about like a dropped thread. Clumps of fruit-trees marked the villages;
slim palms put their nodding heads together above the low houses;
dried palm-leaf roofs shone afar, like roofs of gold, behind the dark
colonnades of tree-trunks; figures passed vivid and vanishing; the smoke
of fires stood upright above the masses of flowering bushes; bamboo
fences glittered, running away in broken lines between the fields. A
sudden cry on the shore sounded plaintive in the distance, and ceased
abruptly, as if stifled in the downpour of sunshine. A puff of breeze
made a flash of darkness on the smooth water, touched our faces, and
became forgotten. Nothing moved. The sun blazed down into a shadowless
hollow of colours and stillness.

It was the stage where, dressed splendidly for his part, he strutted,
incomparably dignified, made important by the power he had to awaken an
absurd expectation of something heroic going to take place--a burst of
action or song--upon the vibrating tone of a wonderful sunshine. He was
ornate and disturbing, for one could not imagine what depth of horrible
void such an elaborate front could be worthy to hide. He was not
masked--there was too much life in him, and a mask is only a lifeless
thing; but he presented himself essentially as an actor, as a human
being aggressively disguised. His smallest acts were prepared and
unexpected, his speeches grave, his sentences ominous like hints and
complicated like arabesques. He was treated with a solemn respect
accorded in the irreverent West only to the monarchs of the stage, and
he accepted the profound homage with a sustained dignity seen nowhere
else but behind the footlights and in the condensed falseness of some
grossly tragic situation. It was almost impossible to remember who he
was--only a petty chief of a conveniently isolated corner of Mindanao,
where we could in comparative safety break the law against the traffic
in firearms and ammunition with the natives. What would happen should