The forest changed our thoughts as soon as we were in it. We began to
climb southwest of the Golok Valley through a tunnel in the jungle. It
was a day—somewhere, anyhow, it was day, though hardly there, for the
valley was deep and the morning was early. The woods might not have been
there. They looked unbegotten. The trunks were contorted and askew. They
reclined in a watery light, wet and rotting, and rocks like unplumbed
reefs in a submarine deep had to be climbed. One would not expect to hear
a sound there, and in fact there was no sound in that twilight unreality.
I stopped to listen. There was but a noise in my head, which I tried to
shake out. But this delay left me far in the rear. Then I could not hear
even our party, and so could not reach them. They might have floated
upward to the surface out of it. As I crawled on along the interminable
floor, looking for signs of them, I had a distinct inclination to glance
backward over my shoulder to see if anything were following me. But what
could have been following me?
By noon we were near the height of the divide, and paused for a rest.
A stream was beside us, unwinding slowly past hindering trees whose
roots were like outcrops of weathered rock. The water was black, like
the roots, till I noticed spectral fish, vividly dyed, suspended low
down among the buttresses of what could have been a column of basalt.
The water was really clear. Yet the fish could have been an illusion,
so unlikely were their circumstances; but I was too tired for any
verification. One becomes weary to the point of moribundity on rough
ground in a forest of the equatorial rains. You don’t care any more.
By the time the day is mellow you have tripped in fatigue too often to
bother about anything that matters. Nothing matters. Another stream has
to be waded just when you had hoped you would arrive at camp almost dry.
There is a pause to pick off the leeches. When you try to see whether
there are any attached to your person where direct vision is difficult
and in part impossible, you slip in the mud. Impatiently you step out.
The leeches you can’t see may stay where they are, and be damned to
them. Anyhow, the last stream washed off the mud. Then a quagmire made
by elephants is reached, and the muck is returned to you, and more also.
Out of the bog you mount a steep bank, feeling you could move no faster
if the elephants were charging it, and slip; as you fall you grasp
desperately at a rattan full of thorns, which gives way. Then there are
more leeches to pick off.
Some hours before sunset we descended to an upper reach of the Kelantan
River, and came to a hut occupied by two white men. The one who met us
wore a beard, but not much else except a pipe, for his trousers were
useless for their purpose, and his singlet hung from one shoulder. I
understood he was prospecting for gold. I hoped that his cheerfulness was
more than mere ignorance of his fate, for his alabaster pallor suggested
that long exposure to a moist heat had drained the virtue from his
flesh. His companion, an older man, then briskly approached. But he was
dressed so neatly that perhaps he respected the society of the trees. His
bearing reminded me that through mud and leeches a stranger could not
see me at my best. He stood regarding our small party as though it were
a dog on a parade ground; I fancied there was still something remaining
of the sergeant major about him and that recently he had been sardonic
with duffers. He was nursing a Winchester rifle as if it were a delicate
child. He surveyed us steadily for so long that I wondered what he would
say when he spoke. But he only remarked, “My God!” I dare say we were,
too.
This man Ryan showed us where to bathe, and told us what not to do with
our wounds, though his manner implied that probably we would be fools,
nevertheless. Then he listened to the story of our wanderings without a
comment; he merely asked at times what could have been supposed was an
irrelevant question, though he made no use of the answer. When our jejune
recital was over he looked a little pensive and whimsical for a moment,
then rose to place about the platform where we were reclining some dishes
of hot food and basins of coffee. We looked out to the river. It was
deeply below us, in a narrow passage, gliding over shelves of granite.
The forest was a somber wall on the other bank. Above those personal
trees some hills were monstrous and salient, for the sun had just gone
down behind them. Ryan pointed at the hills with his knife. “Only
seladang and Sekai over there.”
[Illustration: _He Began to Treat His Foothold Too Punctiliously_
(_See p. 239_)]
With a friend beside me whose profile was like Ryan’s I should regard the
immediate possibilities of any quite primal savagery with equanimity.
The thought of it was even pleasant. We were going over there, too, in
the morning. The light in the clouds beyond those hills was that of
dread and wonder. A wind, an eddy from a distant thunderstorm, brought
the scent of a tree in flower from the forest behind us, and carried
away the heavy heat down to the river. The coffee had a flavor notably
good. That was the way coffee ought to taste. A dog sat next to me,
waiting for scraps. As I spoke to him I saw a leech uncoil from inside
his nose and elongate and retract. One must accept such things along
with sunsets and sonatas, but they do seem like insults to truth and
beauty. The leech, for his part, might ask what did we suppose men and
dogs were for, in a world of good leeches. The dog took no notice of his
familiar, for he had no fingers to take hold of the thing; the dog was
philosophically resigned. But the leech, by jerking out of sight like a
piece of tense elastic released, proved to me at once that fingers were
of no use against him. Ryan said the worm had had a lodging in the dog’s
nostril for a month, and that it declined to be ejected. Yet it was not
easy for the coffee and food to maintain its flavor with that before me,
so I got a pair of forceps; and Ryan, with exclamations of vicious joy,
presently executed the leech on the platform, beside the tin of biscuits.
If you regard this sort of outrage boldly and steadily, the light in
the sky remains almost unimpaired. The world is what we think it is;
most accommodatingly, it changes with our moods. It is not always easy,
therefore, to maintain a good light in the sky.
Our light failed. The opposite hills merged into the night, though arcs
of them shaped again when lightning momentarily expanded in the clouds
beyond. We could hear the river below, as though the thin remainder of
time were rapidly running out, and we were being left stranded on a high
solitude in eternity. Ryan’s quiet voice made eternity most homely.
His presence on the Plutonian shore, should we have the luck to meet
him there, will instantly cause the awful thought of the lord of that
domain to be of less moment. Some irreverent plot against Doom may even
begin then to rehabilitate the humbled soul of man. Ryan seemed to have
learned, in No Man’s Land in France, a few artful underplots against the
august front of eternity itself, and I found myself chuckling at its
somber presentment, now and then. When a victim regards even his own
extinction as a bit of a joke, can he be extinguished? Even the local
cattle of some Malay settlers who lived near appeared to be aware of the
nature of our hut. I heard, in the dark, grunts and blunderings near us,
snorts and hard breathing. What was this? Well, the animals came around
like that every night, confound them! No good sending the dog against
them. The brutes came back, as close as they could. They came for society
and safety. The tigers never approached _his_ place at night.