Hassim looked at Lingard.
"Why did the little white man make that outcry?" he asked, anxiously.
"Their desire is to eat fish," said Lingard in an enraged tone.
Then before the air of extreme surprise which incontinently appeared on
the other's face, he could not restrain a short and hopeless laugh.
"Eat fish," repeated Hassim, staring. "O you white people! O you white
people! Eat fish! Good! But why make that noise? And why did you send
them here without guns?" After a significant glance down upon the slope
of the deck caused by the vessel being on the ground, he added with a
slight nod at Lingard--"And without knowledge?"
"You should not have come here, O Hassim," said Lingard, testily. "Here
no one understands. They take a rajah for a fisherman--"
"Ya-wa! A great mistake, for, truly, the chief of ten fugitives without
a country is much less than the headman of a fishing village," observed
Hassim, composedly. Immada sighed. "But you, Tuan, at least know the
truth," he went on with quiet irony; then after a pause--"We came here
because you had forgotten to look toward us, who had waited, sleeping
little at night, and in the day watching with hot eyes the empty water
at the foot of the sky for you."
Immada murmured, without lifting her head:
"You never looked for us.
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