those things,
together with the domestic quarrels, were the only events of her three
years' existence. She did not die from despair and disgust the first
month, as she expected and almost hoped for. On the contrary, at the end
of half a year it had seemed to her that she had known no other life. Her
young mind having been unskilfully permitted to glance at better things,
and then thrown back again into the hopeless quagmire of barbarism, full
of strong and uncontrolled passions, had lost the power to discriminate.
It seemed to Nina that there was no change and no difference. Whether
they traded in brick godowns or on the muddy river bank; whether they
reached after much or little; whether they made love under the shadows of
the great trees or in the shadow of the cathedral on the Singapore
promenade; whether they plotted for their own ends under the protection
of laws and according to the rules of Christian conduct, or whether they
sought the gratification of their desires with the savage cunning and the
unrestrained fierceness of natures as innocent of culture as their own
immense and gloomy forests, Nina saw only the same manifestations of love
and hate and of sordid greed chasing the uncertain dollar in all its
multifarious and vanishing shapes. To her resolute nature, however,
after all these years, the savage and uncompromising sincerity of purpose
shown by her Malay kinsmen seemed at last preferable to the sleek
hypocrisy, to the polite disguises, to the virtuous pretences of such
white people as she had had the misfortune to come in contact with. After
all it was her life; it was going to be her life, and so thinking she
fell more and more under the influence of her mother. Seeking, in her
ignorance, a better side to that life, she listened with avidity to the
old woman's tales of the departed glories of the Rajahs, from whose race
she had sprung, and she became gradually more indifferent, more
contemptuous of the white side of her descent represented by a feeble and
traditionless father.

Almayer's difficulties were by no means diminished by the girl's presence
in Sambir. The stir caused by her arrival had died out, it is true, and
Lakamba had not renewed his visits; but about a year after the departure
of the man-of-war boats the nephew of Abdulla, Syed Reshid, returned from
his pilgrimage to Mecca, rejoicing in a green jacket and the proud title
of Hadji. There was a great letting off of rockets on bo