’"I was too startled to be quite cool—­don’t you know? and if that revolver had been loaded I would have shot somebody—­perhaps two, three bodies, and that would have been the end of me.  But it wasn’t. . . .”  “Why not?” I asked.  “Well, I couldn’t fight the whole population, and I wasn’t coming to them as if I were afraid of my life,” he said, with just a faint hint of his stubborn sulkiness in the glance he gave me.  I refrained from pointing out to him that they could not have known the chambers were actually empty.  He had to satisfy himself in his own way. . . .  “Anyhow it wasn’t,” he repeated good-humouredly, “and so I just stood still and asked them what was the matter.  That seemed to strike them dumb.  I saw some of these thieves going off with my box.  That long-legged old scoundrel Kassim (I’ll show him to you to-morrow) ran out fussing to me about the Rajah wanting to see me.  I said, ’All right.’  I too wanted to see the Rajah, and I simply walked in through the gate and—­and—­here I am.”  He laughed, and then with unexpected emphasis, “And do you know what’s the best in it?” he asked.  “I’ll tell you.  It’s the knowledge that had I been wiped out it is this place that would have been the loser.”

’He spoke thus to me before his house on that evening I’ve mentioned—­after we had watched the moon float away above the chasm between the hills like an ascending spirit out of a grave; its sheen descended, cold and pale, like the ghost of dead sunlight.  There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.  It is to our sunshine, which—­say what you like—­is all we have to live by, what the echo is to the sound:  misleading and confusing whether the note be mocking or sad.  It robs all forms of matter—­which, after all, is our domain—­of their substance, and gives a sinister reality to shadows alone.  And the shadows were very real around us, but Jim by my side looked very stalwart, as though nothing—­not even the occult power of moonlight—­could rob him of his reality in my eyes.  Perhaps, indeed, nothing could touch him since he had survived the assault of the dark powers.  All was silent, all was still; even on the river the moonbeams slept as on a pool.  It was the moment of high water, a moment of immobility that accentuated the utter isolation of this lost corner of the earth.  The houses crowding along the wide shining sweep without ripple or glitter, stepping into the water in a line of jostling, vague, grey, silvery forms mingled with black masses of shadow, were like a spectral herd of shapeless creatures pressing forward to drink in a spectral and lifeless stream.  Here and there a red gleam twinkled within the bamboo walls, warm, like a living spark, significant of human affections, of shelter, of repose.