straight, without a branch, for eighty or a hundred feet flaunted their power majestically in the sun. Creepers with gigantic leaves entwined them and the smaller trees were covered with parasitic plants as a bride is covered by her veil. The bamboos were sixty feet high. The wild plantains grew everywhere. They seemed set in their places by some skilful gardener, for they had the air of consciously completing the decoration. They were magnificent. The lower leaves were torn and yellow and bedraggled; they were like wicked old women who looked with envy and malice on the beauty of youth; but the upper ones, lissom, green and lovely, lifted their splendour proudly. They had the haughtiness and the callous indifferenceof youthful beauty; their ample surface took the sun like water.
One day, looking for a short cut, I ventured along a path that led straight into the jungle. There was more life than I had seen while I kept to the highway; the jungle-fowl scurried over the tops of the trees as I passed, pigeons cooed all about me, and a hornbill sat quite still on a branch to let me look at it. I can never quite get over my surprise at seeing at liberty birds and beasts whose natural habitation seems a Zoological Garden, and I remember once in a far island away down in the South East of the Malay Archipelago, when I saw a great cockatoo staring at me I looked about for the cage from which it had escaped and could not realise for a moment that it was at home there and had never known confinement.
The jungle was not very thick and the sun finding its bold way through the trees diapered the ground with a coloured and fantastic pattern. But after a while it began to dawn on me that I was lost, not seriously and tragically lost as may happen to one in the jungle, but astray as one might be in the squares and terraces of Bayswater; I did not want to retrace my steps and the pathway, with the sun shining on it, was tempting: I thought I would go on a little further and see what happened. And suddenly I came upon a tiny village; it consisted of no more than four or five houses surrounded by a stockade of bamboos. I was as surprised to find it there, right in the jungle and six or seven miles from the main road, as its inhabitants must have been to see me, but neither they nor I would betray by our demeanour that there was anything odd about it. Small children playing on the dry, dusty ground scattered at my approach (I remembered how in one place I was asked if two little boys who had never seen a white man might be brought to have a look at me and were promptly carried away screaming with terror at the revolting sight); but thewomen, carrying buckets of water or pounding rice, went on unconcernedly with their tasks; and the men, sitting on their verandahs, gave me but an indifferent glance. I wondered how those people had found their way there and what they did; they were self-subsistent, living a life entirely of their own, and as much cut off from the outside world as though they dwelt on an atoll in the South Seas. I knew and could know nothing of them. They were as different from me as though they belonged to another species. But they had passions like mine, the same hopes, the same desires, the same griefs. To them, too, I suppose, love came like sunshine after rain, and to them too, I suppose, came satiety. But for them the days unchanging added their long line to one another without haste and without surprise; they followed their appointed round and led the lives their fathers had led before them. The pattern was traced and all they had to do was to follow it. Was that not wisdom and in their constancy was there not beauty?
I urged my pony on and in a few yards I was once more in the thick of the jungle. I continued to climb, the path crossing and recrossing little rushing streams, and then wound down, wound round the hills, the trees growing upon them so densely that you felt you could walk upon the tree-tops as though upon a
One day, looking for a short cut, I ventured along a path that led straight into the jungle. There was more life than I had seen while I kept to the highway; the jungle-fowl scurried over the tops of the trees as I passed, pigeons cooed all about me, and a hornbill sat quite still on a branch to let me look at it. I can never quite get over my surprise at seeing at liberty birds and beasts whose natural habitation seems a Zoological Garden, and I remember once in a far island away down in the South East of the Malay Archipelago, when I saw a great cockatoo staring at me I looked about for the cage from which it had escaped and could not realise for a moment that it was at home there and had never known confinement.
The jungle was not very thick and the sun finding its bold way through the trees diapered the ground with a coloured and fantastic pattern. But after a while it began to dawn on me that I was lost, not seriously and tragically lost as may happen to one in the jungle, but astray as one might be in the squares and terraces of Bayswater; I did not want to retrace my steps and the pathway, with the sun shining on it, was tempting: I thought I would go on a little further and see what happened. And suddenly I came upon a tiny village; it consisted of no more than four or five houses surrounded by a stockade of bamboos. I was as surprised to find it there, right in the jungle and six or seven miles from the main road, as its inhabitants must have been to see me, but neither they nor I would betray by our demeanour that there was anything odd about it. Small children playing on the dry, dusty ground scattered at my approach (I remembered how in one place I was asked if two little boys who had never seen a white man might be brought to have a look at me and were promptly carried away screaming with terror at the revolting sight); but thewomen, carrying buckets of water or pounding rice, went on unconcernedly with their tasks; and the men, sitting on their verandahs, gave me but an indifferent glance. I wondered how those people had found their way there and what they did; they were self-subsistent, living a life entirely of their own, and as much cut off from the outside world as though they dwelt on an atoll in the South Seas. I knew and could know nothing of them. They were as different from me as though they belonged to another species. But they had passions like mine, the same hopes, the same desires, the same griefs. To them, too, I suppose, love came like sunshine after rain, and to them too, I suppose, came satiety. But for them the days unchanging added their long line to one another without haste and without surprise; they followed their appointed round and led the lives their fathers had led before them. The pattern was traced and all they had to do was to follow it. Was that not wisdom and in their constancy was there not beauty?
I urged my pony on and in a few yards I was once more in the thick of the jungle. I continued to climb, the path crossing and recrossing little rushing streams, and then wound down, wound round the hills, the trees growing upon them so densely that you felt you could walk upon the tree-tops as though upon a
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