The mate persuaded them, and they landed me on the point, half a mile away, with a box of cheroots, and a roll of matting to take my nap on. I walked round to the clearing, and spread my mat under the canary tree, close to the shore. All that blessed afternoon I waited, and smoked, and killed a snake, and made notes in a pocket Virgil, and slept, and smoked again; but no sign of the bearers from the _campong_. I made signals to the schooner,--she was too far out to hail,--but the crew took no notice. It was plain they meant to wait and see whether the _hantu_ prau went out with the ebb or not; and as it was then flood, and dusk, they couldn't see before morning. So I picked some bananas and chicos, and made a dinner of them; then I lighted a fire under the tree, to smoke and read Virgil by,--in fact, spent the evening over my notes. That editor was a _pukkah_ ass! It must have been pretty late before I stretched out on my matting. I was a long time going to sleep,--if I went to sleep at all. I lay and watched the firelight and shadows in the _lianas_, the bats fluttering in and out across my patch of stars, and an ape that stole down from time to time and peered at me, sticking his blue face out from among the creepers. At one time a shower fell in the clearing, but only pattered on my ceiling of broad leaves. After a period of drowsiness, something moved and glittered on the water, close to the bank; and there bobbed the ghost prau, the gilt and vermilion flags shining in the firelight. She had come clear in on the flood,--a piece of luck. I got up, cut a withe of bamboo, and made her fast to a root. Then I fed the fire, lay down again, and watched her back and fill on her tether,--all clear and ruddy in the flame, even the carvings, and the little wooden figures of wizards on her deck. And while I looked, I grew drowsier and drowsier; my eyes would close, then half open, and there would be the _hantu_ sails and the fire for company, growing more and more indistinct. So much for Certainty; now begins the Other. Did I fall asleep at all? If so, was my first waking a dream-waking, and the real one only when the thing was gone? I'm not an imaginative man; my mind, at home, usually worked with some precision; but this,--there seems to be, you might say, a blur, a--film over my mental retina. You see, I'm not a psychologist, and therefore can't use the big, foggy terms of man's conceit to explain what he never can explain,--himself, and Life. * * * * * The captain tossed his cheroot overboard, and was silent for a space. "The psychologists forget AEsop's frog story," he said at last. "Little swollen Egos, again." Then his voice flowed on, slowly, in the dark. * * * * *