第117章 LETTER XX(15)

Just now I saw Mahmoud and Eblis walk into my room, and shortly following them, I found that Mahmoud had drawn a pillow to the foot of the bed, and was lying comfortably with his head upon it, and that Eblis was lying at the other end. I do hope that you will not be tired of the apes. To me they are so intensely interesting that I cannot help writing about them. Eblis has been feverish for some days. I think he has never recovered from the thrashing he got the day I came. He is pining and growing very weak; he eats nothing but little bits of banana, and Mr. Low thinks he is sure to die. It is a curious fact that these apes, which are tamed by living with Europeans, acquire a great aversion to Malays.

February 19.--Eblis became much worse while I was out yesterday, and I fear will surely die. He can hardly hold anything in his cold, feeble hands, and eats nothing. He has a strangely human, faraway look, just what one sees in the eyes of children who have nearly done with this world.

The heat is much greater to-day, there is less breeze, and the mercury has reached 90 degrees, but in the absence of mosquitoes, and with pine-apples and bananas always at hand, one gets on very well. But mosquitoes do embitter existence and interfere with work. Apparently, people never become impervious to the poison, as I thought they did, and there is not a Malay in his mat hut, or a Chinese coolie in his crowded barrack, who has not his mosquito curtains; and I have already mentioned that the Malays light fires under their houses to smoke them away. Last night a malignant and hideous insect, above an inch long, of the bug species, appeared. The bite of this is as severe as the sting of a hornet.