The Village in the Jungle

by Leonard Woolf

The parties and witnesses in the case were taken at once to the court-house. They waited about all the morning on the verandah. The court was a very large oblong room with a roof of flat red tiles. At one end was the bench, a raised dais, with a wooden balustrade round it. There were a table and chair upon the dais. In the centre of the room was a large table with chairs round it for the bar and the more respectable witnesses. At the further end of the room was the dock, a sort of narrow oblong cage made of a wooden fence with a gate in it. Silindu and Babun were locked up in this cage, and a court peon stood by the gate in charge of them. There was no other furniture in the room except the witness-box, a small square wooden platform surrounded by a wooden balustrade on three of its sides.

Nothing happened all the morning: Babun and Silindu squatted down behind the bars of their cage. They were silent: they had never been in so vast or so high a room. The red tiles of the roof seemed a very long way above their heads. Outside they could hear the murmur of the sea, and the rush of the wind, and the whispered conversation of the witnesses on the verandah; but inside the empty room the silence awed them. About one o'clock there was a stir through the court: the headmen hurried in, a proctor or two came and sat down at the table. The peon nudged Babun and Silindu, and told them to stand up. Then they saw a white Hamadoru, an Englishman, appear on the daïs and sit down. The court interpreter, a Sinhalese Mahatmaya in coat and trousers, stood upon a small wooden step near the bench. The judge spoke to him in an angry voice. The interpreter replied in a soothing deferential tone. The conversation being in English was unintelligible to Babun and Silindu. Then the door of their cage was unlocked, and they were led out and made to stand up against the wall on the left of the bench.

The court-house stood on a bare hill which rose above the town, a small headland which ran out into the sea to form one side of the little bay. The judge, as he sat upon the bench, looked out through the great open doors opposite to him, down upon the blue waters of the bay, the red roofs of the houses, and then the interminable jungle, the grey jungle stretching out to the horizon and the faint line of the hills. And throughout the case this vast view, framed like a picture in the heavy wooden doorway, was continually before the eyes of the accused. Their eyes wandered from the bare room to the boats and the canoes, bobbing up and down in the bay, to the group of little figures on the shore hauling in the great nets under the blazing sun, to the dust storms sweeping over the jungle, miles away where they lived. The air of the court was hot, heavy, oppressive; the voices of those who spoke seemed both to themselves and to the others unreal in the stillness. The murmur of the little waves in the bay, the confused shouts of the fishermen on the shore, the sound of the wind in the trees floated up to them as if from another world.

It was like a dream. They did not understand what exactly was happening. This was 'a case' and they were 'the accused,' that was all they knew. The judge looked at them and frowned; this increased their fear and confusion. The judge said something to the interpreter, who asked them their names in an angry threatening voice. Silindu had forgotten what his ge[46] name was; the interpreter became still more angry at this, and Silindu still more sullen and confused. From time to time the judge said a few sharp words in English to the interpreter: Silindu and Babun were never quite certain whether he was or was not speaking to them, or whether, when the interpreter spoke to them in Sinhalese, the words were really his own, or whether he was interpreting what the judge had said.

At last the question of the names was settled. Babehami was told to go into the witness box. As he did so a proctor stood up at the table and said:

'I appear for the complainant, your honour.'

'Any one for the defence?' said the judge.

'Have you a proctor?' the interpreter asked Silindu.

'No,' said Babun, 'we are very poor.'

'No, your worship,' said the interpreter.