Another hour wasted! It was blazing noon, and a row of Chinamen were squatting in the shade, eating slops from basins with two sticks. They did not even look up. The naked children at play did not appear to see him. Nobody in Singapore knew anything, and did not care what happened to anybody. He had never seen this part of the city before. Was it Singapore? It might have been the grotesque country of a dream, all these people inimical shadows who did not even glance at their victim, and he the only live man, caught in an enchantment, lost and imprisoned in an illusion where the face of things had a meaning which he could not guess, though it was important for him. The man from London wiped the perspiration from his hands and looked round. A high wall was opposite, with a gateway, and crouched on the top of the wall, on either side of the opening, were two big bulls in pink stone. In the shadow on the pavement beneath were heaps of colored rags, fast asleep. Was that a temple to Siva? It was then that the third ’rickshaw man entered the dream, stopped and looked at Bennett as though he knew at once the man for whom he was seeking, and drew near seductively. This figure of evil, its face pock-marked, had only a rag about its loins and his ’rickshaw was a self-supporting wreck. Well, it would serve to escape from those pink bulls and that unmoving smell. By luck, too, they might pass into a part of the city he recognized, and then he would be released from the spell and wake up. But he went farther, and saw nothing that he knew. He was abandoned under some cocoanuts, and outside the city, by the look of it.
The road was empty, except for a bullock cart at a standstill. A haze of little flies quivered about the sleepy heads of the two animals, and the shadows under their bellies were black. The dark folk, Klings and Malays, who padded by occasionally, were probably in another world. They were certainly not in his. He could not speak with them. The heat was so still and heavy that he felt he could not move in it, especially as he did not know which way to take.
“Can I help you? Are you looking for anyone about here, sir?” The voice was so like Oxford that it exorcized the spectral East completely; for a moment it steadied his bewilderment in the midst of what was quick, but was alien and enigmatic. He was too surprised to answer at once, but in the shade of those palms stared at a young fellow who was so attractively dressed in neat and unctuous white, with a flourishing black silk bow to a collar not in the least stained, though the heat was many hours old, that Bennett felt mean and soiled in the regard of that friendly curiosity. Bennett explained. He was lost. He had been unable to make the ’rickshaw men understand. What he wanted now was the Europe Hotel.
“Some distance, the Europe. This is the Ayer Laut Estate. Sorry, but our cars are out. Would you come with me? Then we can telephone to your hotel.”
They went off through somber avenues of sleeping trees. Their trunks were scored with pale scars and under the wounds were stuck small glass cups. His companion said nothing, but strode briskly forward. The crepuscular aisles were deserted, though Bennett noticed that he and his companion were not alone in that silent and shadowy plantation. But what were the figures he could see in the distance he did not know. They might have been Dryads, those slender and motionless forms in robes of scarlet, orange, and emerald, who were intent on some ritual among the trees. They were retired into the twilight quiet of the aisles, and seemed unaware of the intruding Englishmen. But Bennett was startled by one of those figures. It had been hidden by the gray column of a tree near the path. As he went by it raised its head, with its piled black hair and a gold comb diminishing its dark and delicate face, which had a gold stud in the bold curve of a nostril. Her drowsy eyes looked at him, but he remembered only the spot of gold in her nose, and the astonishing orange of the silk wound round her lithe figure.
They came to a house in a shrubbery of crotons, and ascended a flight of wooden steps to a veranda. A Malay was there, crouched in the portico; but he might have been inanimate. His gaze was fixed beyond them. And the house was deserted. Their footsteps made an embarrassing din on the boards. Bennett with his brisk friend, who seemed to know exactly what to do, went to an upper room, open to the air on three sides, and overlooking everywhere the green roof of the plantation.
The skin of a tiger was on the floor. Its head grinned toward the door in shabby and fatuous defiance. Dusty native weapons were disorderly on the wooden partition at the back. There was a picture of Salisbury Cathedral hanging next to a photograph of a dead elephant with a man nursing a gun sitting on its head.
“Wait a minute,” said the young fellow in white, and went to the most noticeable object in the dingy and neglected apartment, a bright telephone instrument. He leaned against the wall in superior and casual attention with the receiver to his ear. While waiting like that, suddenly and brusquely he spoke to Bennett.
“I say, sorry, what’s your name?” Then he turned in a tired way to the instrument, murmured softly and allusively to the wall for a few seconds, and came away. “That’s all right. The car will be here presently. I must go. But you wait here. Whisky and soda on that sideboard. Make yourself at home”; and he was gone.