The chief’s sister especially, “with the aspect of a child and the fearlessness of a great fighter,” became skilled in casting spells.  They were defeated by the son of their uncle, because—­will explain the narrator simply—­“The courage of us Wajo people is so great that magic can do nothing against it.  I fought in that war.  We had them with their backs to the sea.”  And then he will go on to relate in an awed tone how on a certain night “when there was such a thunderstorm as has been never heard of before or since” a ship, resembling the ships of white men, appeared off the coast, “as though she had sailed down from the clouds.  She moved,” he will affirm, “with her sails bellying against the wind; in size she was like an island; the lightning played between her masts which were as high as the summits of mountains; a star burned low through the clouds above her.  We knew it for a star at once because no flame of man’s kindling could have endured the wind and rain of that night.  It was such a night that we on the watch hardly dared look upon the sea.  The heavy rain was beating down our eyelids.  And when day came, the ship was nowhere to be seen, and in the stockade where the day before there were a hundred or more at our mercy, there was no one.  The chief, Hassim, was gone, and the lady who was a princess in the country—­and nobody knows what became of them from that day to this.  Sometimes traders from our parts talk of having heard of them here, and heard of them there, but these are the lies of men who go afar for gain.  We who live in the country believe that the ship sailed back into the clouds whence the Lady’s magic made her come.  Did we not see the ship with our own eyes?  And as to Rajah Hassim and his sister, Mas Immada, some men say one thing and some another, but God alone knows the truth.”