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Although the varnished leaves of the cocoanuts kept almost every ray of sunlight out of the little village, and though the children could play in the airy spaces under their own houses, their heads and faces were painted with a paste of flour and water to keep their tender skins from chafing in the hot, moist air.

At evening, when the fierce sun went down behind the great banian tree that nearly hid Mount Pulei, the kateeb would sound the call to prayer on a hollow log that hung up before the little palm-thatched mosque. Then Busuk and her playmates would fall on their faces, while the holy man sang in a soft, monotonous voice the promises of the Koran, the men of the kampong answering. “Allah il Allah,” he would sing, and “Mohammed is his prophet,” they would answer.

Every night Busuk would lie down on a mat on the floor of the house with a little wooden pillow under her neck, and when she dared she would peep down through the open spaces in the bamboo floor into the darkness beneath. Once she heard a low growl, and a great dark form stood right below her. She could see its tail lashing its sides with short, whip-like movements. Then all the dogs in the kampong began to bark, and the men rushed down their ladders screaming, “Harimau! Harimau!” (A tiger! A tiger!) The next morning she found that her pet dog, Fatima, named after herself, had been killed by one stroke of the great beast’s paw. Once a monster python swung from a cocoanut tree through the window of her home, and wound itself round and round the post of her mother’s loom. It took a dozen men to tie a rope to the serpent’s tail, and pull it out.

Busuk went everywhere astride the punghulo’s broad shoulders as he collected the taxes and settled the disputes in the little village. She went out into the straits in the big prau that floated the star and crescent of Johore over its stern, to look at the fishing-stakes, and was nearly wrecked by a great water-spout that burst within a few feet of them.

Then she went twice to Johore, and gazed in open-eyed wonder at the palaces of the Sultan and at the fort in which her uncle was an officer.

“Some day,” she thought, “I may see his Highness, and he may notice me and smile.” For had not his Highness spoken twice to her father and called him a good man? So whenever she went to Johore she put on her best sarong and kabaya> and in her jetty black hair she put the pin her aunt had given her, with a spray of sweet-smelling chumpaka flower.

When she was four years old she went to the penager to learn to read and write. In a few months she could outstrip any one in the class in tracing Arabic characters on the sand-sprinkled floor, and she knew whole chapters in the Koran.

So the days were passed in the little kampong under the gently swaying cocoanuts, and the little Malayan girl grew up like her companions, free and wild, with little thought beyond the morrow. That some day she was to be married, she knew; for since her first birthday she had been engaged to Mamat, the son of her father’s friend, the punghulo of Bander Bahru.

She had never seen Mamat, nor he her; for it was not proper that a Malay should see his intended before marriage. She had heard that he was strong and lithe of limb, and could beat all his fellows at the game called ragga. When the wicker ball was in the air he never let it touch the ground; for he was as quick with his head and feet, shoulders, hips, and breast, as with his hands. He could swim and box, and had once gone with his father to the seaports on New Year’s Day at Singapore, and his own prau had won the short-distance race.