“How?” said the girl. “Why, as I came in. I have opened the way,” and she pointed to the ragged hole in the palm thatch.
“I could not climb up there,” exclaimed Helen, with a look of helplessness and despair in her countenance; “it is impossible!”
“You white people!” cried the girl—“you are poor, and weak, and helpless! But come, you must go. Murad will soon waken, and what will you do then?”
The mention of that name and the prospect of the awaking seemed to nerve Helen to the effort she was called upon to make; and in answer to a fresh demand made upon her by her companion, she declared her readiness.
“I will go first,” said the girl, and with the nimbleness of a cat she seized the bars of the window, went up them like a ladder, and with an agility that made Helen, as she watched her in the dim light shed up there by the lamp, look upon her movements as almost miraculous.
Drawing herself quickly up, she passed through the hole in the attap roof, crawling right out; and directly after, having turned, Helen saw her leaning through.
“Now, come—quick!” whispered the girl. “Step up the window-bars as I did, and then give me your hands. You shall not fall; I will hold you.”
Helen made a couple of weak, ineffective trials to climb up and reach her friend, but sank back, and was ready to burst into feeble tears and give up in despair; but Murad uttered some angry words and threw out one arm, which fell heavily back upon the floor.
The noise electrified Helen, who darted to the window-bars, and how she managed she hardly knew, but she climbed up, caught spasmodically at the Malay girl’s hand, at the bamboo rafters, and partly by her own effort, partly by the girl’s exertion, was dragged up through the palm-leaf roof, and sat with her companion holding on tightly to the steep slope.
Here she rested, panting and trembling, so that the girl did not make any further effort for a few minutes, and even then it was Helen who proposed that they should move, placing her lips close to the other’s ear, and asking wildly what they should do next.