We had been out all day from Singapore on a wild-pig hunt. There were
eight of us, including three young officers of the Royal Artillery,
besides somewhere between seventy and a hundred native beaters. The
day had been unusually hot, even for a country whose regular record
on the thermometer reads 150 degrees in the sun.
We had tramped and shot through jungle and lallang grass, until, when
night came on, I was too tired to make the fourteen miles back across
the island, and so decided to push on a mile farther to a government
"rest bungalow." I said good-by to my companions and the game, and
accompanied only by a Hindu guide, struck out across some ploughed
lands for the jungle road that led to and ended at Changhi.
Changhi was one of three rest bungalows, or summer resorts, if
one can be permitted to mention summer in this land of perpetual
summer. They were owned and kept open by the Singapore Government for
the convenience of travellers, and as places to which its own officials
can flee from the cares of office and the demands of society. I had
stopped at Changhi Bungalow once for some weeks when my wife and a
party of friends and all our servants were with me. It was lonely
even then, with the black impenetrable jungle crowding down on three
sides, and a strip of the blinding, dazzling waters of the uncanny
old Straits of Malacca in front.
There were tigers and snakes in the jungle, and crocodiles and sharks
in the Straits, and lizards and other things in the bungalow. I thought
of all this in a disjointed kind of a way, and half wished that I
had stayed with my party. Then I noticed uneasily that some thick
oily-looking clouds were blotting out the yellow haze left by the sun
over on the Johore side. A few big hot drops of rain splashed down into
my face, as I climbed wearily up the dozen cement steps of the house.
The bamboo chicks were all down, and the shutter-doors securely locked
from the inside, but there was a long rattan chair within reach,
and I dropped into it with a sigh of satisfaction, while my guide
went out toward the servant-quarters to arouse the Malay mandor, or
head gardener, whom H. B. M.'s Government trusted with this portion
of her East Indian possessions.
As might have been expected, that high functionary was not to be
found, and I was forced to content myself, while my guide went on to
a neighboring native police station to make inquiries. I unbuttoned
my stiff kaki shooting-jacket, lit a manila, which my mouth was too
dry to smoke, and gazed up at the ceiling in silence.
It was stiflingly hot. Even the cicadas in the great jungle tree, that
towered a hundred and fifty feet above the house, were quiet. Every
breath I took seemed to scorch me, and the balls of my eyes ached. The
sky had changed to a dull cartridge color.
A breeze came across the hot, glaring surface of the Straits, and
stirred the tops of a little clump of palms, and died away. It brought
with it the smell of rain.
For a moment there was a dead stillness,--not even a lizard clucked
on the wall back of me; then all at once the thermometer dropped down
two or three degrees, and a tearing wind struck the bamboo curtains
and stretched them out straight; the tops of the massive jungle trees
bent and creaked; there was a blinding flash and a roar of thunder,
and all distance was lost in darkness and rain. It was one of the
quick, fierce bursts of the southwest monsoon.