old a kerchief between his big, soft hands until it
produced a live lizard, which presently turned to a tame lorikeet, which
sat up and dratted your eyes in good set Malay. He drew chinking coins
out of space. He stood a plate on his nose and caught it on his calf,
kept six rings accurately flying, grew flowers from a paper spill and
butterflies from a kanari nut, and on occasion--if he was not
absolutely petrified and could still see the mark--would even undertake
to sink half a dozen daggers within the space of a hand print on the
opposite wall: and would do it, too, with the utmost speed and
precision.

Accomplishments of this kind were his passport, good any day for a lift,
a lodging, or a load from the most unlikely people, for they set him
apart in cult of conjurers and jesters that has been privileged always
and everywhere.

And so, past all the usual land-falls and long past the tables of
mortality for persons of his class and condition, he did keep going on.
He kept on after his clothes had fallen to ruin and his face had turned
the tint of seaweed; after he had lost most of the pretensions of a
white man, his shoes and his shirt. And in due course he arrived at
Zimballo's, where he lost the little property left to him and the shreds
of his pride, which every man has whether aware of it or not and which
he loses last of all....

Here again was an eastern city--not Palembang, though between two winks
you scarce could tell it from that or a dozen other ports: the same hive
of mats and slats, of fishing poles and cigar boxes, like a metropolis
devised by ingenious small children; with the same smells which remain
the only solid memorials; with the same swarm of pullulating humanity
and the same crowding junks and praus, and now and then the
far-venturing ships of recognized flags, sometimes as many as two or
three at once; with the same yellows and browns and clays against
shifting greens and eternal distant blues--all hazed with the same
molten light.

But in its own ways the city is different and remarkable. It is a
falling-off place. It is the eddy in a stream. At its roadstead the
trickle of traffic turns back and sheers aside from a shallow sea of
uncharted and unprofitable dangers: one of the big, blank spaces.

It has some scores of Europeans, who linger as official or accidental
units in the population. It has some hundreds of Eurasians, who occur as
improper fractions of varying hue. It has a season