Page 110 - Malay sketches

MALAY SKETCHES
where
you instinctively know the mud and sea meet,
and there they watch the gradually receding tide
with melancholy abstraction, as though they took no
real interest in the daily toil of sustaining life.
Last, there is something else here, and, if you are
not quite a stranger, you will look first, look longest,
and look always for this other thing. Perhaps it is
the extraordinary fitness of her surroundings (I say
her advisedly), perhaps the art with which nature
has designed the body of the saurian to make you
think her a log, or a stranded palm-branch, a half-
of a wrecked or even a or
buried spar boat, lighter
darker ridge of the surrounding mud certain it is
that as the crocodile lies there, basking in the sun
which makes air and water and blistering slime
shimmer and dance before your eyes, you will not
notice the creature, nay, even when pointed out to
you, it is ten to one that you will not even then
realise that she is there.
But get nearer, speak no word and let your rowers
a and noiseless stroke till some one with a
pull long
quick eye and a steady hand can put a bullet in the
neck. As that
reptile's great mouth suddenly opens,
the rows of it shuts
disclosing shining teeth, as
again with the noise of a steel trap, as the horrible
scaly claws dig deep into the mud in their agony and
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