“I fancy that further practice with blowpipes will be at a discount on Rainbow Island,” he cried cheerfully.

But Iris was anxious and distrait.

“It is very sad,” she said, “that we are obliged to secure our own safety by the ceaseless slaughter of human beings.  Is there no offer we can make them, no promise of future gain, to tempt them to abandon hostilities?”

“None whatever.  These Borneo Dyaks are bred from infancy to prey on their fellow-creatures.  To be strangers and defenceless is to court pillage and massacre at their hands.  I think no more of shooting them than of smashing a clay pigeon.  Killing a mad dog is perhaps a better simile.”

“But, Robert dear, how long can we hold out?”

“What!  Are you growing tired of me already?”

He hoped to divert her thoughts from this constantly recurring topic.  Twice within the hour had it been broached and dismissed, but Iris would not permit him to shirk it again.  She made no reply, simply regarding him with a wistful smile.

So Jenks sat down by her side, and rehearsed the hopes and fears which perplexed him.  He determined that there should be no further concealment between them.  If they failed to secure water that night, if the Dyaks maintained a strict siege of the rock throughout the whole of next day, well—­they might survive—­it was problematical.  Best leave matters in God’s hands.

With feminine persistency she clung to the subject, detecting his unwillingness to discuss a possible final stage in their sufferings.

“Robert!” she whispered fearfully, “you will never let me fall into the power of the chief, will you?”

“Not whilst I live.”

“You must live.  Don’t you understand?  I would go with them to save you.  But I would have died—­by my own hand.  Robert, my love, you must do this thing before the end.  I must be the first to die.”

He hung his head in a paroxysm of silent despair.  Her words rung like a tocsin of the bright romance conjured up by the avowal of their love.  It seemed to him, in that instant, they had no separate existence as distinguished from the great stream of human life—­the turbulent river that flowed unceasingly from an eternity of the past to an eternity of the future.  For a day, a year, a decade, two frail bubbles danced on the surface and raced joyously together in the sunshine; then they were broken—­did it matter how, by savage sword or lingering ailment?  They vanished—­absorbed again by the rushing waters—­and other bubbles rose in precarious iridescence.  It was a fatalist view of life, a dim and obscurantist groping after truth induced by the overpowering nature of present difficulties.  The famous Tentmaker of Naishapur blindly sought the unending purpose when he wrote:—­

  “Up from Earth’s Centre through the Seventh Gate
  I rose, and on the throne of Saturn sate,
      And many a Knot unravel’d by the Road;
  But not the Master-Knot of Human Fate.