It is all very well, but one must pay for blundering carelessly through
the hindrances which discourage most men from the central hills of
Malaya. Yet a reward for being thus fatigued and sickened comes early
every morning in the forest. The light of dawn might be—perhaps it
is—merely the tranquillity and assurance of one’s own spirit. What of
that? The soaring palms, the green jib-sails of the giant arums, the pale
shafts and lofty domes of the great trees, shine as though the radiance
were theirs. Insects glance over the new blossoms in the clearing like
vagrant prismatic rays. But the hills have gone. They have not returned
with the morning. Where they were dominant last, sunset is but brilliant
vacuity, which is regarded with astonishment, for hills certainly were
there, and a river below them. And there the river still glides, past the
wall of the forest opposite, in long inclines of flawless crystal and
breaks of foam, over its shelves of granite; though now it is soundless
because all the world is murmuring. But where are the hills? Where they
rose opposite, standing over the valley in abrupt and gigantic shapes, is
only a glimmering pallor, the luminous depth of emptiness, which thins
upward into the blue of the sky. While surprise still stares at the place
from which the hills have vanished, a fragment of the distant forest
appears in midair, a miraculous satellite of earth, its tiny trees
distinct in the upper blue. That translated wood grows downward as the
jungle mist clears, till a shoulder of a dissolved hill has reformed.
Ryan cried breakfast, and by the time the pipes were lit all the hills
had come back and the ecstatic dog was strangling a snake under the hut.
Then we began to load a canoe—we waded in, guided it down clear canals
between the rocks, brought it in to a steeply shelving beach, and packed
it with pots and pans, a bag of mangosteens, and the provender for a long
journey; enough to sink it to about an inch of freeboard when we had
embarked, with two Malays, and Ryan’s Chinaman to cook for us.
The river seemed much swifter now we were committed to it, and it poured
just under my elbow. The forest, too, mounted over us to an astonishing
height. We were in a narrow chasm. The upper Kelantan is often in
anger among so many thwarting hills. The hills crowded in round us and
sometimes gave the river the semblance of a narrow lake. Precipices of
trees prevented a landing, our way ahead was closed by one bold mountain,
and other heights stood over our retreat. Yet somehow our Malays always
got us out of it. They stood up, one at the stem, one aft, each with
a bamboo, and just when we were charging into the trees they shouted
and poled us round a surprising corner. Or the canoe grounded in some
snarling rapids—tilted and began to fill—and we all climbed out to
persuade her upward against the stream; the stream lay in ambush behind
rocks, sprang at us as we approached, and tried to wrench the long narrow
craft out of our hands. It was while doing this against one barricade of
granite hummocks that some monkeys hooted at us, and the Malays jovially
answered them, sharply clapping their hands. The panic-stricken monkeys
fled, plunged desperately from tree to tree, became frantic and crashed
the boughs when we increased our yells.
More than water flowed through that chasm. The sun filled it with a
sluggish tide of burning air. When the stream narrowed and we moved under
the foliage it was like going into the shadow and coolness of a cave.
Fruits, legumes like scimitars, pale green globes, and clusters of yellow
balls hung in the shade, and were often seen with only just time to duck
the head. There were lenticular banks of bleached sand in midstream,
for this was the dry season, and stranded on them the bare skeletons of
trees, like the towering bones of dinosaurs. On the damp margins of those
sandbanks clusters of butterflies quivered their petals like beds of
stalkless flowers strangely agitated; when we splashed near they planed
over the mirror, with an image below each, or shot up the green wall
of the forest. Sometimes we passed a _rakit_ going downstream, a raft
of bamboos, with its man and wife and family as still as images. Once
another canoe passed us going up, with several gaudy Malay youths showing
off as noisy paddlers. They smiled at us and had a comparison to make
between our load and theirs; their load might have been Cleopatra, a dark
little lady in orange and emerald silk, gold ornaments in her black hair,
and haughtily unconscious, even in that place, that we were present.
Myriads of dragonflies and nymphs interlaced the sunlight just over the
stream, as though the crystal air were being flawed by the heat. They
settled on the edges of the canoe, transitory decorations, with wings
like flinders of quartz and hard bodies enameled in ruby and turquoise.
From behind one mountain, late in the day, a vivid cloud appeared, and
the tops of the trees showed a strange uneasiness. A flock of hornbills,
which had been quiet and unseen on the high roof where a tree was in
fruit—except for chance obliquities you might suppose the forest was
untenanted—suddenly mounted in an uproar, as though exploded from their
tree, soared so swiftly and disorderly that they might have been in the
power of a mad spiral of wind, and were gone.
Ryan began to show activity. He consulted his chart. He energized the
Malays. He ordered us to leap out and help over the bad places. He looked
at the sky. But there was no need to look at it. Its shadow rested on us.
The trees suddenly shouted and turned white, and then vanished in falling
water. It was then that the canoe jammed in some rocks; which made no
difference to us, though we stood up to our middles when clearing her. In
any case the river was warmer than the rain and did not smite so hard.
We landed at a beach and a hut at last, the place for which Ryan had
been making to escape the downpour, but only when the worst of the storm
was over. It was near a strange natural tower of white marble, which
must have risen five hundred feet sheer from a little plain. There was a
forest on its flat summit, and aprons of foliage hung wherever it had a
narrow shelf. As we worked round it and looked up, its mass seemed to be
hollowed with caverns. When a stone was flung at a dark window in a lower
story a cloud of bats unsettled, like thick black dust.
There we left the river and camped; and in three more marches got to
a hut of Ryan’s in the heart of the hills, near a corner where Siam,
Kelantan, and Perak were immediate on the map, but I could see no
difference in the jungle. That land was a congestion of steep hills, with
torrents circling their bases. Here and there in it a clearing let in the
direct sunlight to mortals, who else moved in a lower confused murk lost
to the sight of Heaven. On the way to the hut, Smith, whose indifference
to all but his own suffering occasionally led him into more trouble,
ignored the presence of some inquisitive wasps, which hovered about his
head in the woods while he was reducing his misery with a long drink. He
flapped a hand insultingly at one of them, though they looked as big as
one-pounder shells, and made the same sort of noise in flight. In that
instant I saw we stood close to their fort, from which the first wave
of the attack, having got the signal, was coming over the top. I fled.
Ryan had already gone. But Smith did not seem to know that we yelled to
him because time was short. It was the wasps who really impressed that
on him, and then he came faster than I should have thought he could,
and brought them with him. The enemy had made up their minds, however,
that only Smith had insulted them. They ignored Ryan and myself, though
we used violence to keep them off our friend. For barely ten seconds,
with those heroic insects coming at us like projectiles to repair their
honor, the affair was grave, for we could retreat no more with the thorny
rattans about us, and the only obvious track led back past the nest. But
the attack was called off, in the moment of victory for the wasps, just
as I struck another off Smith’s neck. They could have killed us, but
they let us off, with the exception of the bayonets remaining in various
parts of Smith’s body and even in his scalp. There was no doubt about the
venom of those stings; Smith was really a casualty.
The day was almost done when we reached the hut, and at the moment of
arrival it looked to me the flimsiest vantage that man had ever built
amid the powers of darkness. It had no walls. It was only a thatch raised
on poles, with a floor of rough boughs about a yard above the earth. It
was open to the jungle, which pressed round it and stood over it, so
that, at such an hour, it seemed lost at a fathomless crepuscular depth,
where the light and sounds of a world of men could never reach. A noble
fire of aromatic timber burned at one end of it; Ryan said the smell
of it helped to keep the beasts away. The Chinaman who had been left
to watch the place smiled at this. He shook his head. Last night, he
explained, an elephant, he come. He come there. The Chinaman pointed to
the margin of a stream beside the hut, where certainly something large
had rioted among the shrubs. He come, he stop. No good. He make noise.
The Chinaman curled an arm above his head in the semblance of a trunk,
and imitated a cornet. I go. The man pointed to the thatch. Yet the
elephant, it seems, though he argued loudly about it all night, could not
make up his mind to cast the sticks and grass of which the hut was made
back into the forest; and at daybreak the Chinaman thought of some festal
crackers he had secreted in a box, got down bravely, lit one, and threw
the serpentining firework at the elephant, which fled.
As the man finished his tale the cicadas began theirs. They did that
every evening. When from our place by the stream we could see the
declining sun glance for the last time on the top story of the forest,
where there was a break in the tangle, it was as though his straight
beam, like a plectrum, struck the silent life of the place into an
immediate chorus. The solitude woke. The cicadas and crickets shrilled,
whirred, made the sound of a wind through wires, the sound of cutlery
being ground, of circular saws singing through logs, the humming of
dynamos. It all came suddenly, and I thought I could hear at last the
very note of the high tension of life there. Yet it put me apart. I
heard, but the triumphant chorus was not for me. My own life was not at
that terrific pitch and confidence. That sound antedated the chant of the
priests before the Ark, the Eroica Symphony, and the National Anthem. It
may even be heard, some day, by some survivors of humanity, as their Last
Post.
The song ended when night came. Life had made its sign. It was there.
It would sing again in the morning. All dark Malaya contracted down to
Ryan’s hut. Only that was left, except some wavering patches of gold
which our fire threw on unseen trees. That Chinaman was a good cook; and
those nights when we sat in undress, listening to Ryan, and sometimes to
a call in the outer dark, caused me to wonder what had become of all my
other evenings of the past, when these certainly would be remembered.
But my easy confidence went when at last each of us took his place on
the logs, for sleep, having made up the fire. Sleep was not easy. One
listened. There was no sound. Yet that was the worst of it. When would
the sound come? What would make it?
It was two in the morning, and I rested on my elbow and looked out. A
thin filtering of moonlight was making the aisles spectral. The trees,
it seemed to me, had stopped in an advance on us just as I looked at
them. And what was that shape over there? Was it of the moon, or of the
firelight? No, the fire was going out. I got up and put on some logs.
Shadows jumped from rafter to rafter overhead as the flames changed. The
head of the hornbill which was being smoked turned round on its cord
in the sparks. All our fellows were asleep. The forest was asleep; or
else listening. Then, far off, there was a sound, half snarl, half moan.
When I looked out even the trees seemed to be attentive to that call.
There was a long silence, and then it came again. It was nearer. It was
insultingly confident. I had never heard a tiger in his own place before,
and I lost the feeling that man is the noblest work of God; even if he
is, perhaps tigers do not know it.