“Half of this world will not sleep forever. The sleepers of the East will touch their bonds and find them rotten—the senile hold of their foreign masters! Then there shall be such a conflagration as will scatter the very stars.”
Isabel coming suddenly back from her feverish flight, looked up at Julie. “Are you ill?” she demanded.
Julie put her hands to her head and pressed it hard, her lids drawing together with pain. “I had a sunstroke in Nahal, and ever since I’ve had a headache. Sometimes it aches as if it would split my brain.”
Isabel pointed to the adjoining room. “Go and lie down! When you get up the sunlight will be dimmed, and you will be better.”
Julie dropped down on a bed that was a mass of crawling teakwood dragons. All over the walls, from queer prints etched as with a single hair, gazed fantastic human apparitions wearing their limbs and features in most extraordinary ways, all supremely triumphant over space and perspective. Draperies of embroidered landscapes, fine as old etchings, disclosed temples of woven gold, rivers as fantastic as dreams, and blue mountains over which the mysticism of the East hung like dew.
She drowsed, and presently the temples of gold threads expanded into pavilions like the markets she had seen in the city, and millions of people, thick as flies, passed in and out.
She awoke, and her eyes rested on Isabel, who had so agitated her brain with strange prophecies and visions. The long hair, black as the jungle at night, lay curved over her beautiful body; the blue eyes that judged etchings and old prints were closed, curtained by heavy lids. The soul seemed to be withdrawn to inaccessible retreats, afar off perhaps beating its wings against inexorable walls. Only the mask of the East looked out from the inert form. The Malay woman lay there asleep—the woman that could track her enemy, and kill.
CHAPTER XV
Early the next morning, Julie received a note from Father Hull, in which he informed her that her appointment to the Manila Department had been arranged. Only one vacancy had existed—in the Tondo district, a native section of the city. The Reredos, the prosperous mestizos who were to accommodate her, had a large house within easy distance of the school.