Gallions Reach (26 page)

They had the maps spread out on the floor, and kneeled to them. Colet began to come down to some considerations which he had not supposed were in the journey. It looked a formidable distance, on the chart, and the greater length of it was supported by very few names. It would have been a different affair, Colet saw then, to do that with Norrie; who indeed, began to grow interested as he worked it out, as though he were projecting a new and spacious experience for himself. He lost himself in it. They were rolling up the charts, and putting them into rubber bags, when Mr. Parsell began to come their way. Norrie studied him deliberately.

“Listen. Don't let that man linger. Make him get along, short of breaking him. He'll want to sit down and become a native. Bully him. Don't forget. Bully him. Win his respect. It's the only way to treat a great scientist who doesn't know where he is. He'll never listen to reason. Order him about till he cries. If you get down to the coast you know the people who know me.… Here, the men are waiting.”

The change in their plans was explained to Mr. Parsell. He gave it, as he listened, an apprehending and friendly nod or two. He raised no objection to Colet leaving the country by the route he himself had chosen.

“You might be of some assistance to me. Do you know anything of ethnology, Mr. Colet?”

Their farewells were perfunctory. Their men had already separated, and were on their divergent trails. When Colet turned, as he was about to enter the woods, Norrie was standing, looking back at him. They lifted their rifles, and Norrie vanished.

To face about and march away from Norrie made the land different. The very sunlight depends for its brightness on the way we are able to see it. Norrie was an old sentimentalist, easy and warm, armoured bright in guile, like most of the cynics and epicures, and was as sure to have the hump tonight as himself. What is the good of a camp-fire anywhere without a pal the other side of it? Life without comradeship would be ashes. The fire would be out. Here; better push on and take the head of the line. Set the pace. Let these fellows see who is running the show.

Old Parsell's puttees were comic. Might be an urchin's stockings; no better than dirty bandages slipping down, and the beastly leeches were active.

“Hold on, Mr. Parsell; let us fix these. They'll never last as they are. You should start them, winding the strip this way … see? Look at that. A bunch of worms already browsing on you. There it is—that comes of loose and unsoaped puttees. Always give 'em a strong dose of carbolic soap once they are fixed. The lather upsets the little devils.”

A promising start, teaching the dear old buffer how to dress for a walk. Parsell seemed to imagine he was strolling through a Devon lane, and that the local oddities meant nothing to an important man. No concern of his. He was humming to himself now—a confident old card—considering a problem of philology, no doubt, while cheerfully humming a tune, and perhaps a rhinoceros was waiting round that bend. Where did Norrie say was the place to hit an elephant? Three inches in front of the earhole, if you could see it. But if not?

Colet, leading them, found the trail descended to an open space, a smooth and sunny lake of grass round which the forest towered rugged as basaltic cliffs. But the grass was taller than himself. You had to plunge into this lake, and walk along the bottom of it. A likely corner for sladang, the instantaneous bull which does not wait for trouble but makes it when you are not looking; and it was impossible to see a yard ahead. Queer. Now he knew how much before he had left to Norrie; he had never bothered about such characteristics of the Malay jungle while Norrie was ahead, though he knew they were there. No worse now than they used to be, but he happened to be leading. There is something in leadership, then, which the people behind never guess till the man who should be in front is not.

Through that bit. Nothing there. Just as well not to worry when you can't see anything. Wait till you do. It might be good fun to manœuvre this party through to the sea; an attractive substitute for the loss of the tin. The Malays were fine fellows. A likely lot. Stout little men. That one close behind, the guide, had a serviceable face for the figure-head of a pirate ship; coming along with its eyes at your heels it kept you brisk. Mat was decidedly a good man. His eyes saw things. He would last. And another pleasing sign. Mat had consulted him, with marked respect—which was a trifle disturbing, seeing where they were—about the point to be made that day; Mat had not gone to the pawang. Perhaps he guessed that even a pawang may be a bit weak about such a detail as the best direction to take in a forest.

Parsell, when half the day was done, showed no sign of distress. The ethnologist had no body worth mentioning, but his cheerfulness hinted that spirit could well support a purpose as well as sinew. With that big helmet, his meagreness was absurdly overcapped; it was a mushroom on a short thin stalk. He was in a mood of light confidence, when they paused for food in the early afternoon.

“I have decided, Mr. Colet, that we shall camp here for the day. This is an excellent place. I want some time to arrange my notes. The men had better make a shelter.”

“Not here, Mr. Parsell. It can't be done. It's a rotten hole for a camp. We shall go on till five o'clock.”

“But, my dear sir, I must have leisure for my work. It is in arrears.”

“Not the place for a camp, sir. You wouldn't do any work here. The sand-flies wouldn't let you. On we must go.”

Colet lumbered up, fixed his gear, slung his gun. Mat already was getting under way.

“We mustn't waste time, Mr. Parsell. Some way to go yet.”

The ethnologist showed astonishment. His mind, evidently, had been settled. But he saw the men assembling their burdens and that the guide had gone.

“I don't understand this, Mr. Colet. I thought the men.…”

“But I do. It's not a bit of good. We can't risk the lives of these men for our fun, you know. Got to push on. I think we should get this bit behind us. It's a bad patch. Feeling tired?”

“Not in the least. I rarely feel tired. Something has occurred to me, and I wish to get to work. You don't think we could pitch here?”

“Sure of it. The men know it, too.”

Mr. Parsell gave the still and monstrous foliage about them a cursory glance. It began to exist for him. No wonder he had not noticed it; it was so quiet. The last of the men was waiting for the ethnologist to take his place in the line. Colet hurried to the front. After all, the silence of the forest was a forcible persuader, once you noticed it. You could leave it to the look of the jungle at a pinch. Not even Mr. Parsell would elect for loneliness there. That was another hopeful sign.

The camp was not awake when Colet left it to go down to the river. Its surroundings were apparitional in the hour before dawn. The forest was uncreated. It was only beginning to come out of the darkness. Nothing had taken shape, except a few outlines on the surface. Creation had been roughly indicated. The rest was night. Substance was not alive, but was suspended in a void, germinal and suggestive. There had been no word yet.

It was almost cold, and Colet shivered. There was something in the scene suggestive of an autumnal dawn at home; the same hush and the unreality. The track led down past a tree with buttresses massive enough for a cathedral. Its exposed roots, in that light, were dank coils ambushed in a nightmare. They appeared to be a tangle of sleeping reptiles waiting for a touch to set them thrashing about hideously. The trail was easier below, almost free of obstructions. No. Something was there in the path. Only a shadow? It was not. That really was a snake; it twisted a little.

Better be careful. Colet advanced a few steps, watchful. He did not think he was mistaken. There had been a movement. The shadow then heaved, and humped on the ground. The snake uncoiled again and turned over. It was a tail. Colet stopped, with an urgent impulse to fly back to the camp. He overcame that impulse. He had a clear idea of the expression on the tiger's face. It was boredom. It had pale side-whiskers; the upward glance of its bright eyes was reproachful. It stretched itself; it yawned with a gape which Colet especially remarked, and stood for a moment sideways.
It sneered; and then it went. The forest took it in. There was no sound. It was there, and then it was not.

For a second Colet wondered whether human dignity would insist that he must go on. But dignity lost. He could not go on. The vague path left empty by that surprise was insuperable. He retired, in deliberate but agitated leisure, occasionally looking back. That was a gentlemanly beast. And if he'd had the gun with him he couldn't have hit it. It went before a thought could move.

Mat was roving about, with his morning cigarette, when he reached the hut, and after a suitable interval Colet advised the Malay that he had met a tiger when going to bathe. Mat listened to the news with a show of polite interest. These tigers! They have no manners.

Mat's own manners now, were perfect. His courtesy and patience, which were safe from the presumption of the ignorant because he did not look safe, and because of the austerity of his bearing, made him notable even on the march, when his lithe bronze figure was almost naked. The eyes of the two men met, for no particular reason, and the Malay smiled. That was well. Colet knew he was not alone in that enterprise.

The Malay wished to speak to him. Tuan! He would not hide the truth. All his knowledge of that country had been gained when, long ago, as a young man, he had passed through with a party hunting Sakais, the jungle folk, for slaves. Yet, if he might speak, he thought that time would be saved if now they took to the river. It would not be easy to pole
rakits
up against the stream, but it would be easier than carrying burdens in the forest. The river was low. The
jerams
, the rapids, would not be bad, for the season of floods had not come.

The map, Colet saw, held with Mat's opinion; the men very quickly made rafts of bamboo. That sort of craft had a dubious freeboard, Colet noticed, but the men behaved as though they had nothing to learn when they were turning
bamboos into a means of transport. If the river allowed it, if there were no floods, they would be in the neighbourhood of Berching in a few days; and the idea of that mountain had been very distant, when considered in the woods. Their small flotilla of rafts began its upward journey towards the watershed.

Colet's platform of green bamboo pipes, enamelled and wet, made slippery holding. It was fairly agile, too, and demanded subtle coaxing from a rider who was unused to such a seat. It would pardon no nonsense. Its surface responded to every inequality of the current. You could feel the river alive under your feet.

Mr. Parsell sat beside Colet, but was forgotten. The ethnologist showed no interest in the world about; apparently he desired nothing better than an opportunity to meditate on what could not be imparted to a man who, in an important sense, was not with him. Colet forgot him.

Their way was now at the bottom of a chasm. The dark forest was its walls. The river was a blinding mirror, but narrow; the sky overhead was hardly any wider. That region told them that man had only then entered it; but Colet, after rounding several bends, received no impulse from the thought. He lapsed gradually into limp but enduring desire, a desire for shade, for a break in the journey. The sun concentrated its heat into that stagnant cleft in the forest, down the bottom of which waters drained from the heights. The poles of the Malays clinked, splashed, and echoed. The men cried out to each other, and their voices sped like the first flaws in the original peace. They broke the solitude at last. The stillness of the forest, in which not a leaf stirred, and the insistence of the heat, were mesmeric; they reduced Colet to a pair of eyes which travelled, that first afternoon of it, without a body. Occasionally he was brought round, and found that he was able to move, when the
rakit
was swept under a projecting bough, and globular fruits
hanging in its shade, like emerald and yellow lamps, threatened to clear the deck. There was a brushing and cracking, the raft heeled, and they came clear into the sun again, half foundered, the Malays laughing.

Long sandy islands were humped in the stream, and on them had stranded trees out of old floods, trees gaunt and bleached, like the skeletons of mastodons. A dragon-fly would hover over the raft with a lustre of wing-beat as its nimbus, the only inhabitant, and then it would shoot off as a streak of prismatic light. The reach they were in was always enclosed, as though it were a brief lake, with high walls on either hand, unscaleable, and abrupt hills corrugated with the everlasting forest overlooking both ends of it. No way out. But round the corner, as they turned it, shot the uproar of rapids, and the river above was taut in glassy sheets over inclines. All had to jump overboard, and persuade the mutinous rafts to go up and over against their weighty and tricky insistence that down was the right way to go. That was a lively and cooling interlude. It was play for the men. They chanted; they raised their shrill war-cry when they got a
rakit
free from the snags and fairly on the run.

The late afternoon gloomed with the threat of the daily storm. Colet watched those pitchy masses in the sky with a concern for the coming of rain which was instinctive, but puzzled him. Here he hated rain, and that seemed unreasonable. Yet these were more than storms; they were threats to existence. The earth cowered under that savage frown, and waited, in surrender. The sky lowered to the forest in ponderous keels of bitumen solid and ominous, illuminated, so it seemed, by livid glowings from hell. The trees that had been cataleptic began to tremble, leaves and birds whirled in upper gusts, the outer branches shook in helpless desperation; and then the sky collapsed, roaring. Nothing could be seen but a screen of falling water which glittered with incessant convulsions of lightning. The raft was battered.
The storm ceased with a shocking detonation, as though on the signal of a gun-burst. In the silence which followed, when there was only drainage drumming through the leaves, they heard the crash of a forest giant. The Malays were glum now, chilled and depressed. It was nightfall when they sighted some lights ahead, and moored by a cluster of huts.