CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
To V. W.
I've given you all the little, that I've to give;
You've given me all, that for me is all there is;
So now I just give back what you have given--
If there is anything to give in this.
CHAPTER I
The village was called Beddagama, which means the village in the jungle.
It lay in the low country or plains, midway between the sea and the
great mountains which seem, far away to the north, to rise like a long
wall straight up from the sea of trees. It was in, and of, the jungle;
the air and smell of the jungle lay heavy upon it--the smell of hot air,
of dust, and of dry and powdered leaves and sticks. Its beginning and
its end was in the jungle, which stretched away from it on all sides
unbroken, north and south and east and west, to the blue line of the
hills and to the sea. The jungle surrounded it, overhung it, continually
pressed in upon it. It stood at the door of the houses, always ready to
press in upon the compounds and open spaces, to break through the mud
huts, and to choke up the tracks and paths. It was only by yearly
clearing with axe and katty that it could be kept out. It was a living
wall about the village, a wall which, if the axe were spared, would
creep in and smother and blot out the village itself.
There are people who will tell you that they have no fear of the jungle,
that they know it as well as the streets of Maha Nuwara or their own
compounds. Such people are either liars and boasters, or they are fools,
without understanding or feeling for things as they really are. I knew
such a man once, a hunter and tracker of game, a little man with
hunched-up shoulders and peering, cunning little eyes, and a small dark
face all pinched and lined, for he spent his life crouching, slinking,
and peering through the undergrowth and the trees. He was more silent
than the leopard and more cunning than the jackal: he knew the tracks
better than the doe who leads the herd. He would boast that he could see
a buck down wind before it could scent him, and a leopard through the
thick undergrowth before it could see him. 'Why should I fear the
jungle?' he would say. 'I know it better than my own compound. A few
trees and bushes and leaves, and some foolish beasts. There is nothing
to fear there.' One day he took his axe in his hand, and the sandals of
deer-hide to wear in thorny places, and he went out to search for the
shed horns of deer, which he used to sell to traders from the towns. He
never returned to the village again, and months afterwards in thick
jungle I found his bones scattered upon the ground, beneath some
thorn-bushes, gnawed by the wild pig and the jackal, and crushed and
broken by the trampling of elephants. And among his bones lay a bunch of
peacock feathers that he had collected and tied together with a piece of
creeper, and his betel-case, and the key of his house, and the tattered
fragments of his red cloth. In the fork of one of the thorn-bushes hung
his axe: the massive wooden handle had been snapped in two. I do not
know how he died; but I know that he had boasted that there was no fear
in the jungle, and in the end the jungle took him.
All jungles are evil, but no jungle is more evil than that which lay
about the village of Beddagama. If you climb one of the bare rocks that
jut up out of it, you will see the jungle stretched out below you for
mile upon mile on all sides. It looks like a great sea, over which the
pitiless hot wind perpetually sends waves unbroken, except where the
bare rocks, rising above it, show like dark smudges against the
grey-green of the leaves. For ten months of the year the sun beats down
and scorches it; and the hot wind in a whirl of dust tears over it,
tossing the branches and scattering the leaves. The trees are stunted
and twisted by the drought, by the thin and sandy soil, by the dry wind.
They are scabrous, thorny trees, with grey leaves whitened by the clouds
of dust which the wind perpetually sweeps over them: their trunks are
grey with hanging, stringy lichen. And there are enormous cactuses,
evil-looking and obscene, with their great fleshy green slabs, which put
out immense needle-like spines. More evil-looking still are the great
leafless trees, which look like a tangle of gigantic spiders'
legs--smooth, bright green, jointed together--from which, when they are
broken, oozes out a milky, viscous fluid.
And between the trees are the bushes which often knit the whole jungle
together into an impenetrable tangle of thorns. On the ground beneath
the trees it is very still and very hot; for the sterile earth is
covered with this thorny matted undergrowth, through which the wind
cannot force its way. The sound of the great wind rushing over the
tree-tops makes the silence below seem more heavy. The air is heavy with
the heat-beating up from the earth, and with the smell of dead leaves.
All the bushes and trees seem to be perpetually dying for ten months of
the year, the leaves withering, and the twigs and branches decaying and
dropping off, to be powdered over the ground among the coarse withered
grass and the dead and blackened shrubs. And yet every year, when the
rains come, the whole jungle bursts out again into green; and it forces
its way forward into any open space, upon the tracks, into villages and
compounds, striving to blot out everything in its path.
If you walk all day through the jungle along its tangled tracks, you
will probably see no living thing. It is so silent and still there that
you might well believe that nothing lives in it. You might perhaps in
the early morning hear the trumpeting and squealing of a herd of
elephants, or the frightened bark of the spotted deer, or the deeper
bark of the sambur, or the blaring call of the peacock. But as the day
wore on, and the heat settled down upon the trees, you would hear no
sound but the rush of the wind overhead, and the grating of dry branches
against one another. Yet the shadows are full of living things, moving
very silently, themselves like shadows, between the trees, slinking
under the bushes and peering through the leaves.
For the rule of the jungle is first fear, and then hunger and thirst.
There is fear everywhere: in the silence and in the shrill calls and the
wild cries, in the stir of the leaves and the grating of branches, in
the gloom, in the startled, slinking, peering beasts. And behind the
fear is always the hunger and the thirst, and behind the hunger and the
thirst fear again. The herd of deer must come down to drink at the
water-hole. They come down driven by their thirst, very silently through
the deep shadows of the trees to the water lying white under the moon.
They glide like shadows out of the shadows, into the moonlight,
hesitating, tiptoeing, throwing up their heads to stare again into the
darkness, leaping back only to be goaded on again by their thirst, ears
twitching to catch a sound, and nostrils quivering to catch a scent of
danger. And when the black muzzles go down into the water, it is only
for a moment; and then with a rush the herd scatters back again
terror-stricken into the darkness. And behind the herd comes the
leopard, slinking through the undergrowth. Whom has he to fear? Yet
there is fear in his eyes and in his slinking feet, fear in his pricked
ears and in the bound with which he vanishes into the shadows at the
least suspicious sound.
In the time of the rains the jungle might seem to be a pleasant place.
The trees are green, and the grass stands high in the open spaces. Water
lies in pools everywhere; there is no need to go stealthily by night to
drink at rivers or water-holes. The deer and the pig roam away, growing
fat on the grass and the young leaves and the roots; the elephant
travels far from the river bank. The time of plenty lasts, however, but
a little while. The wind from the north-east drops, the rain fails; for
a month a great stillness lies over the jungle; the sun looks down from
a cloudless sky; the burning air is untempered by a breath of wind. It
is spring in the jungle, a short and fiery spring, when in a day the
trees burst out into great masses of yellow or white flowers, which in a
day wither and die away.
The pools and small water-holes begin to dry up under the great heat;
the earth becomes caked and hard. Then the wind begins to blow from the
south-west, fitfully at first, but growing steadier and stronger every
day. A little rain falls, the last before the long drought sets in. The
hot, dry wind sweeps over the trees. The grass and the shrubs die down;
the leaves on the small trees shrivel up, and grow black and fall. The
grey earth crumbles into dust, and splits beneath the sun. The little
streams run dry; the great rivers shrink, until only a thin stream of
water trickles slowly along in the middle of their immense beds of
yellow sand. The water-holes are dry; only here and there in the very
deepest of them, on the rocks, a little muddy water still remains.
Then the real nature of the jungle shows itself. Over great tracts there
is no water for the animals to drink. Only the elephants remember the
great rivers, which lie far away, and whose banks they left when the
rains came; as soon as the south-west wind begins to blow, they make for
the rivers again. But the deer and the pig have forgotten the rivers. In
the water-holes the water has sunk too low for them to reach it on the
slippery rocks; for days and nights they wander round and round the
holes, stretching down their heads to the water, which they cannot
touch. Many die of thirst and weakness around the water-holes. From time
to time one, in his efforts to reach the water, slips, and falls into
the muddy pool, and in the evening the leopard finds him an easy prey.
The great herds of deer roam away, tortured by thirst, through the
parched jungle. They smell the scent of water in the great wind that
blows in from the sea. Day after day they wander away from the rivers
into the wind, south towards the sea, stopping from time to time to
raise their heads and snuff in the scent of water, which draws them on.
Again many die of thirst and weakness on the way; and the jackals follow
the herds, and pull down in the open the fawns that their mothers are
too weak to protect. And the herds wander on until at last they stand
upon the barren, waterless shore of the sea.
Such is the jungle which lay about the village of Beddagama. The village
consisted of ten scattered houses, mean huts made of mud plastered upon
rough jungle sticks. Only one of the huts had a roof of tiles, that of
the village headman Babehami; the others were covered with a thatch of
cadjans, the dried leaves of the cocoanut-palm. Below the huts to the
east of the village lay the tank, a large shallow depression in the
jungle. Where the depression was deepest the villagers had raised a long
narrow bund or mound of earth, so that when the rain fell the tank
served as a large pond in which to store the water. Below the bund lay
the stretch of rice-fields, about thirty acres, which the villagers
cultivated, if the tank filled with water, by cutting a hole in the
bund, through which the water from the tank ran into the fields. The
jungle rose high and dense around the fields and the tank; it stretched
away unbroken, covering all the country except the fields, the tank, and
the little piece of ground upon which the houses and compounds stood.
The villagers all belonged to the goiya caste, which is the caste of
cultivators. If you had asked them what their occupation was, they would
have replied 'the cultivation of rice'; but in reality they only
cultivated rice about once in ten years. Rice requires water in plenty;
it must stand in water for weeks before it grows ripe for the reaping.
It could only be cultivated if the village tank filled with water, and
much rain had to fall before the tank filled. If the rains from the
north-east in November were good, and the people could borrow seed, then
the rice-fields in January and February were green, and the year brought
the village health and strength; for rice gives strength as does no
other food. But this happened very rarely. Usually the village lived
entirely by cultivating chenas. In August every man took a katty and
went out into the jungle and cut down the undergrowth, over an acre or
two. Then he returned home. In September he went out again and set fire
to the dead undergrowth, and at night the jungle would be lit up by
points of fire scattered around the village for miles; for so sterile is
the earth, that a chena, burnt and sown for one year, will yield no crop
again for ten years. Thus the villagers must each year find fresh jungle
to burn. In October the land is cleared of ash and rubbish, and when the
rains fall in November the ground is sown broadcast with millet or
kurakkan or maize, with pumpkins, chillies, and a few vegetables. In
February the grain is reaped, and on it the village must live until the
next February. No man will ever do any other work, nor will he leave the
village in search of work. But even in a good year the grain from the
chenas was scarcely sufficient for the villagers. And just as in the
jungle fear and hunger for ever crouch, slink, and peer with every
beast, so hunger and the fear of hunger always lay upon the village. It
was only for a few months each year after the crop was reaped that the
villagers knew the daily comfort of a full belly. And the grain sown in
chenas is an evil food, heating the blood, and bringing fever and the
foulest of all diseases, parangi. There were few in the village without
the filthy sores of parangi, their legs eaten out to the bone with the
yellow, sweating ulcers, upon which the flies settle in swarms. The
naked children, soon after their birth, crawled about with immense pale
yellow bellies, swollen with fever, their faces puffed with dropsy,
their arms and legs thin, twisted little sticks.
The spirit of the jungle is in the village, and in the people who live
in it. They are simple, sullen, silent men. In their faces you can see
plainly the fear and hardship of their lives. They are very near to the
animals which live in the jungle around them. They look at you with the
melancholy and patient stupidity of the buffalo in their eyes, or the
cunning of the jackal. And there is in them the blind anger of the
jungle, the ferocity of the leopard, and the sudden fury of the bear.
In Beddagama there lived a man called Silindu, with his wife Dingihami.
They formed one of the ten families which made up the village, and all
the families were connected more or less closely by marriage. Silindu
was a cousin of the wife of Babehami, the headman, who lived in the
adjoining compound. Babehami had been made a headman because he was the
only man in the village who could write his name. He was a very small
man, and was known as Punchi Arachchi[1] (the little Arachchi). Years
ago, when a young man, he had gone on a pilgrimage to the vihare[2] at
Medamahanuwara. He had fallen ill there, and had stayed for a month or
two in the priest's pansala. The priest had taught him his letters, and
he had learnt enough to be able to write his own name.
Silindu was a cultivator like the other villagers. The village called
him 'tikak pissu' (slightly mad). Even in working in the chena he was
the laziest man in the village. His real occupation was hunting; that is
to say he shot deer and pig, with a long muzzle-loading gas-pipe gun,
whenever he could creep up to one in the thick jungle; or, lying by the
side of a water-hole at night, shoot down some beast who had come there
to drink. Why this silent little man, with the pinched-up face of a grey
monkey and the long, silent, sliding step, should be thought slightly
mad, was not immediately apparent. He seemed only at first sight a
little more taciturn and inert than the other villagers. But the village
had its reasons. Silindu slept with his eyes open like some animals, and
very often he would moan, whine, and twitch in his sleep like a dog; he
slept as lightly as a deer, and would start up from the heaviest sleep
in an instant fully awake. When not in the jungle he squatted all day
long in the shadow of his hut, staring before him, and no one could tell
whether he was asleep or awake. Often you would have to shout at him and
touch him before he would attend to what you had to say. But the
strangest thing about him was this, that although he knew the jungle
better than any man in the whole district, and although he was always
wandering through it, his fear of it was great. He never attempted to
explain or to deny this fear. When other hunters laughed at him about
it, all he would say was, 'I am not afraid of any animal in the jungle,
no, not even of the bear or of the solitary elephant (whom all of you
really fear), but I am afraid of the jungle.' But though he feared it,
he loved it in a strange, unconscious way, in the same unconscious way
in which the wild buffalo loves the wallow, and the leopard his lair
among the rocks. Silent, inert, and sullen he worked in the chena or
squatted about his compound, but when he started for the jungle he
became a different man. With slightly bent knees and toes turned out, he
glided through the impenetrable scrub with a long, slinking stride,
which seemed to show at once both the fear and the joy in his heart.
And Silindu's passions, his anger, and his desire were strange and
violent even for the jungle. It was not easy to rouse his anger; he was
a quiet man, who did not easily recognise the hand which wronged him.
But if he were roused he would sit for hours or days motionless in his
compound, his mind moving vaguely with hatred; and then suddenly he
would rise and search out his enemy, and fall upon him like a wild
beast. And sometimes at night a long-drawn howl would come from
Silindu's hut, and the villagers would laugh and say, 'Hark! the leopard
is with his mate,' and the women next morning when they saw Dingihami
drawing water from the tank would jeer at her.
At length Dingihami bore twins, two girls, of whom one was called Punchi
Menika and the other Hinnihami. When the women told Silindu that his
wife was delivered of two girls, he rushed into the hut and began to
beat his wife on the head and breasts as she lay on the mat, crying,
'Vesi! vesi mau! Where is the son who is to carry my gun into the
jungle, and who will clear the chena for me? Do you bear me vesi for me
to feed and clothe and provide dowries? Curse you!' And this was the
beginning of Silindu's quarrel with Babehami, the headman; for Babehami,
hearing the cries of Dingihami and the other women, rushed up from the
adjoining compound and dragged Silindu from the house.
Dingihami died two days after giving birth to the twins. Silindu had a
sister called Karlinahami, who lived in a house at the other end of the
village. Misfortune had fallen upon her, the misfortune so common in the
life of a jungle village. Her husband had died of fever two months
before: a month later she bore a child which lived but two weeks. When
Dingihami died, Silindu brought her to his hut to bring up his two
children. Her hut was abandoned to the jungle. When the next rains fell
the mud walls crumbled away, the tattered roof fell in, the jungle crept
forward into the compound and over the ruined walls; and when Punchi
Menika was two years old, only a little mound in the jungle marked the
place where Karlinahami's house had stood.
Karlinahami was a short, dark, stumpy woman, with large impassive eyes
set far apart from one another, flat broad cheeks, big breasts, and
thick legs. Unlike her brother she was always busy, sweeping the house
and compound, fetching water from the tank, cooking, and attending to
the children. Very soon after she came to Silindu's house she began to
talk and think of the children as though she had borne them herself.
Like her brother she was slow and sparing of speech; and her eyes often
had in them the look, so often in his, as if she were watching something
far away in the distance. She very rarely took much part in the
interminable gossip of the other village women when they met at the tank
or outside their huts. This gossip is always connected with their
husbands and children, food and quarrels.
But Karlinahami was noted for her storytelling: she was never very
willing to begin, but often, after the evening meal had been eaten, the
women and many of the men would gather in Silindu's compound to listen
to one of her stories. They sat round the one room or outside round the
door, very still and silent, listening to her droning voice as she
squatted by the fire and stared out into the darkness. Outside lay
Silindu, apparently paying no attention to the tale. The stories were
either old tales which she had learnt from her mother, or were stories
usually about Buddha, which she had heard told by pilgrims round the
campfire on their way to pilgrimages, or in the madamas or pilgrims'
resting-places at festivals. These tales, and a curious droning chant
with which she used to sing them to sleep, were the first things that
the two children remembered. This chant was peculiar to Karlinahami, and
no other woman of the village used it. She had learnt it from her
mother. The words ran thus:
'Sleep, child, sleep against my side,
Aiyo! aiyo! the weary way you've cried;
Hush, child, hush, pressed close against my side.
'Aiyo! aiyo! will the trees never end?
Our women's feet are weary; O Great One, send
Night on us, that our wanderings may end.
'Hush, child, hush, thy father leads the way,
Thy mother's feet are weary, but the day
Will end somewhere for the followers in the way.
'Aiyo! aiyo! the way is rough and steep,
Aiyo! the thorns are sharp, the rivers deep,
But the night comes at last. So sleep, child, sleep.'
Until Punchi Menika and Hinnihami were three years old Silindu appeared
not even to be aware of their existence. He took no notice of them in
the house or compound, and never spoke about them. But one day he was
sitting in front of his hut staring into the jungle, when Punchi Menika
crawled up to him and put her hand on his knee, and looked solemnly up
into his face. Silindu looked down at her, took her by her hands, and
stood her up between his two knees. He stared vacantly into her eyes for
some time, and then suddenly he began to speak to her in a low voice:
'Little toad! why have you left the pond? Isn't there food there for
your little belly? Rice and cocoanuts and mangoes and little cakes of
kurakkan? Is the belly full, that you have left the pond for the jungle?
Foolish little toad! The water is good, but the trees are evil. You have
come to a bad place of dangers and devils. Yesterday, little toad, I lay
under a domba-tree by the side of a track, my gun in my hand, waiting
for what might pass. The devils are very angry in the jungle, for there
has been no rain now for these three months. The water-holes are dry;
the leaves and grass are brown; the deer are very thin; and the fawns,
dropped this year, are dying of weakness and hunger and thirst.
Therefore, the devils are hungry, and there is nothing more terrible
than a hungry devil. Well, there I lay, flat on the ground, with my gun
in my hand; and I saw on the opposite side of the track, lying under a
domba-tree, a leopardess waiting for what might pass. I put down my gun,
and, "Sister," I said, "is the belly empty?" For her coat was mangy, and
the belly caught up below, as though with pain. "Yakko, he-devil," she
answered, "three days now I have killed but one thin grey monkey, and
there are two cubs in the cave to be fed. Yakkini, she-devil," I said,
"there are two little toads at home to be fed. But I still have a
handful of kurakkan in my hut, from which my sister can make cakes. It
remains from last year's chena, and after it is eaten there will be
nothing. The headman, too, is pressing for the three shillings[3] body
tax. 'How,' I say to him, 'can there be money where there is not even
food?' But the kurakkan will last until next poya day. Therefore, your
hunger is greater than mine. The first kill is yours." So we lay still a
long time, and at last I heard far away the sound of a hoof upon a dry
stick. "Sister," I whispered, "I hear a deer coming this way. Yakko,
have you no ears?" she said. "A long while now I have been listening to
a herd of wild pig coming down wind. Can you not even now hear their
strong breathing, and their rooting in the dry earth, and the patter of
the young ones' feet on the dry leaves? Yakkini," I said, for I heard
her teeth clicking in the darkness, "the ear of the hungry is in the
belly: the sound of your teeth can be heard a hoo[4] cry's distance
away." So we lay still again, and at last the herd of pigs came down the
track. First came an old boar, very black, his tusks shining white in
the shadows; then many sows and young boars; and here and there the
little pigs running in and out among the sows. And as they passed, one
of the little pigs ran out near the domba-bush, and Yakkini sprang and
caught it in her teeth, and leapt with it into the branch of a palu-tree
which overhung the path. There she sat, and the little pig in her mouth
screamed to its mother. Then all the little pigs ran together screaming,
and stood on one side, near the bush where I lay; and the great boars
and the young boars and sows ran round the palu-tree, looking up at
Yakkini, and making a great noise. And the old sow, who had borne the
little pig in Yakkini's mouth, put her forefeet against the trunk of the
tree, and looked up, and said, "Come down, Yakkini; she-devil, thief.
Are you afraid of an old, tuskless sow? Come down." But the leopardess
laughed, and bit the little pig in the back behind the head until it
died, and she called down to the old sow, "Go your way, mother. There
are two cubs at home in the cave, and they are very hungry. Every year I
drop but one or two cubs in the cave, but the whole jungle swarms with
your spawn. I see eight brothers and sisters of your child there by the
domba-bush. Go your way, lest I choose another for my mate. Also, I do
mot like your man's teeth." The old boar and the sows were very angry,
and for a long while they ran round the tree, and tore at it with their
tusks, and looked up and cursed Yakkini. But Yakkini sat and watched
them, and licked the blood which dripped from the little pig's back. I
too lay very still under my domba-bush, for there is danger in an angry
herd. At last the old boar became tired, and he gathered the little pigs
together in the middle of the herd, and led them away down the track.
Then Yakkini dropped to the ground, and bounded away into the jungle,
carrying the little pig in her mouth. So you see, little crow, it is a
bad place to which you have come. Be careful, or some other devil will
drop on you out of a bush, and carry you off in his mouth.'
While Silindu had been speaking, Hinnihami had crawled and tottered
across the compound to join her sister. At the end of his long story she
was leaning against his shoulder. From that day he seemed to regard the
two children differently from the rest of the world in which he lived.
He was never tired of pouring out to them in a low, monotonous drone his
thoughts, opinions, and doings. That they did not understand a word of
what he said did not trouble him in the least; but when they grew old
enough to understand and to speak and to question him, he began to take
a new pleasure in explaining to them the world in which he lived.
It was a strange world, a world of bare and brutal facts, of
superstition, of grotesque imagination; a world of trees and the
perpetual twilight of their shade; a world of hunger and fear and
devils, where a man was helpless before the unseen and unintelligible
powers surrounding him. He would go over to them again and again in the
season of drought the reckoning of his small store of grain, and the
near approach of the time when it would be exhausted; his perpetual fear
of hunger; his means and plans for obtaining just enough for existence
until the next chena season. But, above all, his pleasure seemed to be
to tell them of the jungle, of his wanderings in search of game, of his
watchings by the water-holes at night, of the animals and devils which
lived among its shadows.