With our possessions assembled into six small packs roped in rubber
sheets, next morning at daybreak Smith and I took train for Rantau
Panjang, a village on the right bank of the Golok River, twenty miles
from its mouth—this is mentioned just in case there should be any
curiosity to discover exactly where we were. The Golok is the division
between Malaya and Siam. At that little village the headman, on reading
our mandate, found three men for us without parley. And the chief
of police, who happened to be an Englishman, was so alarmed by the
inadequacy of our preparations and the puerility of our plans that he
forced on me also a rifle and ammunition. I understood from him that
I might be required to shoot a tiger or a seladang at any moment.
“But don’t shoot an elephant,” he admonished me, “unless you must.” I
assured him that I would resist every temptation to harm a wild elephant
unnecessarily. Thereupon we marched off. The policeman shook his head
over us in mirthful pessimism.
It was ten in the morning; and the spaciousness of the bare and brazen
prospect to which then we set our faces under that sun was a matter for
firm courage. I could have played tennis with the rifle at the start.
In less than an hour it was a worse evil than many tigers, for we had
to cross some miles of padi fields and open land, all of it hard and
rough in the dry season, with the loam of the furrows and ridges as
unaccommodating as granite. We marched toward a line of blue hills, but
the shelter of their woods seemed at a distance no effort could measure.
Smith was ahead of me, so I could watch the dark stains begin on his
khaki tunic, and spread till their boundaries merged and the back of his
jacket was uniform again with sweat. When he turned to me now and then I
saw he was suffering, for he was of a stout and hemispherical habit of
body. Yet certainly this was better than all the motor-cars and steamers,
for at least we hardly knew where we were going, and had no idea where
we should be that night. A spot named Nipong was mentioned; but by
looking, first at the chart, and then at Smith, I judged that Nipong was
best considered as a fond dream. We came to a swamp, then managed to
scramble over a small tree prone across a stream (a rifle is useless as a
balancing pole), and the track became a tunnel in a forest immediately it
left the far end of the fallen trunk.
Nothing could be guessed of that path except that it would get more
illegible the farther it beguiled us from the things that were familiar
and understood. It would please itself, though perhaps not Smith, who
was a little sketchy in his geography. He, indeed, appeared to be sure
only that there was a lot of jungle to be traversed before we reached
Nipong, where folk lived; and we were going to rely on Malay hospitality
for shelter for the night. So I wondered in these circumstances what had
gone amiss with me, because it is odd to feel tired, yet sure you can
light-heartedly continue till the best man of the party has had enough of
it.
I felt I had known the Malay jungle all my life. This place had no
incubus. It was still the first day there, and not even noon. I would not
have used that rifle on any polite tiger, and it occurred to me from the
look of the place that the animals there would be friendly. Besides, the
Malay who had chosen to march near to me had rolled his _sarong_ into a
loin cloth. But for that he was naked. He was a middle-aged man, slender
and tough, and his figure appeared to be so proper to that murky place
where fragments of sunlight had sunk down the deep silence to rest on
improbable and immovable leaves on the floor, that I knew I should be
lucky if the two of us were designed to go on like that till we emerged
from the other side of it, where the Bay of Bengal would stop us at a
beach. I liked the mild but critical eye of that fellow. He did not look
at me, but there could be no doubt he was appraising, by a standard we
should find difficult to meet, the two white men who were with him, and I
am bound to say I desired that that barbarian should not view me in any
miserable, inadequate, thin, faded, apologetic loin rag of civilization.
I did not want my culture to shame me. I will swear that fellow was a
sound judge, whose verdict might be guessed only in the aloofness of his
contempt. When the police inspector that morning had pointed to the far
hills, and peered at us sardonically as we turned to go there, I was a
little dubious of my sanity. Why was I asking for trouble? But something
had happened to me in the meantime. I would have repudiated my past if
I could have done so, denied St. Paul, pretended I had never heard of a
doctor of literature (what on earth is that?), and swopped all the noble
heritage of two thousand years of London for a couple of bananas, only
there can be no escape from what we are. I wished then that Mr. Santayana
had been with us. I would have given even the bananas for a sly peep at
my barbaric Malay as he viewed in that wild our more blanched and tenuous
refinement. I wonder to what it really amounts? An accidental ray through
the roof of that forest had dropped on it, and you could hardly tell
Ancoats from Oxford; yet the Malay’s quick and questioning glance had
been not only revealing, but pleasing to me. There are other worlds, but
we so seldom glimpse them.
We came to the sandy shore of a larger stream. It flowed swiftly and
silently out of the darkness on one side of us and into the shades on
the other. There was no bridge. Quite naturally I looked for it, because
it is our right to cross a river by a bridge, and to find an inn on the
other side of it. Our Malays did not pause. They walked straight in,
somehow kept their feet with the water near their shoulders, climbed the
opposite bank, and vanished within the foliage without looking round. It
began to occur to me that I was expected to get wet, and I followed the
natives with but the briefest hesitation. We are so used to the provision
of bridges and things that at first it appears to be an oversight on the
part of nature, and an affront to our dignity, to have to wet the shirt.
Something was broken in my mind during that pause. On the other side,
as I went up the sandy slope with heavier boots, I saw a footprint not
made by our party. A tiger had been there before us. Crossing that little
stream took me into a quite different region, where the usual counters
of thought were not current. We use the supports of our civilization
without knowing they are there, and even suppose we are supporting
ourselves. Profound philosophers will do this, unaware that without
the favor of the rude tinkers, tailors, and candlestick-makers beneath
them their minds would give way, would sprawl in a most uncultured and
helpless manner next to an earth even ruder and more intractable than a
revolutionary tinker, and that they would perish long before they could
raise a few coarse oats for sustenance. I followed my Malay, as though
I had not gone over a boundary which parted me from all that hitherto
had kept my feet. What my civilization had given me, I realized, was
altogether inadequate and counterfeit. Even my rifle was fraudulent. A
philosopher’s finest thought cannot move with the infernal subtlety of a
tiger.
A little later another stream ran athwart our way. There was no wading
over that. It was wide and swift, and moved with a silent power that
betrayed its depth. There was no passage over it but by a fallen tree.
The huge butt of the tree was on our side, and descended in a nasty curve
to the center of the river, which in places swirled over the partly
submerged hole. I knew I could not do it. “_Buaya_,” warned my Malay,
and trotted over without a fault. And crocodiles, too? Smith essayed the
pass ahead of me, but he began to treat his foothold too punctiliously
just when his daring courage should have entered recklessly both his
feet; paused, and made to look back; tried to go forward again; and fell.
I was at that moment on a greasy length of it, waving the rifle about
helplessly and trying not to judge how many more seconds I should last.
Smith bumped off, but snatched at a projection and hung on desperately.
The current carried his legs downstream.
The Malays had disappeared ahead and what could I do? I cried savagely to
him that if he let go he would have to die. I knew that he was almost at
an extremity with fatigue, but at the shout he became lively, grabbed a
better hold, and at last was aboard again, panting. I have no idea how I
got over.
A tropical rain-forest is an experience which goes far to alter your
conception of the quality of life. Life does not seem to be a tender
plant. In the north, on the exposed ridges and sandy barrens of the
world, life might be a patient but timid invader, grateful for the
stoniest comfort, doing its best against the adverse verdict of fate,
and perishing meekly in adversity. In a jungle of equatorial rains the
earth itself is alive, and there is no death, and not even change. There
are no seasons. Life is visibly as dominant a fact in the universe as
great Orion in a winter sky. It is immortal. It is even terrifying in
its heedless and unscrupulous arrogance, as triumphant as the blazing
sun, and has no doubt that God has justified its ways. You may live
with it, if you can. It has no other terms. This Malay forest varied in
character. Where the ground was high it was more open, yet more dim; the
trees were greater, and their buttressed trunks rose like the pillars
of a cathedral whose roof was night. But on swampy ground, where day
could in some diffused sort reach the earth, we could not step aside
from the track. A lower riot of foliage was caught between the masts of
the forests, spinous, tough, and exuberant. Bare cables were looped and
pendent from above, roots meandered over the earth like flat walls and
like the rounded bodies of dead reptiles of interminable length. Climbing
palms, the rattans, lifted green feathers into every space, and their
barbed and flexible ropes frustrated every pass. Epiphytes and ferns were
posed on all the knots and protuberances of the masts and spars, and one
fern, the elk’s horn, projected its masses of palmated green antlers in
such abundance that it was more remarkable than the hosts on which it
was parasitic. There was no sound. I paused to watch some colored flies
hovering in a lath of sunlight, and their murmuring might have been the
audible energy of the tense and still uprush of life about me. It was
while alone, watching those insects, that I was surprised by my Malay
coming back to me. He was evidently bothered by a difficulty. He told me
that the other _tuan_ was ill, was lying down in the path, and could not
move.
Poor Smith was indeed on his back. He had propped his head on his
helmet, and he confessed that this heat and fatigue were outside his
specification. He was finished. He could not go another step. While
kneeling beside him, pointing out that he was yet too young to give
himself as food for ants, I noticed that my breeches were bloody and had
to touch the leeches off my legs with my pipe. This was our introduction
to those indefatigable creatures. The revulsion was mental, not physical.
It is a shock to see the worms feeding on you before their time. Such
haste is unseemly and not by the rules. I glanced at Smith, and then saw
a group of them attached to his belly. He had not noticed them. How soon
he was up! How well he stepped out! Even leeches can have their good
points.
The day was slanting fast toward sunset, but there was no sign of any end
to the forest. I found myself the leading file, and so discovered that
when one reaches a queer place in the woods, some resolution is required
to take it ahead of the others. For once I came out of the trees suddenly
and unannounced, and found below me an extensive and forbidding inclosure
in the jungle, a level lake of pale reeds round which the gloomy wall of
the forest rose, as though to keep private and secluded what was there.
The afternoon, sure of its privacy, was asleep within that secret bay in
the darkness of the woods. Even Adam must have had some hesitances in the
far and unfamiliar corners of his garden. The grass in this corner of the
forest rose several feet above my head, and I parted it to find a way,
remembering the while tales of the seladang, the bison who weighs a ton,
does not wait to be insulted, but takes the initiative, and can reverse
like a cat. But only the afternoon was asleep in that recess. Then the
forest began again.
Within an hour of sunset, when even the Malays looked as though they had
had enough of it, we came upon a wide clearing. The hills of indigo,
which had been far from us in the morning, were now near. They were part
of the forest. That open sandy space was loosely grown over with shrubs
that were touched with the colors of flowers whose scents stirred only
when we blundered past, as though nothing moved in that place except when
man disturbed it. Its peace seemed as settled as eternal truth. I could
look upon the pale bare stretches there of the sands of old floods as if
this were not only another country, but I had entered another existence.
Tired? I felt I could drop. But why are some moments and some scenes of
such nameless significance that, though all is strange, we feel there is
no need to ask what is truth? The Golok River was near us. It might have
been an upper reach of the river of life. It was of crystal and beryl.
The façade of the Siamese forest opposite was of gracious pilasters of
palms, with cornices and capitals of plumes; the roof was domed. The
clouds of evening were of rose.
But Smith was done. No more of it. The Malays, he said, were deceiving
us. This was Nipong. “There,” he said, pointing, “is a house. I can
see the plantains from here.” Our men stood by disconsolate. They said
nothing. But when I went to inspect this house something loathly stirred
within the rank herbage on its floor; for it had no roof and most of its
walls of palm matting had gone. We got going again. And it was almost
dark when, for the first time in that long march, we came to betel and
cocoanut palms (no doubt of it now) and presently to the huts. There was
a fair cluster of them, all raised on stilts with clear spaces under
them, and the paths between lumbered with the bulky black shapes of
buffaloes. The beasts gave one sullen stare at us, and lumbered off with
about as much sense of direction as runaway lorries. I thought they would
carry the houses off their props and that we should be left shelterless
after all. But, anyhow, the eruption brought out a frowning and elderly
little man, who stood at a distance while he read the Sultan’s letter.
He took us home. It was a larger house than the rest, with an unusual
length of irregular ladder to its veranda. A corner of its bamboo floor
was given to us, and a group of children became intent on our business
of unpacking. The chief showed us the river, where we could bathe. When
I returned from it the day had gone, and I sat cross-legged with the
Malays, dressed like them in _sarong_ and _baju_, and feeling that I
would have gone twice the distance for such a night. The heavy shadows
of that old barn-like structure were hardly disturbed by a little brass
oil lamp. Some men of the village gathered to gossip, and the women and
children vanished I don’t know where, but I could hear their voices
somewhere in the rafters. Brass dishes were placed between us on the
floor, with fruits and nuts, lansats, rambutans, mangosteens, and a
kernel which tasted like walnut. One felt quite at home with these
people. They spoke in low voices. They asked modestly about the outer
world, but said nothing in criticism. Perhaps they believed us. Smith
fell asleep, and I lay on a mat which the chief spread for me, and
pretended to sleep, but was listening, smelling the whiffs which came up
through the flooring of old durian shards, looking at the gossiping heads
of the chief and his cronies and at the grotesque shapes on the wall,
whether antlers and horns or shadows I did not know, and at a star or two
showing through the cracks in the wall. When I woke, the day was entering
the hut in splinters, but all my friends were motionless bundles about
me.