ire-light of the Semang camp, in the Upper Perak valley, and now
there is a trigonometrical survey station on the summit of Korbu. It is
true that the surveyors employed there have made no mention in their
reports of the Amazons of the neighbourhood, and the Sakai are still
living in prosperity, in spite of the impending doom, which the old
Semang foretold for them. None the less, however, I hold to the belief
that my informant actually did see something weird and uncanny at the
back of Gunong Korbu; and that the keen eyes of a jungle-dwelling Semang
should not be able to clearly recognise anything their owner could
encounter in the forests of the Peninsula, is, in itself, a miracle.

'HIS HEART'S DESIRE'

They wrench my back on a red-hot rack,
They comb my nerves with wire,
They poison with pain the blood of my brain
Till the Devils of Devilry tire;
They spit from Above on the name of my Love,
They call my Love a liar;
But they can't undo the joy I knew
When I knew my Heart's Desire.

_The Song of the Lost Soul._--ANON.

Where and when these things happened does not signify at all. The East
Coast is a long one, and the manners of the Malay _Rajas_ who dwell
thereon have suffered but little change for centuries. Thus, both in the
matter of time and of space, there is a wide choice, and plenty of
exercise may be given to the imagination. The facts anyway are true, and
they were related, in the watches of the night, to a White Man--whose
name does not matter--by two people, with whose identity you also have
no concern. One of the latter was a man whom I will call Awang Itam, and
the other was a woman whose name was Bedah, or something like it. The
place in which the tale was told was an empty sailing boat which lay
beached upon a sandbank in the centre of a Malay river, and, as soon as
the White Man had scrambled up the side, the dug-out, which had brought
him, sheered off and left him.

He had come to this place by appointment, but he did not know precisely
whom he was to meet, as the assignation had been made in the secret
native fashion, which is as different from the invitation card of Europe
as most things in the East are different from white men's gear. Twice
that day his attention had been very pointedly called to this deserted
sailing boat; once by an old crone who was selling sweetstuff from door
to door, and once by a young chief who had stop