But he became aware of a bad smell and concluded he would go no farther.
"While he stood wiping his forehead, he heard from somewhere the exclamation: 'My God! It's Davy!' "Davidson's lower jaw, as he expressed it, came unhooked at the crying of this excited voice.

Davy was the name used by the associates of his young days; he hadn't heard it for many years.

He stared about with his mouth open and saw a white woman issue from the long grass in which a small hut stood buried nearly up to the roof.
"Try to imagine the shock: in that wild place that you couldn't find on a map, and more squalid than the most poverty-stricken Malay settlement had a right to be, this European woman coming swishing out of the long grass in a fanciful tea-gown thing, dingy pink satin, with a long train and frayed lace trimmings; her eyes like black coals in a pasty-white face.
Davidson thought that he was asleep, that he was delirious.

From the offensive village mudhole (it was what Davidson had sniffed just before) a couple of filthy buffaloes uprose with loud snorts and lumbered off crashing through the bushes, panic-struck by this apparition.
"The woman came forward, her arms extended, and laid her hands on Davidson's shoulders, exclaiming: 'Why! You have hardly changed at all.
The same good Davy.' And she laughed a little wildly.
"This sound was to Davidson like a galvanic shock to a corpse.

He started in every muscle.