left
where an itinerant diamond merchant may unload a larger parcel of
brilliants on an unsophisticated housewife than on the local goldsmith,
usually, of course, at a better profit! Whether the good woman decides
to pay in cash or in monthly instalments, the dealer knows his money is
safe, for the Chinese ladies of Malaya are scrupulously honest.
I
heard of one likely spot—this was during my Singapore days—and I
determined to enlarge my circle of private customers, even though it
must involve an automobile journey of four hundred miles, by roads none
too good, and across narrow, rickety wooden bridges which might at any
moment conspire with the fatalistic speed-maniac at the wheel to
precipitate me into a crocodile-infested swamp.
When
mercifully I arrived at my destination in an un-mutilated condition, I
did not know a single soul in the district, and had I not taken the
precaution of providing myself with a letter of introduction to one
Mirzah, I might have come away at once a sadly disappointed man. This
introduction had been scribbled in Arabic Malay upon a half-sheet torn
from a motor-accessory dealer's price list. I could not read it, and
for all I knew its contents might have proved embarrassing to me. But I
was already taking so many risks that one more didn't matter. If I knew
nothing at all of this Mirzah to whose good offices I was commended,
at least his friend, my introducer, was a propertied man and had
supplied me with two cans of petrol. But all he had been willing to say
of Mirzah was that he acted sometimes as a go-between for merchants if
he liked
