And, strong though he had proved himself to be at the time of the strange happenings, which he had been able to exorcize with a single word of threatening force, this superstition, which came as an aftermath of those events, found a weakness in him, a vulnerable spot as it were. He was so much surprised at himself that he did not understand and was afraid lest he might be going mad; and still he worried. His health was undermined by an incipient liver-complaint; and he kept on examining his jaundiced complexion. Suddenly he had an idea that he was being poisoned. The kitchen was searched, the cook subjected to a cross-examination; but nothing came to light. He realized that he had been frightened by nothing. But the doctor declared that he had an enlarged liver and prescribed the usual diet. A thing which otherwise he would have thought quite natural, a far from uncommon illness, now of a sudden struck him as strange, a mysterious event; and he worried over it. And it got on his nerves. He began to suffer from sudden weariness when working, from throbbing headaches. His jealousy upset him; he was overcome by a shuddering restlessness. He suddenly reflected that, if there were now any hammering above his head, if betel-juice were now spat at him, he would not be able to stay in the house. And he began to believe in a hatred rising slowly all around him out of the hostile soil, like a miasma. He believed in a force deep-hidden in the things of India, in the nature of Java, in the climate of Labuwangi, in the conjuring--as he continued to call it--which sometimes makes the Javanese cleverer than the European and gives him the power, a mysterious power, not to release himself from the yoke, but to cause illness, lingering illness, to plague and harass, to play the ghost most incredibly and hideously: a hidden force, a hidden power, hostile to our temperament, our blood, our bodies, our souls, our civilization, to all that seems to us the right thing to do and be and think. It had flashed before him as in a sudden light, it was not the result of thought, it had flashed out before him as in a dreadful revelation, which was utterly in conflict with all the logic of his methodical life, his methodical mode of thought. In a vision of terror, he suddenly saw it before him, as the light of his approaching old age, as men who are growing old do sometimes suddenly perceive the truth. And yet he was young still and hale. And he felt that, if he did not divert his maddening thoughts, they might make him ill, weak and miserable, for ever and ever....