It was already dusk under the heavy trees: the bananas lifted the cool green paddles of their leaves; and under the stately canopy of the coco-palms the little bamboo houses hid, romantically Oriental, idyllic, with their palm-leaf roofs, their doors often already closed, or, if open, framing a little black inward vista, with the vague outline of a bench on which squatted a dark figure. The scabby, hairless dogs barked; the children, naked, with bells dangling from their stomachs, ran indoors and stared out of the houses; the women kept quiet, recognizing the tempter and vaguely laughing, blinking their eyes as he passed in his glory. And Addie pointed to the little house where his old babu lived, Tidjem, the woman who helped him, who always opened her door to him when he wanted the use of her hut, who worshipped him as his mother and his sisters and his little nieces worshipped him. He showed Theo the house and thought of his walk last night with Doddie under the tjemaras. Tidjem the babu saw him and ran up to him delightedly. She squatted down beside him, she pressed his leg against her withered breast, she rubbed her forehead against his knee, she kissed his white shoe, she gazed at him in rapture, her beautiful prince, her raden, whom she had rocked as a little chubby boy in her already infatuated arms. He tapped her on the shoulder and gave her a rix-dollar and asked her if she knew where Si-Oudijck was, because his brother wished to see him. Tidjem stood up and beckoned to him to follow: it was some way to walk. And they stepped out of the compound into an open road with rails along it, by which the bamboo baskets filled with sugar were removed to the proas that lay moored at a landing-stage yonder, in the Brantas. The sun was going down in a fan-shaped glory of orange sheaves; and the distant rows of trees that outlined the paddy-fields were washed in with dark, soft, velvety touches against their arrogant glow. These fields were not yet planted, but their dark, earth-coloured expanse lay as broken by the plough. From the factory came a few men and women, making their way home. Beside the river, by the landing-stage, a small market of portable kitchens had been set up under a sacred, five-fold banyan-tree, with its five trunks merging into one another and its wide-spreading roots. Tidjem called the ferry-man and he put them across, across the orange Brantas, amidst the last yellow rays of the sun, outspread fanwise like a peacock's tail. When they were on the other bank, the night fell over everything, like the hasty fall of a gauze curtain; and the clouds, which all through November had threatened the low horizons, hung oppressively on the sultry air. And they entered another compound, lit here and there by a paraffin-lamp, set down on the ground, with a long lamp-glass but no globe. At last they came to a little house, built partly of bamboo, partly of old packing-cases, and roofed partly with tiles, partly with palm-leaves.