Can you picture that enclosure to yourself down on the sandy shore with its great fence of rough poles cut in the jungle, lighted by a few flares, torches dipped in cocoanut oil: and the white man tied to a pole raving, writhing in the flickering light which just showed too Robson's white scared little face? And in the intervals of taking over oysters and settling disputes between Arabs and Somalis and Tamils and Moormen, I sat at the table writing a report (which had to go by runner next morning) on a proposal to introduce the teaching of French in 'English schools' in towns. That wasn't a very good report. White gave us the whole history of his life between ten P.M. and four A.M. in the morning. He didn't leave much to the imagination; a parson would have said that in that hour the memory of his sins came upon him--O, I beg your pardon. But really I think they did. I thought I had lived long enough out there to have heard without a shock anything that men can do and do do--especially white men who have 'gone under'. But I hadn't: I couldn't stomach the story of White's life told by himself. It wasn't only that he had robbed and swindled himself through India Up and down for fifteen years. That was bad enough, for there wasn't a station where he hadn't swindled and bamboozled his fellow white men. But it was what he had done when he got away 'among the natives'--to men, and women too, away from 'civilization', in the jungle villages and high up in the mountains. God! the cold, civilized, corrupted cruelty of it. I told you, I think, that his teeth were pointed and spaced out in his mouth. And his remorse was the most horrible thing, tied to that post there, writhing under the flickering light of the flare: the remorse of fear--fear of punishment, of what was coming, of death, of the horrors, real horrors and the phantom horrors of madness.