AT A MALAYAN COURT
WHERE and when these things happened does not signify at all. The east coast of the Malay Peninsula is a long one; several native states occupy its seaboard; and until quite recently the manners of the râjas who ruled over them had not suffered any material change for centuries. Thus, both in the matter of time and of spare, a wide range of choice is afforded to the imagination. The facts, anyway, are true, and they were related, in the watches of the night, to a white man (whose name does not matter) by two people with whose identity you also have no concern. One of the latter was a man, whom I will call Âwang Îtam, and the other was a woman whose name was Bêdah, or something like it. The place which they close for the telling of their story was an empty sailing-boat, which lay beached upon a sand bank in the centre of a Malayan river; and as soon as the white man had scrambled up the side, the dug-out which had brought him sheered off and left him.
He had come to this place by appointment, but he knew nothing beyond that single fact, for the assignation had been made in the furtive native fashion which is as unlike the invitation card of Europe as are most things in the East if compared
