For upwards¹ of forty years Abdulla had walked in the way of his Lord. Son of the rich Syed Selim bin² Sali, the great Mohammedan trader of the Straits, he went forth³ at the age of seventeen on his first commercial expedition, as his father’s representative on board a pilgrim ship chartered by the wealthy Arab to convey a crowd of pious⁴ Malays to the Holy Shrine⁵. That was in the days when steam was not in those seas — or, at least, not so much as now. The voyage was long, and the young man’s eyes were opened to the wonders of many lands. Allah had made it his fate to become a pilgrim very early in life. This was a great favour of Heaven, and it could not have been bestowed⁶ upon a man who prized it more, or who made himself more worthy⁷ of it by the unswerving piety⁸ of his heart and by the religious solemnity of his demeanour. Later on it became clear that the book of his destiny contained the programme of a wandering life. He visited Bombay and Calcutta, looked in at the Persian Gulf⁹, beheld¹⁰ in due course the high and barren coasts of the Gulf of Suez, and this was the limit of his wanderings westward¹¹. He was then twenty-seven, and the writing on his forehead decreed that the time had come for him to return to the Straits and take from his dying father’s hands the many threads of a business that was spread over all the Archipelago: from Sumatra to New Guinea, from Batavia to Palawan.

Very soon his ability, his will — strong to

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