Sinopsis
The white man, leaning with both arms over the roof of the
little house in the stern of the boat, said to the steersman —
“We will pass the night in Arsat’s clearing. It is late.”
The Malay only grunted, and went on looking fixedly at the
river. The white man rested his chin on his crossed arms and gazed at the wake
of the boat. At the end of the straight avenue of forests cut by the intense
glitter of the river, the sun appeared unclouded and dazzling, poised low over
the water that shone smoothly like a band of metal. The forests, sombre and
dull, stood motionless and silent on each side of the broad stream. At the foot
of big, towering trees, trunkless nipa palms rose from the mud of the bank, in
bunches of leaves enormous and heavy, that hung unstirring over the brown swirl
of eddies. In the stillness of the air every tree, every leaf, every bough,
every tendril of creeper and every petal of minute blossoms seemed to have been
bewitched into an immobility perfect and final. Nothing moved on the river but
the eight paddles that rose flashing regularly, dipped together with a single
splash; while the steersman swept right and left with a periodic and sudden
flourish of his blade describing a glinting semicircle above his head. The
churned-up water frothed alongside with a confused murmur. And the white man’s
canoe, advancing upstream in the short-lived disturbance of its own making,
seemed to enter the portals of a land from which the very memory of motion had
forever departed.
The white man, turning his back upon the setting sun, looked
along the empty and broad expanse of the sea-reach. For the last three miles of
its course the wandering, hesitating river, as if enticed irresistibly by the
freedom of an open horizon, flows straight into the sea, flows straight to the
east — to the east that harbours both light and darkness. Astern of the boat the
repeated call of some bird, a cry discordant and feeble, skipped along over the
smooth water and lost itself, before it could reach the other shore, in the
breathless silence of the world.
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