*Reprinted by permission of the author.
All the wintry afternoon we had been worming our way down the Thames,
the big steamer filtering slowly through the throng of crafts like a
'bus moving ponderously amid crowded traffic. When at last we won
free of the river, the Channel chop took us on its knee and rocked us
roughly, while the skud of wind and rain slapped us in the face with
riotous horse-play. As we came up from dinner and struggled aft, our
feet slipped and slithered over the wet decks, and the shouts of the
frozen Lascars at the lookout reached us through the sopping gloom,
despairing as the howls of souls in torment. The ugly, hopeless
melancholy of our surroundings accorded well with the mood which
possessed the majority of those on board; for we were outward bound,
and men who leave England for the good of their purses carry heavy
hearts with them at the start. In the smoking room, therefore, with
coat-collars tugged up about our ears and hands thrust deeply into
our pockets, we sat smoking with mournful earnestness, glaring at our
neighbours with the open animosity of the genial Briton.
Through the thickening fog of the tobacco-smoke, the figure of a man
seated immediately opposite to me was dimly visible; but presently
his unusual appearance claimed my closer attention and aroused my
curiosity. His emaciated body was wrapped in a huge ulster, from the
up-turned collar of which a head emerged that I can only describe as
being like nothing so much as that of a death's-head moth. He was
clean-shaven, and his cheeks were as hollow as saucers; his temples
were pinched and prominent; from the bottom of deeply sunken sockets
little wild eyes glared like savage things held fast in a gin. The
mouth was set hard, as though its owner were enduring agony, and
trying his best to repress a scream. As much of his hair as his cap
and his coat-collar suffered to be seen was of a dirty yellow-white;
yet in some indefinable way the man did not give the impression of
being old. Rather he seemed to be one prematurely broken; one who
suffered acutely and unceasingly; one who, with rigid self-control,
maintained a tight grip upon himself, as though all his nerves were
on edge. I had marked a somewhat similar expression of concentrated
determination upon the faces of fellow-passengers engaged in fighting
the demon of sea-sickness; but this man sucked at his pipe, and
obviously drew a measure of comfort from it, in a fashion which
showed that he was indifferent to the choppy motion. Yet though
those buried eyes of his were glaring and savage--eyes that seemed to
be eternally seeking some means of escape from a haunting peril--they
were not restless, but rather were fixed in a venomous scowl; while
the man himself, dead quiet, save for the light that glinted from
them, was apparently sunken in a fathomless abstraction. All this I
noted mechanically, but it was the extraordinary condition of his
face that chiefly excited my wonder. It was literally pock-marked
with little purple cicatrices, small oblong lumps, smooth and shining
feebly in the lamplight, that rose above the surface of the skin, and
ran this way and that at every imaginable angle. I had seen more
than once the faces of German duellists wonderfully and fearfully
beslashed; but the scars they wore were long and clean, wholly unlike
the badly healed lumps which disfigured my queer _vis-à-vis_. I fell
to speculating as to what could have caused such a multiplicity of
wounds: not a gunpowder explosion, certainly, for the skin showed
none of the blue tattooing inseparable from injuries so inflicted;
nor yet the bursting of a gun, for that always makes at least one
jagged cut, not innumerable tiny scars such as those at which I was
looking. I could think of no solution that would fit the case; and
as I watched, suddenly the man withdrew his hands from his pockets,
waggling them before his face with a nervous motion as though he were
warding off some invisible assailants. Then I saw that every inch of
the backs and palms, and as much of his wrists as were exposed to
view, were pitted with cicatrices similar to those with which his
face was bedecked.
"Evening, you folk!" said a nasal voice in the doorway, breaking
discordantly upon the sulky silence which brooded over us; and I
looked up to see the figure of a typical "down-easter," slim and
alert, standing just within the room. He had a keen, hard face on
him, like a meat-axe, and the wet rain stood upon it in drops. He
jerked his head at us in collective greeting, walked through the haze
of smoke with a free gait and swinging shoulders, and threw himself
down in a heap on the horse-hair bench beside the man whose strange
appearance had riveted my attention. Seated thus, he looked round at
us with quick humorous glances, as though our British solemnity,
which made each one of us grimly isolated in a crowd, struck him as
at once amusing and impossible of endurance.
"Snakes!" he exclaimed genially. "This is _mighty_ cheerful!" His
strident twang seemed to cut wedges out of the foggy silence. "We
look as though we had swallowed a peck of tenpenny nails, and the
blamed things were sitting heavy on our stomachs. Come, let us be
friendly. I ain't doing any trade in sore-headed bears. Wake up,
sonny." And he dug his melancholy neighbour in the ribs with an
aggressive and outrageous thumb.
It was for all the world as though he had touched the spring that
sets in motion the clockwork of a mechanical toy. The man's cap flew
from his head--disclosing a scalp ill-covered with sparse hairs and
scarred like his face--as he leaped to his feet with a scream, torn
suddenly, as it were, from the depths of his self-absorbed
abstraction. Casting quick nervous glances over his shoulder, he
backed into the nearest corner, his hands clawing at the air, his
eyes hunted, defiant, yet abject. His whole figure was instinct with
terror--terror seeking impotently to defend itself against unnumbered
enemies. His teeth were set, his gums drawn back over them in two
rigid white lines; a sort of snarling cry broke from him--a cry that
seemed to be the expression of furious rage, pain, and agonisingly
concentrated effort.
It all took place in a fraction of a second--as quickly as a man
jumps when badly startled--and as quickly he recovered his balance,
and pulled himself together. Then he cast a murderous glance at the
American--who at that moment presented a picture of petrified
astonishment--let fly a venomous oath at him, and slammed out of the
room in a towering rage.
"Goramercy!" ejaculated the American limply. "I want a drink.
Who'll join me?" But no one responded to his invitation.
That was the occasion of my first meeting with Timothy O'Hara: but as
I subsequently travelled half across the world in his company, was
admitted to his friendship, and heard him relate his experiences, not
once but many times, I am able to supply the key to his extraordinary
behaviour that evening. I regret that it is impossible to give his
story in his own words, for he told it graphically, and with force;
but unfortunately his very proper indignation got the better of his
discretion, with the result that he frequently waxed blasphemous in
the course of his narrative, and at times was rendered altogether
inarticulate by rage. However, the version which I now offer to the
reader is accurate in all essential details: and my own first-hand
knowledge of that gentle race called Muruts, at whose hands O'Hara
fared so evilly, has helped me to fill in such blanks as may have
existed in the tale as it originally reached me.
A score of years ago there was a man in North Borneo, whose name does
not matter--a man who had the itch of travel in him, and loved
untrodden places for their own sake. He undertook to explore the
interior of the no-man's-land which the Chartered Company
euphemistically described as its "property." He made his way inland
from the western coast, and little more was heard of him for several
months. At the end of that time a haze of disquieting rumours, as
impalpable as the used-up, fever-laden wind that blows eternally from
the interior, reached the little squalid stations on the seashore;
and shortly afterward the body of the explorer, terribly mangled and
mutilated, was sluiced down-country by a freshet, and brought up on a
sand-spit near the mouth of a river on the east coast. Here it was
discovered by a couple of white men, who with the aid of a handful of
unwilling natives buried it in becoming state, since it was the only
thing with a European father and mother which had ever travelled
across the centre of North Borneo, from sea to sea, since the
beginning of time.
In life the explorer had been noted for his beard, a great yellow
cascade of hair which fell down his breast from his lip to his waist;
and when his corpse was found this ornament was missing. The
Chartered Company, whose business it was to pay dividends in adverse
circumstances, did not profess to be a philanthropical institution,
and could not spend its hard-squeezed revenues upon putting the fear
of death into people who have made too free with the lives of white
folk, as is the practice in other parts of Asia. Therefore no steps
were taken by the local administration to punish the Muruts of the
interior who had amused themselves by putting the explorer to an ugly
death; but the knowledge that the murdered man's beard had been shorn
from his chin by some truculent savage, and was even then ornamenting
the knife-handle of a Murut chief in the heart of the island rankled
in the minds of the white men on the spot. The wise and prudent
members of the community talked a great deal, said roundly that the
thing was a shame and an abomination, and took care to let their
discretion carry them no farther than the spoken word. The young and
foolish did not say much, but the recovery of that wisp of hair
became to many of them a tremendous ambition, a dream, something that
made even existence in North Borneo tolerable, while it presented
itself to their imaginations as a feat possible of accomplishment.
With a few this dream became an _idée fixe_, an object in a life that
otherwise was unendurable; and it may even have saved a few from the
perpetration of more immediate follies. The quest would be the most
hazardous conceivable, a fitting enterprise for men rendered
desperate by the circumstances into the midst of which fate had
thrust them.
Sitting at home in England, with pleasant things to distract the mind
all about you, and with nothing at hand more dangerous than a
taxicab, all this pother concerning the hairs off a dead man's chin
may appeal to you as something absurdly sentimental and irrational;
but try for the moment to place yourself in the position of an
isolated white man at an outstation of North Borneo. Picture to
yourself a tumble-down thatched bungalow standing on a roughly
cleared hill, with four Chinese shops and a dilapidated
police-station squatting on the bank of a black, creeping river. Rub
in a smudge of blue-green forest, shutting you up on flanks, front,
and rear. Fill that forest with scattered huts, wherein squalid
natives live the lives of beasts--natives whose language you do not
know, whose ideas you do not understand, who make their presence felt
only by means of savage howls raised by them in their drunken
orgies--natives whose hatred of you can only be kept from active
expression by such fear as your armed readiness may inspire. Add to
this merciless heat, faint exhausted air, an occasional bout of the
black fever of the country, and not enough of work to preserve your
mind from rust. Remember that the men who are doomed to live in
these places get no sport, have no recreations, no companionship; and
that the long, empty, suffocating days trail by, one by one, bringing
no hope of change, and that the only communication with the outer
world is kept up fitfully by certain dingy steam-tramps which are
always behind time, and which may, or may not, arrive once a month.
Can you wonder that amid such surroundings men wax melancholy; that
they take to brooding over all manner of trivial things in a fashion
which is not quite sane; and that the knowledge that their continued
existence is dependent upon the wholesome awe in which white folks
are held sometimes gets upon their nerves, and makes them feverishly
anxious to vindicate the honour of their race? When you have let the
full meaning of these things sink into your minds, you will begin to
understand why so much excitement prevailed in North Borneo
concerning the reported ownership of the deceased explorer's beard.
Timothy O'Hara and Harold Bateman had lived lives such as those which
I have described for half a dozen years or more. They had had ample
leisure in which to turn the matter of the explorer's beard over and
over in their minds, till the thought of it had bred something like
fanaticism--a kind of still, white-hot rage within them. It chanced
that their leave of absence fell due upon one and the same day. It
followed that they put their heads together and decided to start upon
a private raid of their own into the interior of the Murut country,
with a view to redeeming the trophy. It also followed that they made
their preparations with the utmost secrecy, and that they enlisted a
dozen villainous little Dyaks from Sarawak to act as their punitive
force. The whole thing was highly improper and very illegal, but it
promised adventurous experiences, and both Bateman and O'Hara were
young and not over-wise. Also, it must be urged in extenuation of
their conduct that they had the effects of some six years' crushing
monotony to work off; and that they had learned to regard the Muruts
of the interior as their natural enemies; and that the ugliness and
the deadly solitude of their existence had rendered them savage, just
as the tamest beast becomes wild and ferocious when it finds itself
held in the painful grip of a trap.
I am in nowise concerned to justify their doings: my part is to
record them. O'Hara and Bateman vanished one day from the last
outpost of quasi-civilisation, having given out that they were off
up-country in search of big game--which was a fact. Their little
expedition slipped into the forest, and the wilderness swallowed it
up. When once they had pushed out into the unknown interior they
were gone past power of recall, were lost as completely as a needle
in a ten-acre hay-field; and they breathed more freely because they
had escaped from the narrow zone wherein the law of the white man
runs, and need guide themselves for the future merely by the dictates
of their own rudimentary notions of right and wrong.
They had a very hard time of it, so far as I can gather; for the
current of the rivers, which crept toward them, black and oily, from
the upper country, was dead against them, and the rapids soon caused
them to abandon their boats. Then they tramped it, trudging with
dogged perseverance up and down the hills, clambering painfully up
sheer ascents, slipping down the steep pitches on the other side,
splashing and labouring through the swamps betwixt hill and hill, or
wading waist-deep across wildernesses of rank _lalang_-grass, from
the green surface of which the refracted heat smote them under their
hat-brims with the force of blows. Aching in every limb,
half-blinded by the sweat that trickled into their eyes, flayed by
the sun, mired to the ears in the morasses, torn by thorn-thickets,
devoured by tree-leeches, stung by all manner of jungle-insects, and
oppressed by the weight of self-imposed effort that pride forbade
them to abandon, they struggled forward persistently, fiercely,
growing more savage and more vindictive at every painful step. The
golden fleece of beard, which was the object of their quest, became
an oriflamme, in the wake of which they floundered eternally through
the inferno of an endless fight. Their determination to recover it
became a madness, a possession: it filled their minds to the
exclusion of aught else, nerved them to fresh endeavour, spurred them
out of their weariness, and would not suffer them to rest. But the
bitterness of their travail incensed them mightily against the Murut
folk, whose lack of reverence for white men had imposed so tremendous
a task upon these self-appointed champions of their race; and as they
sat over their unpalatable meals when the day's toil was ended, they
talked together in blood-thirsty fashion of the vengeances they would
wreak and the punishment they would exact from the tribe which was
discovered to be in possession of the object of their search.
One feature of their march was that prudence forbade a halt. The
Murut of North Borneo is a person of mean understanding, who requires
time wherein to set his slow intellect in motion. He is a
dipsomaniac, a homicide by training and predilection, and he has a
passion for collecting other people's skulls, which is an
unscrupulous and as fanatical as that of the modern philatelist.
Whenever he encounters a stranger, he immediately falls to coveting
that stranger's skull; but as he is a creature of poor courage it is
essential to his comfort that he should win possession of it only by
means that will not endanger his own skin. The question as to how
such means may be contrived presents a difficult problem for his
solution, and it takes his groping mind from two to three days in
which to hit upon a workable plan. The explorer, as Bateman and
O'Hara were aware, had lost his life because, overcome by fatigue, he
had allowed himself to commit the mistake of spending more than a
single night under a hospitable Murut roof-tree, and had so given
time to his hosts to plot his destruction. Had he only held steadily
upon his way, all might have been well with him: for in a country
where every village is at enmity with its neighbours, a short march
would have carried him into a stranger's land, which he should have
been able to quit in its turn ere the schemes for his immolation
hatched therein had had time in which to ripen. O'Hara and Bateman,
therefore, no matter how worn out they might be by that everlasting,
clambering tramp across that cruel huddle of hill-caps, were rowelled
by necessity into pushing forward, and still forward, as surely as
the day dawned.
Often the filth and squalor of the long airless huts--each one of
which accommodated a whole village community in its dark interior,
all the pigs and fowls of the place beneath its flooring, and as many
blackened human skulls as could find hanging space along its
roof-beams--sickened them, and drove them forth to camp in the
jungle. Here there were only wild beasts--self-respecting and on the
whole cleanly beasts, which compared very favourably with the less
attractive animals in the village huts--but a vigilant guard had to
be maintained against possible surprise; and this, after a
heart-breaking tramp, was hard alike upon white men and Dyaks.
The raiders had pitched their camp in such a place one evening; and
as the party lacked meat, and the pigeons could be heard cooing in
the treetops close at hand, O'Hara took his fowling piece and
strolled off alone into the forest, with the intention of shooting a
few birds for the pot. The jungle was very dense in this part of the
country--so dense, indeed, that a man was powerless to see in any
direction for a distance of more than a dozen yards; but the pigeons
were plentiful, and as they fluttered from tree to tree O'Hara walked
after them without in the least realising how far he was straying
from his starting point. At last the fast-failing light arrested his
attention, and as he stooped to pick up the last pigeon, the search
for which among the brambles had occupied more time than he had
fancied, it suddenly struck him that he ought to be returning to the
camp, while a doubt as to its exact direction assailed him. He was
in the very act of straightening himself again with a view to looking
about him for some indication of the path by which he had come when a
slight crackle in the underwood smote upon his ear. He remained very
still, stooping forward as he was, holding his breath, and listening
intently. It flashed through his mind that the sound might have been
made by one of the Dyaks, who perhaps had come out of the camp in
search of him and he waited the repetition of the snapping noise with
eagerness, hoping that it would tell him whether it were caused by
man or beast. As he stood thus for an instant with bowed shoulders,
the crackle came again, louder, crisper, and much clearer than
before; and at the same moment, before he had time to change his
attitude or to realise that danger threatened him, something smote
him heavily in the back, bringing him prone to the earth with a
grunt. The concussion was caused by some yielding substance, that
was yet quick and warm; and the litter of dead leaves and the tangle
of underwood combined to break his fall. He was not hurt, therefore,
though the breath was knocked out of him, and that unseen something,
which tumbled and writhed upon his back, pinned him to the ground.
He skewed his head round, trying to see what had assailed him, and
immediately a diabolical face peeped over his shoulder an inch or two
above it. He only saw, as it were, in a flash; but the sight was one
which, he was accustomed to say, he would never forget. In after
years it was wont to recur to him in dreams, and as surely as it came
it woke him with a scream. It was a savage face, brown yet pallid,
grimed with dirt and wood ashes, with a narrow retreating forehead, a
bestial prognathous snout, and a tiny twitching chin. The little
black eyes, fierce and excited, were ringed about with angry sores,
for the eyelashes had been plucked out. The eyebrows had been
removed, but from the upper lip a few coarse wires sprouted
uncleanly. The face was split in twain by a set of uneven teeth
pointed like those of a wild cat, and tightly clenched, while above
and below them the gums snarled rigidly, bearing witness to the
physical effort which their owner was making. The scalp was divided
into even halves by a broad parting, on either side of which there
rose a tangle of dirty, ill-kept hair, that was drawn back into a
chignon, giving to the creature a curious sexless aspect. All these
things O'Hara noted in the fraction of a second; and as the horror
bred of them set him heaving and fighting as well as his cramped
position made possible, a sharp knee-cap was driven into the back of
his neck, and his head fell with a concussion that blinded him. For
a moment he lay still and inert, and in that moment he was conscious
of little deft hands, that flew this way and that, over, under, and
around his limbs, and of the pressure of narrow withes, drawn
suddenly taut, that ate into his flesh. Up to this time the whole
affair has been transacted in a dead, unnatural silence that somehow
gave to it the strangeness and unreality of a nightmare; but now, as
O'Hara lay prostrate with his face buried in the underwood, the even
song of the forest insects, which rings through the jungle during the
gloaming hour, was suddenly interrupted by an outbreak of queer
sounds--by gurgling, jerky speech inter-mixed with shrill squeakings
and whistlings, and by the clicking cackle which stands the Murut
folk instead of laughter. Yet even now the voices of his captors
were subdued and hushed, as though unwilling to be overheard; and
O'Hara, understanding that the Muruts feared to be interrupted by
their victim's friends, made shift to raise a shout, albeit the green
stuff forced its way into his mouth and choked his utterance.
Immediately the little nimble hands were busy, clutching him afresh,
while the tones of those inhuman voices shrilled and gurgled and
clicked more excitedly than before. O'Hara was heaved and tugged,
first one way, then another, until his body was rolled over on to its
back, falling with a dull bump. He shouted once more, putting all
the strength that was in him into the yell, and the nearest Murut
promptly stamped on his mouth with his horny heel. O'Hara bit
viciously at the thing, but his teeth could make no impression upon
its leathery under-surface, and before he could shout again he found
himself gagged with a piece of wood, which was bound in its place by
a couple of withes. Despair seized him then, and for a moment or two
he lay still, with the manhood knocked fairly out of him by a
crushing consciousness of impotence, while the gabble of squeak and
whistle and grunt, still hushed cautiously, broke out more
discordantly than ever.
The withes about his limbs bound O'Hara so cripplingly that only his
neck was free to move; but presently, craning it upward, he caught
sight of his persecutors for the first time. They formed a squalid
group of little, half-starved, wizened creatures, not much larger
than most European children of fourteen, but with brutal faces that
seemed to bear the weight of whole centuries of care and animal
indulgence. They were naked, save for their foul loin-clouts; they
were abominably dirty, and their skins were smothered in
leprous-looking ringworm; they had not an eyelash or an eyebrow among
them, for the hairs had been plucked out by the root; but their
scalps were covered by frowsy growths, gathered into loathsome
chignons on the napes of their necks. Every man was armed with one
or more spears, and from the waist of each a long knife depended,
sheathed in a wooden scabbard hung with tufts of hair. One of
them--the man of whose face O'Hara had caught a glimpse above his
shoulder--flourished his sheathed knife insistently in his captive's
face with grotesque gesticulations, and O'Hara shuddered every time
that the disgusting tassels that bedecked the scabbard swept his
cheek. The fading daylight was very dim now, enabling O'Hara to see
only the _form_ of the things by which he was surrounded; _colour_
had ceased to have any meaning in those gloomy forest aisles. The
grinning savage prancing and gibbering around him, and brandishing
that sheathed weapon with its revolting trophies, puzzled him. If he
meant murder, why did he not draw his blade? In the depth of his
misery the inconsequence of this war-dance furnished O'Hara with an
additional torture.
Presently two of the Muruts came suddenly within his field of vision
bearing a long green pole. This they proceeded to thrust between
O'Hara's flesh and the withes that were entwined about him; and when
this had been accomplished, the whole party set their shoulders under
the extremities of the pole and lifted their prisoner clear of the
ground. Then they bore him off at a sort of jog-trot.
The thongs, tightened fearfully by the pressure thus put upon them,
pinched and bruised him pitilessly; and his head, lacking all
support, hung down in an attitude of dislocation, waggling this way
and that at every jolt; the blood surged into his brain, causing a
horrible vertigo, and seeming to thrust his eyes almost out of their
sockets; he thought that he could feel his limbs swelling above the
biting grip of the withes, and an irresistible nausea seized him.
Maddening cramps tied knots in his every muscle; and had his journey
been of long duration, Timothy O'Hara would never have reached its
end alive. Very soon, however, the decreased pace, and the shrill
whistling sounds which came from the noses of his Murut bearers, told
him that the party was ascending a hill--for these strange folk do
not pant like ordinary human beings, and the uncanny noise was
familiar to O'Hara from many a toilsome march in the company of
native porters. Presently, too, between the straining legs of the
leading files, O'Hara caught a flying glimpse of distant fire; and
that, he knew, betokened the neighbourhood of a village.
A few minutes later, just as he thought that he was about to lose
consciousness, the village was reached--a long, narrow hut, raised on
piles, and with a door at either end, from the thresholds of which
crazy ladder-ways led to the ground. Up the nearest of these rude
staircases the Muruts struggled with their burden, banging his head
roughly against each untrimmed rung, and throwing him down on the
bamboo flooring with a chorus of grunts. For a moment there was
silence, while the entire community gathered round the white man,
staring at him eagerly with a kind of ferocious curiosity. Then with
one accord all the men, women, and children present set up a
diabolical chorus of whoopings and yellings. They seemed to give
themselves over to a veritable insanity of noise. Some, squatting on
their heels, supporting the weight of their bodies on arms thrust
well behind them, tilted their chins to the roof and howled like
maniacs. Others, standing erect, opened their mouths to their
fullest extent, and emitted a series of shrill blood-curdling
bellows. Others, again, shut their eyes, threw their arms aloft,
and, concentrating every available atom of energy in the effort,
screamed till their voices broke. The ear-piercing din sounded as
though all the devils in hell had of a sudden broken loose. Heard
from afar, the savage triumph, the diabolical delight that found in
it their fitting expression, might well have made the blood run cold
in the veins of the bravest; but heard close at hand by the solitary
white man whose capture had evoked that hideous outcry, and who knew
himself to be utterly at the mercy of these fiends, it was almost
enough to unship his reason. O'Hara told me that from that moment he
forgot the pains which his bonds had occasioned him, forgot even his
desire to escape, and was filled with a tremendous longing to be put
out of his agony--to be set free by death from this unspeakable
inferno. His mind, he said, was working with surprising activity,
and "as though it belonged to somebody else." In a series of flashes
he began to recall all that he had ever heard of the manners and
customs of the Muruts, of the strange uses to which they put their
prisoners; and all the while he was possessed by a kind of
restlessness that made him eager for them to do _something_--of no
matter how awful a character--that would put a period to his
unendurable suspense.
Meanwhile the Muruts were enjoying themselves thoroughly. Great
earthenware jars, each sufficiently large to drown a baby with
comfort, were already standing round the enclosed veranda which
formed the common-room of the village, on to which each family
cubicle opened, and to these jars the Muruts--men, women, and
children--repeatedly addressed themselves, squatting by them, and
sucking up the abominable liquor which filled them through long
bamboo tubes. Each toper, as he quitted the jar, fell to howling
with redoubled energy; and as more and more of the fiery stuff was
consumed, their cries became more savage, more inarticulate, and more
diabolical.
Half a dozen men, however, were apparently busy in the performance of
some task on a spot just behind O'Hara's head, for though they
frequently paid visits of ceremony to the liquor-jars, they always
staggered back to the same part of the room when their draughts were
ended, and there fell to hacking and hammering at wood with renewed
energy. O'Hara was convinced that they were employed in constructing
some infernal instrument of torture; and the impossibility of
ascertaining its nature was maddening, and set his imagination
picturing every abominable contrivance for the infliction of anguish
of which he had ever heard or read. And all the while the hideous
orgies, for which his capture was the pretext, were waxing fast and
furious.
Suddenly the hidden group behind him set up a shrill cat-call, and at
the sound every Murut in sight leaped to his or her feet, and danced
frantically with hideous outcry and maniacal laughter. A moment
later a rattan rope whined as it was pulled over the main beam of the
roof with something heavy at its end; and as the slack of the cord
was made fast to the wall-post opposite to him, O'Hara was aware of
some large object suspended in mid-air, swinging out into the middle
of the veranda immediately above him. This, as he craned his neck up
at it, struggling to see it more clearly in the uncertain
torch-light, was presently revealed as a big cage, an uneven square
in shape, the bars of which were some six inches apart, saving on one
side, where a wide gap was left. He had barely had time to make this
discovery when a mob of Murut men and women rushed at him, cut the
bonds that bound him, and mauling him mercilessly, lifted him up, and
literally threw him into the opening formed by the gap. The cage
rocked crazily, while the Muruts yelled their delight, and two of
their number proceeded hastily to patch up the gap with cross-pieces
of wood. Then the whole crowd drew away a little, though the hub-bub
never slackened, and O'Hara set his teeth to smother the groans which
the pains of the removed bonds nearly wrung from him. For the time
fear was forgotten in the acuteness of the agony which he endured;
for as the blood began to flow freely once more, every inch of his
body seemed to have been transformed into so many raging teeth. His
extremities felt soft and flabby--cold, too, like jellies--but O'Hara
was by nature a very strong man and at the time of his capture had
been in the pink of condition. In an incredibly short while,
therefore, the pain subsided, and he began to regain the use of his
cramped limbs.
He was first made aware of his recovered activity by the alacrity
with which he bounded into the centre of the cage in obedience to a
sharp prick in the back. He tried to rise to his feet, and his head
came into stunning contact with the roof; then, in a crouching
attitude, he turned in the direction whence the attack had reached
him. What he saw filled him with horror. The leader of the Muruts
who had captured him, his eyes bloodshot with drink, was staggering
about in front of him with grotesque posturings, waving his knife in
one hand and its wooden sheath in the other. It was the former,
evidently, that had administered that painful prod to O'Hara's back,
but it was the latter which chained the white man's attention even in
that moment of whirling emotions, for from its base depended a long
shaggy wisp of sodden yellow hair--the golden fleece of which O'Hara
and Bateman were in search. In a flash the savage saw that his
victim had recognised the trophy to which he had already been at some
pains to direct to his attention, and the assembled Muruts gave
unmistakable tokens that they all grasped the picturesqueness of the
situation. They yelled and howled and bayed more frantically than
ever; some of them rolled upon the floor, their limbs and faces
contorted by paroxysms of savage merriment, while others staggered
about, smiting their fellows on their bare shoulders, squeaking like
bats, and clicking like demoralised clockwork. A second prod with a
sharp point made O'Hara shy across his narrow cage like a fly-bitten
horse, and before he could recover his balance a score of delicately
handled weapons inflicted light wounds all over his face and hands.
As each knife touched him its owner put up his head and repeated some
formula in a shrill sing-song, no word of which was intelligible to
O'Hara save only the name of Kina-Balu--the great mountain which
dominates North Borneo, and is believed by the natives to be the
eternal resting-place of the spirits which have quitted the life of
earth.
Then, for the first time, O'Hara understood what was happening to
him. He had often heard of the ceremony known to the wild Muruts as
a _bangun_, which has for its object the maintenance of communication
between the living and the dead. He had even seen a pig hung up, as
he was now hanging, while the tamer Muruts prodded it to death very
carefully and slowly, charging it the while with messages for the
spirits of the departed; and he remembered how the abominable cruelty
of the proceeding had turned him sick, and had set him longing to
interfere with native religious customs in defiance of the prudent
government which he served. Now he was himself to be done to death
by inches, just as the pig had died, and he knew that men had spoken
truly when they had explained to him that the unfortunate quadruped
was only substituted for a nobler victim as a concession to European
prejudice, to the great discontent of the tame Muruts.
These thoughts rushed through his mind with the speed of lightning,
and all the while it seemed to him that every particle of his mental
forces was concentrated upon a single object--the task of defending
himself against a crowd of persecutors. Crouching in the centre of
the cage, snarling like a cat, with his eyes bursting from their
sockets, his every limb braced for a leap in any direction, his hands
scrabbling at the air to ward off the stabs, he faced from side to
side, his breath coming in quick, noisy pants. Every second one or
another of the points that assailed him made him turn about with a
cry of rage, and immediately his exposed back was prodded by every
Murut within reach. Suddenly he heard his own voice raised in awful
curses and blasphemies, and the familiar tones of his mother-tongue
smote him with surprise. He had little consciousness of pain as
pain, only the necessity of warding off the points of his enemies'
weapons presented itself to him as something that must be
accomplished at all costs, and each separate failure enraged him. He
bounded about his cage with an energy and an agility that astonished
him, and the rocking of his prison seemed to keep time with the
lilting of his thumping heart-beats. More than once he fell, and his
face and scalp were prodded terribly ere he could regain his feet;
often he warded off a thrust with his bare hands. But of the wounds
which he thus received he was hardly conscious; his mind was in a
species of delirium of rage, and all the time he was torn with a fury
of indignation because he, a white man, was being treated in this
dishonouring fashion by a pack of despicable Muruts. But he received
no serious injury; for the Muruts, who had many messages for their
dead relations, were anxious to keep the life in him as long as might
be, and in spite of their intoxication, prodded him with shrewdness
and caution. How long it all lasted O'Hara never knew with
certainty; but it was the exhaustion caused by loss of breath and
blood, and by the wild leaping of that bursting heart of his, that
caused him presently to sink on the floor of his cage in a swoon.
The Muruts, finding that he did not answer to their stabs, drew off
and gathered eagerly around the liquor-jars. The killing would come
soon after dawn--as soon, in fact, as their overnight orgies made it
possible--when the prisoner would be set to run the gauntlet, and
would be hacked to pieces after one final delicious _bangun_. It was
essential, therefore, that enough strength should be left in him to
show good sport; and in the meantime their villainous home-made
spirits would bring that measure of happiness which comes to the
Murut from being suffered, for a little space, to forget the fact of
his own repulsive existence. Accordingly, with noisy hospitality,
each man tried to make his neighbour drink to greater excess than
himself, and all proved willing victims. With hoots and squeals of
laughter, little children were torn from their mothers' breasts and
given to suck at the bamboo pipes, their ensuing intoxication being
watched with huge merriment by men and women alike. The shouts
raised by the revellers became more and more shaky, less and less
articulate; over and over again the groups around the jars broke up,
while their members crawled away, to lie about in deathlike stupors,
from which they aroused themselves only to vomit and drink anew.
Long after this stage of the proceedings had been reached, O'Hara had
recovered his senses; but prudence bade him lie as still as a mouse.
Once or twice a drunken Murut lurched onto his feet and made a pass
or two at him, and now and again he was prodded painfully; but
putting forth all the self-control at his command, he gave no sign of
life. At last every Murut in the place was sunken in abominable
torpor, excepting only the chief, from whose knife-scabbard hung the
tuft of hair which had once ornamented the chin of the explorer. His
little red eyes were fixed in a drunken stare upon O'Hara, and the
latter watched them with a fascination of dread through his
half-closed lids. Over and over again the Murut crawled to the
nearest liquor-jar, and sucked up the dregs with a horrible sibilant
gurgling; and at times he even staggered to his feet, muttering and
mumbling over his tiny, busy chin, waving his weapon uncertainly, ere
he subsided in a limp heap upon the floor. On each occasion he gave
more evident signs of drowsiness and at last his blinking eyes were
covered by their lashless lids.
At the same moment a gentle gnawing sound, which had been attracting
O'Hara's attention for some minutes, though he had not dared to move
by so much as a finger's breadth to discover its cause, ceased
abruptly. Then the faintest ghost of a whisper came to his ears from
below his cage, and, moving with the greatest caution, and peering
down through the uncertain light, he saw that a hole had been made by
sawing away two of the lathes which formed the flooring. In the
black hole immediately beneath him the faces of two of his own Dyaks
were framed, and even as he looked one of them hoisted himself into
the hut, and began deftly to remove the bars of the cage, working as
noiselessly as a shadow. The whole thing was done so silently, and
O'Hara's own mind was so racked by the emotions which his recent
experiences had held for him, that he was at first persuaded that
what he saw, or rather fancied he saw, was merely a figment conjured
up for his torture by the delirium which possessed him. He felt that
if he suffered himself to believe in this mocking delusion even for
an instant, the disappointment of discovering its utter unreality
would drive him mad. He was already spent with misery, physical and
mental; he was constantly holding himself in leash to prevent the
commission of some insane extravagance; he was seized with an
unreasoning desire to scream. He fought with himself--a self that
was unfamiliar to him, although its identity was never in doubt--as
he might have fought with a stranger. He told himself that his
senses were playing cruel pranks upon him, and that nothing should
induce him to be deceived by them; and all the while--hope--mad, wild
hysterical hope--was surging up in his heart, shaking him like an
aspen, wringing unaccustomed tears from his eyes, and tearing his
breast with noiseless sobs.
As he lay inert and utterly wretched, unable to bear up manfully
under this new wanton torture of the mind, the ghost of the second
Dyak clambered skilfully out of the darkness below the hut, and
joined his fellow, who had already made a wide gap in the side of the
cage. Then the two of them seized O'Hara, and with the same strange
absence of sound lifted him bodily through the prison and through the
hole in the flooring on to the earth below. Their grip upon his
lacerated flesh hurt him acutely; but the very pain was welcome, for
did it not prove the reality of his deliverers? What he experienced
of relief and gratitude O'Hara could never tell us, for all he
remembers is that, gone suddenly weak and plaintive as a child, he
clung to the little Dyaks, sobbing broken-heartedly, and weeping on
their shoulders without restraint or decency, in utter abandon of
self-pity. Also he recalls dimly that centuries later he found
himself standing in Bateman's camp, with his people gathering about
him, and that of a sudden he was aware that he was mother-naked.
After that, so he avers, all is a blank.
The closing incidents of the story were related to me by Bateman one
evening when I chanced to foregather with him in an up-country
outpost in Borneo. We had been talking far into the night, and our
_solitude à deux_ and the lateness of the hour combined to thaw his
usual taciturnity and to unlock his shy confidence. Therefore I was
put in possession of a secret which until then, I believe, had been
closely kept.
"It was an awful night," he said, "that upon which poor O'Hara was
missing. The Dyaks had gone out in couples all over the place to try
to pick up his trail, but I remained in the camp; for though there
was a little moon, it was too dark for a white man's eyes to be of
any good. What with the inactivity, and my fears for O'Hara, I was
as 'jumpy' as you make 'em; and as the Dyaks began to drop in, two at
a time, each couple bringing in their tale of failure, I worked
myself up to such a state of depression and misery that I thought I
must be going mad. Just about three o'clock in the morning the last
brace of Dyaks turned up, and I was all of a shake when I saw that
they had poor O'Hara with them. He broke loose from them and
stumbled into the centre of the camp stark naked, and pecked almost
to bits by those infernal Murut knives; but the wounds were not
overdeep, and the blood was caking over most of them. He was an
awful sight, and I was for tending his hurt without delay; but he
pushed me roughly aside, and I saw that his eyes were blazing with
madness. He stood there in the midst of us all, throwing his arms
above his head, cursing in English and in the vernacular, and
gesticulating wildly. The Dyaks edged away from him, and I could see
that his condition funked them mortally. I tried again and again to
speak to him and calm him, but he would not listen to a word I said,
and for full five minutes he stood there raving and ranting, now and
again pacing frenziedly from side to side, pouring out a torrent of
invective mixed with muddled orders. One of the Dyaks brought him a
pair of trousers, and after looking at them as though he had never
seen such things before, he put them on, and stood for a second or
two staring wildly around him. Then he made a bee-line for a rifle,
loaded it, and slung a bandolier across his naked shoulders; and
before I could stay him he was marching out of the camp with the
whole crowd of Dyaks at his heels.
"I could only follow. I had no fancy for being left alone in that
wilderness, more especially just then, and one of the Dyaks told me
that he was leading them back to the Murut village. You see I only
speak Malay, and as O'Hara had been talking Dyak I had not been able
to follow his ravings. Whatever lingo he jabbered, however, it was
as plain as a pikestaff that the fellow was mad as a hatter; but I
had to stop explaining this to him, for he threatened to shoot me,
and the Dyaks would not listen. They clearly thought that he was
possessed by a devil, and they would have gone to hell at his bidding
while their fear of him was upon them.
"And his madness made him cunning too, for he stalked the Murut den
wonderfully neatly, and just as the dawn was breaking we found
ourselves posted in the jungle within a few yards of the two doors,
which were the only means of entrance or exit for the poor devils in
the hut.
"Then O'Hara leaped out of his hiding place and began yelling like
the maniac he was; and in an instant the whole of that long hut was
humming like a disturbed beehive. Three or four squalid creatures
showed themselves at the doorway nearest O'Hara, and he greeted them
with half the contents of his magazine, and shrieked with laughter as
they toppled onto the ground rolling over in their death-agony.
There was such a wailing and crying set up by the other inhabitants
of the hut as you never heard in all your life--it was just despair
made vocal--the sort of outcry that a huge menagerie of wild animals
might make when they saw flames lapping at their cages; and above it
all I could hear O'Hara's demoniac laughter ringing with savage
delight, and the war-whoops of those little devils of Dyaks, whose
blood was fairly up now. The trapped wretches in the hut made a
stampede for the farther door; we could hear them scuffling and
fighting with one another for the foremost places. They thought that
safety lay in that direction; but the Dyaks were ready for them, and
the bullets from their Winchesters drove clean through three and four
of the squirming creatures at a time, and in a moment that doorway,
too, and the ground about the ladder foot were a shambles.
"After that for a space there was a kind of awful lull within the
hut, though without O'Hara and his Dyaks capered and yelled. Then
the noise which our folk were making was drowned by a series of the
most heart-breaking shrieks you ever heard or dreamed of, and
immediately a second rush was made simultaneously at each door. The
early morning light was getting stronger now, and I remember noting
how incongruously peaceful and serene it seemed. Part of the hut
near our end had caught fire somehow, and there was a lot of smoke,
which hung low about the doorway. Through this I saw the crowd of
Muruts struggle in that final rush, and my blood went cold when I
understood what they were doing. Every man had a woman or a child
held tightly in his arms--held in front of him as a buckler--and it
was from these poor devils that those awful screams were coming. I
jumped in front of the Dyaks and yelled to them in Malay to hold
their fire; but O'Hara thrust me aside, and shooed the Dyaks on with
shouts and curses and peals of laughter, slapping his palm on his
gunstock, and capering with delight and excitement. The Dyaks took
no sort of heed of me, and the volleys met the Muruts like a wall of
lead.
"I had slipped and fallen when O'Hara pushed me, and as I clambered
on to my feet again I saw the mob of savages fall together and
crumple up, for all the world as paper crumples when burned suddenly.
Most of them fell back into the dark interior of the hut, writhing in
convulsions above the litter of the dead; but one or two pitched
forward headlong to the ground, and I saw a little brown baby, which
had escaped unharmed, crawling about over the corpses, and squeaking
like a wounded rabbit. I ran forward to save it, but a Dyak was too
quick for me, and before I could get near it, he had thrown himself
upon it, and ... _ugh_!
"The Muruts began cutting their way through the flooring then, and
trying to bolt into the jungle. One or two of them got away, I
think; and this threw O'Hara into such a passion of fury that I half
expected to see him kill some of the Dyaks. He tore around to the
side of the hut, and I saw him brain one Murut as he made a rush from
under the low floor. One end of the building was in roaring flames
by this time, and half a dozen Dyaks had gone in at the other end and
were bolting the wretched creatures from their hiding places, just as
ferrets bolt rabbits from their burrows, while O'Hara and the other
Dyaks waited for them outside. They hardly missed one of them,
sparing neither age nor sex, though I ran from one to another like a
madman, trying to prevent them. It was awful ... awful! and I was
fairly blubbering with the horror of it, and with the consciousness
of my own impotence. I was regularly broken up by it, and I remember
at the last sitting down upon a log, burying my face in my hands, and
crying like a child.
"The thing seemed to be over by then: there was no more bolting, and
the Dyaks were beginning to clear out of the hut as the flames gained
ground and made the place too hot for them. But, at the last, there
came a terrific yell from the very heart of the fire, and a single
Murut leaped out of the smoke. He was stark naked, for his loin
clout had been burned to tinder; he was blackened by the smoke, and
his long hair was afire behind him! His mouth was wide, and the
cries that came from it went through and through my head, running up
and up the scale till they hit upon a note the shrillness of which
agonised me. Surrounded by the flames, he looked like a devil in the
heart of the pit. In one scorched arm he brandished a long knife,
the blade of which was red with the glare of the flames, and in the
other was the sheath, blazing at one end, and decked at the other by
a great tuft of yellow hair that was smouldering damply.
"As soon as he saw him O'Hara raised a terrible cry and threw himself
at him. The two men grappled and fell, the knife and scabbard
escaping from the Murut's grasp and pitching straight into the fire.
The struggle lasted for nearly a minute, O'Hara and his enemy rolling
over and over one another, breathing heavily but making no other
sound. Then something happened--I don't clearly know what; but the
Murut's head dropped, and O'Hara rose up from his dead body, moving
very stiffly. He stood for a moment so, looking round him in a dazed
fashion, until his eyes caught mine. Then he staggered toward me,
reeling like a tipsy man.
"'Mother of heaven!' he said thickly, 'what have I done?'
"He stared round him at the little brown corpses, doubled up in
dislocated and distorted attitudes, and his eyes were troubled.
"'God forgive me!' he muttered. 'God forgive me!'
"Then he spun about on his heel, his hands outstretched above his
head, his fingers clutching at the air, a thin foam forming on his
lips, and before I could reach him he had toppled over in a limp heap
upon the ground.
"I had an awful business getting O'Hara down-country. He was mad as
a March hare for three weeks. But the Dyaks worked like
bricks--though I could not bear the sight of them--and the currents
of the rivers were in our favour when we reached navigable water. I
know that O'Hara was mad that morning--no white man could have acted
as he did unless he had been insane--and he always swears that he has
no recollection of anything that occurred after the Dyaks rescued
him. I hope it may be so, but I am not certain. He is a changed man
anyway, as nervous and jumpy as they make 'em, and I know that he is
always brooding over that up-country trip of ours."
"Yes," I assented, "and he is constantly telling the first part of
the story to every chance soul he meets."
"Exactly," said Bateman. "That is what makes me sometimes doubt the
completeness of his oblivion concerning what followed. What do you
think?"