Money was wanted and men were wanted, and he had obtained enough of both in two years from that day when, pistols in his belt and a cabbage-leaf hat on head, he had unexpectedly, and at early dawn, confronted in perfect silence that mysterious Belarab, who himself was for a moment too astounded for speech at the sight of a white face.

The sun had not yet cleared the forests of the interior, but a sky already full of light arched over a dark oval lagoon, over wide fields as yet full of shadows, that seemed slowly changing into the whiteness of the morning mist.  There were huts, fences, palisades, big houses that, erected on lofty piles, were seen above the tops of clustered fruit trees, as if suspended in the air.

Such was the aspect of Belarab’s settlement when Lingard set his eyes on it for the first time.  There were all these things, a great number of faces at the back of the spare and muffled-up figure confronting him, and in the swiftly increasing light a complete stillness that made the murmur of the word “Marhaba” (welcome), pronounced at last by the chief, perfectly audible to every one of his followers.  The bodyguards who stood about him in black skull-caps and with long-shafted lances, preserved an impassive aspect.  Across open spaces men could be seen running to the waterside.  A group of women standing on a low knoll gazed intently, and nothing of them but the heads showed above the unstirring stalks of a maize field.  Suddenly within a cluster of empty huts near by the voice of an invisible hag was heard scolding with shrill fury an invisible young girl: 

“Strangers!  You want to see the strangers?  O devoid of all decency!  Must I so lame and old husk the rice alone?  May evil befall thee and the strangers!  May they never find favour!  May they be pursued with swords!  I am old.  I am old.  There is no good in strangers!  O girl!  May they burn.”

“Welcome,” repeated Belarab, gravely, and looking straight into Lingard’s eyes.

Lingard spent six days that time in Belarab’s settlement.  Of these, three were passed in observing each other without a question being asked or a hint given as to the object in view.  Lingard lounged on the fine mats with which the chief had furnished a small bamboo house outside a fortified enclosure, where a white flag with a green border fluttered on a high and slender pole but still below the walls of long, high-roofed buildings, raised forty feet or more on hard-wood posts.

Far away the inland forests were tinted a shimmering blue, like the forests of a dream.  On the seaward side the belt of great trunks and matted undergrowth came to the western shore of the oval lagoon; and in the pure freshness of the air the groups of brown houses reflected in the water or seen above the waving green of the fields, the clumps of palm trees, the fenced-in plantations, the groves of fruit trees, made up a picture of sumptuous prosperity.