Excerpt from Flotsam: The Study of a Life<br><br>The shadows of the palms cast by the lowering sun stretched almost across the sleek water. It was very still, except for the distant song of boatmen who were creeping up the swift river in the shallows by the bank. A strange song this, and full of some racial trouble which touches European ears uneasily. An Englishman in the bungalow garden looked up from a letter he was reading, as if the wail of the thin Hindu voices disturbed him.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.