p his pigtail,--being a Cantonese,--and this is a disadvantage to
sahibs who cannot speak Tamil, Malay, or Cantonese. Otherwise he might
be steered like a camel.

The _'rickshaw_ men are patient and long-suffering. The evil-visaged
person who drove my carriage lashed at them when they came within whip
range, and did his best to drive over them as he headed for the
Waterfalls, which are five miles away from Penang Town. I expected that
the buildings should stop, choked out among the dense growth of
cocoanut. But they continued for many streets, very like Park and
Middleton streets in Calcutta, where shuttered houses, which were
half-bred between an Indian bungalow and a Rangoon rabbit-hutch, fought
with the greenery and crotons as big as small trees. Now and again there
blazed the front of a Chinese house, all open-work vermilion,
lamp-black, and gold, with six-foot Chinese lanterns over the doorways
and glimpses of quaintly cut shrubs in the well-kept gardens beyond.

We struck into roads fringed with native houses on piles, shadowed by
the everlasting cocoanut palms heavy with young nuts. The heat was heavy
with the smell of vegetation, and it was not the smell of the earth
after the rains. Some bird-thing called out from the deeps of the
foliage, and there was a mutter of thunder in the hills which we were
approaching: but all the rest was very still--and the sweat ran down our
faces in drops.

"Now you've got to walk up that hill," said the driver, pointing to a
small barrier outside a well-kept botanical garden; "all the carriages
stop here." One's limbs moved as though leaden, and the breath came
heavily, drawing in each time the vapour of a Turkish bath. The soil was
alive with wet and warmth, and the unknown trees--I was too sleepy to
read the labels that some offensively energetic man has written--were
wet and warm too. Up on the hillside the voice of the water was saying
something, but I was too sleepy to listen; and on the top of the hill
lay a fat cloud just like an eider-down quilt tucking everything in
safely.

"And in the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon."

I sat down where I was, for I saw that the upward path was very steep
and was cut into rude steps, and an exposition of sleep had come upon
me. I was at the mouth of a tiny gorge, exactly where the lotus-eaters
had sat down when they began their song, for I recognised the Waterfall
and the air round my ea