: Joseph Conrad
: Almayer's Folly A Story of an Eastern River
: OTB eBook publishing
: 9783985314935
: 1
: CHF 1.80
:
: Belletristik
: English
: 149
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Almayer's Folly (1895) was Conrad's first novel, set in a remote Bornean outpost at the end of the last century. Conrad draws on his own experience to present the strains of life at a cultural crossroads. The Dutch trader, Almayer, is stranded in Sambir, thirty miles up a virtually unknown equatorial river. He lives among of and new cultures; his wife is Sulu (Philippino), behind him live his Arab rivals, across the river is the Malay rajah's campong, inland are the primitive Dyak headhunters, and decisions taken in London and Amsterdam affect every household in the settlement. (Amazon)

CHAPTER II.


When, in compliance with Lingard’s abrupt demand, Almayer consented to wed the Malay girl, no one knew that on the day when the interesting young convert had lost all her natural relations and found a white father, she had been fighting desperately like the rest of them on board the prau, and was only prevented from leaping overboard, like the few other survivors, by a severe wound in the leg.  There, on the fore-deck of the prau, old Lingard found her under a heap of dead and dying pirates, and had her carried on the poop of theFlash before the Malay craft was set on fire and sent adrift.  She was conscious, and in the great peace and stillness of the tropical evening succeeding the turmoil of the battle, she watched all she held dear on earth after her own savage manner, drift away into the gloom in a great roar of flame and smoke.  She lay there unheeding the careful hands attending to her wound, silent and absorbed in gazing at the funeral pile of those brave men she had so much admired and so well helped in their contest with the redoubtable “Rajah-Laut.”

* * * * *

The light night breeze fanned the brig gently to the southward, and the great blaze of light got smaller and smaller till it twinkled only on the horizon like a setting star.  It set: the heavy canopy of smoke reflected the glare of hidden flames for a short time and then disappeared also.

She realised that with this vanishing gleam her old life departed too.  Thenceforth there was slavery in the far countries, amongst strangers, in unknown and perhaps terrible surroundings.  Being fourteen years old, she realised her position and came to that conclusion, the only one possible to a Malay girl, soon ripened under a tropical sun, and not unaware of her personal charms, of which she heard many a young brave warrior of her father’s crew express an appreciative admiration.  There was in her the dread of the unknown; otherwise she accepted her position calmly, after the manner of her people, and even considered it quite natural; for was she not a daughter of warriors, conquered in battle, and did she not belong rightfully to the victorious Rajah?  Even the evident kindness of the terrible old man must spring, she thought, from admiration for his captive, and the flattered vanity eased for her the pangs of sorrow after such an awful calamity.  Perhaps had she known of the high walls, the quiet gardens, and the silent nuns of the Samarang convent, where her destiny was leading her, she would have sought death in her dread and hate of such a restraint.  But in imagination she pictured to herself the usual life of a Malay girl—the usual succession of heavy work and fierce love, of intrigues, gold ornaments, of domestic drudgery, and of that great but occult influence which is one of the few rights of half-savage womankind.  But her destiny in the rough hands of the old sea-dog, acting under unreasoning impulses of the heart, took a strange and to her a terrible shape.  She bore it all—the restraint and the teac