he was here, but he is dead. He died two months back.'

The jail guard expected to hear the shrill cry and the beating of the breast, the signs of a woman's mourning. Punchi Menika astonished him by walking slowly away to the shade, and sitting down again by the prison wall. The blow was too heavy for the conventional signs of grief. She sat dryeyed; she felt little, but the intense desire to get away to the village, to get away out of this world, where she was lost and alone, to the compound, where she could sit and watch the sun set behind the jungle. She did not wait long; she set out at once down the hill. The old man still sat among his cows looking at the cocoanut-trees.

'Ah,' he said, as she passed him, 'they never come out. I told you so.'

'He is dead, father.'

'Yes, they never come out.

the village, child.'

'I am going, father.'

Go back to

CHAPTER IX

Two years later, Punchi Menika was still living in the hut which had belonged to Silindu, but she lived alone. Karlinahami had died slowly and almost painlessly, like the trees around her. Her death had brought no difference into Punchi Menika's life, except that now she had to find food for herself alone.

The years had brought more evil, death, and decay upon the village. Of the five houses which stood when Punchi Menika returned from her journey to the prison, only two remained, her own, and that of the headman Vederala Punchirala. Disease and hunger visited it year after year. It seemed, as the headman said, to have been forgotten by gods and men. Year after year, the rains from the north-east passed it by; only the sun beat down more pitilessly, and the wind roared over it across the jungle; the little patches of chena crop which the villagers tried to

cultivate withered as soon as the young shoots showed above the ground. No man, traveller or headman or trader, ever came to the village now. No one troubled any longer to clear the track which led to it; the jungle covered it and cut the village off.

Disease and death took the old first, Podi Sinho, and his wife Angohami, and the jungle crept forward over their compound. And three years later two other huts were abandoned. In one had lived Balappu with his wife and sister, and his two children; in the other Bastian Appu with his two sons, a daughter, a daughter-in-law, and a grandchild. They had tried to help Punchi Menika by letting her work in their chenas, and by giving her a share in the meagre crop. They struggled hard against the fate that hung over them, clinging to the place where they had been born and lived, the compound they knew, and the sterile chenas which they had sown. No children were born to them now in their hut, their women were as sterile as the earth; the children that had been born to them died of want and fever. At last they yielded to the jungle. They packed up their few possessions and left the village for ever, to try and find work and food in the rice-fields of Maha Potana.

They tried to induce Punchi Menika to go with them, but she refused. She remembered her misery and loneliness upon the road to Tangalla, and the words of the old man from Mahawelagama, who sat among the cows upon the hill there. She remembered Babun's words to the Mudalali, 'Surely it is a more bitter thing to die in a strange place.' It might be a still bitterer thing to live in a strange place. She was alone in the world; the only thing left to her was the compound and the jungle which she knew. She clung to it passionately, blindly. The love which she had felt for Silindu and Babun-who were lost to her for ever, whose very memories began to fade from her in the struggle to keep alivewas transferred to the miserable hut, the bare compound, and the parched jungle.

He

So she was left alone with Punchirala. was an old man now, weak and diseased. After a while he became too feeble even to get enough food to keep himself alive. She took him into her hut. She had to find food now for him, as well as for herself, by searching the jungle for roots and fruit, and by sowing a few handfuls of grain at the time of the rains in the ground about the hut. He gave her no thanks; as his strength decayed, his malignancy and the bitterness

of his tongue increased; but he did not live long after he came to her hut; hunger and age and parangi at last freed her from his sneers and his gibes.

The jungle surged forward over and blotted out the village up to the very walls of her hut. She no longer cleared the compound or mended the fence, the jungle closed over them as it had closed over the other huts and compounds, over the paths and tracks. Its breath was hot and heavy in the hut itself which it imprisoned in its wall, stretching away unbroken for miles. Everything except the little hut with its rotting walls and broken tattered roof had gone down before it. It closed with its shrubs and bushes and trees, with the impenetrable disorder of its thorns and its creepers, over the rice-fields and the tanks. Only a little hollowing of the ground where the trees stood in water when rain fell, and a long little mound which the rains washed out and the elephants trampled down, marked the place where before had lain the tank and its land.

The village was forgotten, it disappeared into the jungle from which it had sprung, and with it she was cut off, forgotten. It was as if she was the last person left in the world, a world of unending trees above which