Accordingly, the English captain sat down by the side of the Malay sailor, and looked in the same direction. The gunboat lay at anchor about one hundred and fifty yards from the jungle; the water flowed up to its very margin; among the spreading roots of the mangrove trees lay small ridges of white shingle and broken shells, which receded into darkness or shone out into distinct relief as the moonlight fell upon them. When these white gleams became visible, Osborn immediately pointed to them, and hinted that these were the Malay's "spirit."
"No, no!" he answered vehemently, and Jamboo added, "He says he will warn you immediately he sees _it_."
Suddenly he touched his officer, and pointing earnestly, exclaimed, "Look, look!"
Sherard Osborn _did_ look, and for a moment yielded to the delusion as he caught sight of what appeared to be, and probably was, the figure of a female with drapery thrown around her. Gliding out of the dark forest shadows, it halted at a hillock of white sand not more than three hundred yards distant. Osborn rubbed his eyes; the interpreter called vigorously on a Romish saint, and the Malay spat energetically, as if some unclean animal had crossed his path. Again the captain looked, and again he saw the form, which had passed a dense clump of trees, and was slowly crossing another avenue in the forest.
"Feeling the folly," says Sherard Osborn, "of yielding to the impression of reality which the illusion was certainly creating in my mind, I walked away, and kept the Malay employed in different ways until midnight; he, however, every now and then spat vehemently, and cursed all evil spirits with true Mohammedan fervour."
Of this singular race of Malays, the Orang-Lauts, "Men of the Seas," or "Sea-Gipsies," it is said that they do not seem to know anything of a Creator. "A fact so difficult to believe," says Mr. Thomson, "when we find that the most degraded of the human race, in other quarters of the globe, have an intuitive idea of this unerring and primary truth imprinted on their minds, that I took the greatest care to find a slight image of the Deity within the chaos of their thoughts, however degraded such might be, but was disappointed. They knew neither the God nor the Devil of the Christians or Mohammedans, although they confessed they had been told of such; nor any of the demi-gods of Hindu mythology, many of whom were recounted to them."