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 
