"Let me hear what they are, and I'll do the best I can for you."
"Well, in the first place you will procure from one of the stores in the town, sixty feet of strong rope. With this carefully disguised you will wait till midnight; then you must engage a small kharti (native cab) with a good strong Malay boy driver, and proceed to the other side of this wall. When you get there, and only then, you will say to the boy—by the way, do you speak Malay?"
"No; unfortunately I don't."
"That's a pity, but it can't be helped."
He stopped and thought for a moment, then borrowing a pencil and a piece of paper, wrote something on it.
"There are two sentences," he said, and he repeated them once or twice to enable me to pick up the proper accent. "This one means, 'To the gaol'—that, 'You shall have ten guilders if you help me.' Say them over to me."
I repeated them till I was tired, and only then did he seem satisfied.
"I think he'll sumjao you now," he said.
"And when I get here," I continued, "what am I to do?"
"Then you will uncoil the rope and throw one end over the wall, to the left, there. I will make it fast round my waist, and you and the boy must manage between you to pull me up to the top. It'll be a struggle, but you must do it somehow."