ght understand. Only, remember, no
one understands, quite, the workings of the savage mind. And these of
whom I write are gentle savages, and their way of life is simple,
primitive and crude. Only, upon contact with the white man, some of
this has been obliged to wear off a little. They have had to become
adaptive, to assume a little polish, as it were. But at heart, after
these many years of contact, they are still simple. They are mindless,
gentle, squatting bare backed in the shade, chewing, spitting, betel
nut. Chewing as the ox chews, thinking as the ox thinks. Gentle brown
men and women, touching the edge of the most refined civilization of
the western world.

The tale jerks here--why shouldn't it? The Lieutenant told me this bit
of it himself--he lives in the foreigners' town, and keeps order
there. There was a revolt last year. But that is too dignified a word,
it assumes too much, it assumes something that there never was. For
revolt signifies organisation, and there wasn't any. It signifies a
general understanding, and there wasn't any. It signifies great
numbers involved, and there were no great numbers. How could there
have been any of these things, said the Lieutenant, among a scattered
people, scattered through the jungle, on the edges of the warm, mighty
forests, at the headwaters of the great winding rivers which penetrate
inland for a thousand miles. No, it was in no sense a revolt, which is
too strong a word. They had no organisation, they could not
communicate with each other, had they wished. Distances were great,
and they could not read or write. They had never been molested--never
schooled. It was better so. Education is no good to a squatter in the
shade. No, it was rather an uprising of a handful of them in the town
of the white man, the town of red earth streets, with pink and yellow
bungalows, cool and sheltered under spreading palms. The town where
many foreigners lived, who walked about listlessly in their white
linen clothes, ghastly pale, with dark rings beneath their eyes, who
stifled in the heat and thought of Home, ten thousand miles away. It
all happened suddenly, no one knows how or why. But one morning, just
after the sun rose in his red, burning splendour, there crept into the
town a few hundred men. They came in by this red street, with the
statue of the Bishop at the top--the bronze statue of the Bishop who
had lived and worked and died here years ago. They came by the red
street