For many weeks after this visit life in Sambir resumed its even and
uneventful flow. Each day's sun shooting its morning rays above the tree-
tops lit up the usual scene of daily activity. Nina walking on the path
that formed the only street in the settlement saw the accustomed sight of
men lolling on the shady side of the houses, on the high platforms; of
women busily engaged in husking the daily rice; of naked brown children
racing along the shady and narrow paths leading to the clearings. Jim-
Eng, strolling before his house, greeted her with a friendly nod before
climbing up indoors to seek his beloved opium pipe. The elder children
clustered round her, daring from long acquaintance, pulling the skirts of
her white robe with their dark fingers, and showing their brilliant teeth
in expectation of a shower of glass beads. She greeted them with a quiet
smile, but always had a few friendly words for a Siamese girl, a slave
owned by Bulangi, whose numerous wives were said to be of a violent
temper. Well-founded rumour said also that the domestic squabbles of
that industrious cultivator ended generally in a combined assault of all
his wives upon the Siamese slave. The girl herself never
complained--perhaps from dictates of prudence, but more likely through
the strange, resigned apathy of half-savage womankind.
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