Complete Works

motionless with his eyes fixed on its wake.  Ali from under the shade of his hand examined the coast curiously.  As the sun declined, the sea-breeze sprang up from the northward and shivered with its breath the glassy surface of the water.
    “Dapat!” exclaimed Ali, joyously.  “Got him, master!  Got prau!  Not there!  Look more Tanah Mirrah side.  Aha!  That way!  Master, see?  Now plain.  See?”
    Almayer followed Ali’s forefinger with his eyes for a long time in vain.  At last he sighted a triangular patch of yellow light on the red background of the cliffs of Tanjong Mirrah.  It was the sail of the prau that had caught the sunlight and stood out, distinct with its gay tint, on the dark red of the cape.  The yellow triangle crept slowly from cliff to cliff, till it cleared the last point of land and shone brilliantly for a fleeting minute on the blue of the open sea.  Then the prau bore up to the southward: the light went out of the sail, and all at once the vessel itself disappeared, vanishing in the shadow of the steep headland that looked on, patient and lonely, watching over the empty sea.
    Almayer never moved.  Round the little islet the air was full of the talk of the rippling water.  The crested wavelets ran up the beach audaciously, joyously, with the lightness of young life, and died quickly, unresistingly, and graciously, in the wide curves of transparent foam on the yellow sand.  Above, the white clouds sailed rapidly southwards as if intent upon overtaking something.  Ali seemed anxious.
    “Master,” he said timidly, “time to get house now.  Long way off to pull.  All ready, sir.”
    “Wait,” whispered Almayer.
    Now she was gone his business was to forget, and he had a strange notion that it should be done systematically and in order.  To Ali’s great dismay he fell on his hands and knees, and, creeping along the sand, erased carefully with his hand all traces of Nina’s footsteps.  He piled up small heaps of sand, leaving behind him a line of miniature graves right down to the water.  After burying the last slight imprint of Nina’s slipper he stood up, and, turning his face towards the headland where he had last seen the prau, he made an effort to shout out loud again his firm resolve to never forgive.  Ali watching him uneasily saw only his lips move, but heard no sound.  He brought his foot down with a stamp.  He was a firm man — firm as a rock.  Let her go.  He never had a daughter.  He would forget.  He was forgetting already.
    Ali approached him again, insisting on immediate departure, and this time he consented, and they went together towards their canoe, Almayer leading.  For all his firmness he looked very dejected and feeble as he dragged his feet slowly through the sand on the beach; and by his side — invisible to Ali — stalked that particular fiend whose mission it is to jog the memories of men, lest they should forget the meaning of life.  He whispered into Almayer’s ear a childish prattle of many years ago.  Almayer, his head bent on one side, seemed to listen to his invisible companion, but his face was like the face of a man that has died struck from behind — a face from which all feelings and all expression are suddenly wiped off by the hand of unexpected death.
    * * * * *
     
    They slept on the river that night, mooring their canoe under the bushes and lying down in the bottom side by side, in the absolute exhaustion that kills hunger, thirst, all feeling and all thought in the overpowering desire for that deep sleep which is like the temporary annihilation of the tired body.  Next day they started again and fought doggedly with the current all the morning, till about midday they reached the settlement and made fast their little craft to the jetty of Lingard and Co.  Almayer walked straight to the house, and Ali followed, paddles on shoulder, thinking that he would like to eat something.  As they crossed the front courtyard they noticed the abandoned look of the place.  Ali looked in at the different servants’ houses: all were empty.  In the back courtyard there was the same absence of sound and life.  In the cooking-shed the fire was out and the black embers were cold.  A tall, lean man came stealthily out of the banana plantation, and went away rapidly across the open space looking at them with big, frightened eyes over his shoulder.  Some vagabond without a master; there were many such in the settlement, and they