Rajah they knew:  he was of their own royal house.  I had the pleasure of meeting the gentleman later on.  He was a dirty, little, used-up old man with evil eyes and a weak mouth, who swallowed an opium pill every two hours, and in defiance of common decency wore his hair uncovered and falling in wild stringy locks about his wizened grimy face.  When giving audience he would clamber upon a sort of narrow stage erected in a hall like a ruinous barn with a rotten bamboo floor, through the cracks of which you could see, twelve or fifteen feet below, the heaps of refuse and garbage of all kinds lying under the house.  That is where and how he received us when, accompanied by Jim, I paid him a visit of ceremony.  There were about forty people in the room, and perhaps three times as many in the great courtyard below.  There was constant movement, coming and going, pushing and murmuring, at our backs.  A few youths in gay silks glared from the distance; the majority, slaves and humble dependants, were half naked, in ragged sarongs, dirty with ashes and mud-stains.  I had never seen Jim look so grave, so self-possessed, in an impenetrable, impressive way.  In the midst of these dark-faced men, his stalwart figure in white apparel, the gleaming clusters of his fair hair, seemed to catch all the sunshine that trickled through the cracks in the closed shutters of that dim hall, with its walls of mats and a roof of thatch.  He appeared like a creature not only of another kind but of another essence.  Had they not seen him come up in a canoe they might have thought he had descended upon them from the clouds.  He did, however, come in a crazy dug-out, sitting (very still and with his knees together, for fear of overturning the thing)—­sitting on a tin box—­which I had lent him—­nursing on his lap a revolver of the Navy pattern—­presented by me on parting—­which, through an interposition of Providence, or through some wrong-headed notion, that was just like him, or else from sheer instinctive sagacity, he had decided to carry unloaded.  That’s how he ascended the Patusan river.  Nothing could have been more prosaic and more unsafe, more extravagantly casual, more lonely.  Strange, this fatality that would cast the complexion of a flight upon all his acts, of impulsive unreflecting desertion of a jump into the unknown.

’It is precisely the casualness of it that strikes me most.  Neither Stein nor I had a clear conception of what might be on the other side when we, metaphorically speaking, took him up and hove him over the wall with scant ceremony.  At the moment I merely wished to achieve his disappearance; Stein characteristically enough had a sentimental motive.  He had a notion of paying off (in kind, I suppose) the old debt he had never forgotten.  Indeed he had been all his life especially friendly to anybody from the British Isles.  His late benefactor, it is true, was a Scot—­even to the length of being called Alexander McNeil—­and Jim came from a long