 to drop gradually out of the trade.
Perhaps the pepper had given out. Be it as it may, nobody cares for it now; the
glory has departed, the Sultan is an imbecile youth with two thumbs on his left
hand and an uncertain and beggarly revenue extorted from a miserable population
and stolen from him by his many uncles.
    This of course I have from Stein. He gave me their names and a short sketch
of life and character of each. He was as full of information about native states
as an official report, but infinitely more amusing. He had to know. He traded in
so many, and in some districts - as in Patusan, for instance - his firm was the
only one to have an agency by special permit from the Dutch authorities. The
Government trusted his discretion, and it was understood that he took all the
risks. The men he employed understood that, too, but he made it worth their
while apparently. He was perfectly frank with me over the breakfast-table in the
morning. As far as he was aware (the last news was thirteen months old, he
stated precisely), utter insecurity for life and property was the normal
condition. There were in Patusan antagonistic forces, and one of them was Rajah
Allang, the worst of the Sultan's uncles, the governor of the river, who did the
extorting and the stealing, and ground down to the point of extinction the
country-born Malays, who, utterly defenceless, had not even the resource of
emigrating - For indeed, as Stein remarked, where could they go, and how could
they get away? No doubt they did not even desire to get away. The world (which
is circumscribed by lofty impassable mountains) has been given into the hand of
the high-born, and this Rajah they knew: he was of their own royal house. I had
the pleasure of meeting the gentleman later on. He was a dirty, little, used-up
old man with evil eyes and a weak mouth, who swallowed an opium pill every two
hours, and in defiance of common decency wore his hair uncovered and falling in
wild, stringy locks about his wizened, grimy face. When giving audience he would
clamber upon a sort of narrow stage erected in a hall like a ruinous barn with a
rotten bamboo floor, through the cracks of which you could see, twelve or
fifteen feet below, the heaps of refuse and garbage of all kinds lying under the
house. That is where and how he received us when, accompanied by Jim, I paid him
a visit
