uards 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.

Above the buildings, the men, the women, the still sheet of water and
the great plain of crops glistening with dew, stretched the exalted,
the miraculous peace of a cloudless sky. And no road seemed to lead
into this country of splendour and stillness. One could not believe the
unquiet sea was so near, with its gifts and its unending menace. Even
during the months of storms, the great clamour rising from the whitened
expanse of the Shallows dwelt high in the air in a vast murmur, now
feeble now stronger, that seemed to swing back and forth on the wind
above the earth without any one being able to tell whence it came. It
was like the solemn chant of a waterfall swelling and dying aw