JUNGLE STRATAGEMS 39 



a day always rice and fish but I found that two 

 weren't enough for me. After lunch I slept through 

 the heat of the day, with the thermometer climb- 

 ing up to about 125. Then, when evening came, 

 Palembang stirred into life. 



The Malays liked games and they were contin- 

 ually after me to show them some new kind of 

 kindergarten pastime. It made no difference 

 whether it was tag or diving into buckets of treacle 

 after money; if it was a game, they liked it. Some 

 of them knew how to play chess and they gave 

 whole days and nights to it. They are especially 

 fond of gambling, and they repeatedly lose all their 

 money and borrow from the kind merchant, with 

 the result that, to make good their debts, they spend 

 weeks in fishing. 



Occasionally I went to the Dutch quarter to seek 

 a few hours of companionship with white people, 

 but I got little satisfaction out of these visits be- 

 cause I could speak better Malay than Dutch, and 

 at Palambang there were few people who knew 

 English. The white people could not understand 

 why I preferred living with the natives, and some 

 of them looked down on me for it. However, that 

 fact did not trouble me, because I knew what I 

 wanted and I was on the way to getting it. With 

 the hadji I learned the Malay language rapidly, and 

 before long I knew the natives far better than the 

 average white man who goes to work in the Archi- 

 pelago. For the most part, the whites make no 



