Alongside Ryan’s hut the stream spread out into a pool with a floor of
white sand. It had a canopy of leaves. A few rods of sunlight, almost
solid in their bright distinction in that shade, rested obliquely on
the bottom, firm in the smooth current. And the interior of the hut,
that outpost of man, with its heartening reminders of the cunning and
knowledge which maintained Ryan so far from his fellows, interested me
more, I fear, than could any library. I liked to read the labels on
his gallipots, and the names of his books. There were a jar of Epsom
salts, and another of carbolic lotion; a bottle of iodine; tins of cabin
biscuits; a few photos; surveying instruments; a cheap alarm clock;
books on mining and geology; and some whisky bottles, empty. Big black
carpenter bees had burrowed in the rafters, and their bolting holes could
have been made by mice. Companies of wasps, of a size to fear nothing,
gathered round the edges of these holes, gathering sawdust; but I noticed
the wasps showed the bee great respect when his ugly head appeared from
within. They went, and did not stay to say farewell.
“If you meet a rhinoceros,” said Ryan as we started out one morning,
“don’t take any notice of him. Walk by him. He’s a nervous old gentleman
and doesn’t like to be looked at.” My friend’s rifle was of the modern
kind which will tumble an elephant, but he never used it except for pigs
and deer. We waded up the stream for a time, and then entered the woods,
the dog buoyantly scouting ahead. Once, when he came back to us, he was
a different sort of dog. It was the habit of that white man’s mongrel to
murder any too inquisitive native dog. That, no doubt, was merely his
snobbery. He would attack an elephant, so Ryan said, and had killed a
hamadryad, the most deadly snake in Asia, evidence which may show that
there is no natural association between intelligence and courage. But
by the look of him at that moment he would have fled from a rabbit,
for his tail was clamped underneath, he was trembling, and he looked
abject enough as he slunk against Ryan’s feet. Ryan posed his rifle and
went ahead warily. Presently he stopped, and stood looking at a hollow
where the dry rushes were flattened. That was where a tiger had slept.
To the dog the smell of the place was so distressing that he whimpered.
In daylight, to me, it was of little more interest than the couch of a
deer, for although I would not at night have wandered beyond the range
of the firelight, after sunrise one usually has the feeling—usually, but
not always—that the time and the place are man’s. The Malays, I noticed,
never went alone into the woods, so my feeling of security may have been
only the presumption of ignorance.
Ryan told me nothing that morning of the mark of his excursion, and I did
not ask him. It was sufficient to be with him. We crawled under thorns,
but did not escape every hook, and sometimes then I lost my leader and
was compelled to be watchful of his track. That was not really difficult,
though once or twice I was surprised to find how near a man may be to
panic without knowing its silly livid face is at his elbow. One mountain
stream, cascading down a varnished slide of rock where the wet ferns were
constantly nodding, gathered into a font, and the drink we had there from
goblets of twisted arum leaves reminded me that at home we rarely know
what it is to eat and drink. The drops of water left on the waxy surface
of my leaf were like globules of silver. Ryan brought out a bag of
mangosteens. This fruit is nearly as large as a cricket ball, and about
the color of it, when the ball is new. It is opened by pressing its thin
rind, and the sections of translucent white pulp within have a flavor
rather like the strawberry’s.
[Illustration: _The Heavy Shadows Were Hardly Disturbed by a Little Oil
Lamp_
(_See p. 244_)]
While we ate them Ryan noticed a near tree, which the Sakai had scored
to get poison for their darts. An ashy gum had exuded and hardened at
each scar on the rough and grayish bark, but it was impossible to see
the leaves of the tree, which were far out of sight. My companion had
met these people, who are simple and harmless folk, elusive nomads who
never leave the forest, and are very rarely seen even by those Malays
whose clearings are on river banks within the forest. It was almost as
unlikely that we should see them there, though they might have been
watching us at that moment, as in Kota Bharu. Even the greater creatures
of the woods move noiselessly, are never more than shadows, something
briefly suspected without apparent reason, unless they choose otherwise.
But for the insects, and an occasional bird, that nocturnal stillness
might be thought untenanted. The leopard here is usually black, and in
such a place he need not be even an apparition. If you look at a section
of the tangle on which some light is falling there is such a confusion
of shapes, all imperfect and unrelated, and so great a contrast between
surfaces brilliantly reflecting the sun and hollows from which night
never goes, that the eye grows weary with the problem, and refuses to see
anything but an insoluble riddle. An elephant might be standing there and
you would not know it.
And the heat itself of noon will dull curiosity in anything that is not
near and clearly visible. You are content with the accidents of the
moment, as when a large dipterous fly, as I thought it, of a bright
metallic green, kept returning to the sweetish pip of a mangosteen at
my feet. I caught it, and discovered with a pain that it was a bee. But
who would have thought a fly of that age was a bee? Large predatory
flies were hawking about, and did not invite handling. There were
infrequent butterflies. Yet the expectation, natural enough after those
ridiculous tours of museums, and the gorgeously colored plates of life’s
variety in the tropics, that you will be even more gratified than by a
perambulation of a zoölogical gardens, will be gravely disappointed in
the equatorial forest itself. There the creatures watch you, but they
are unseen. The occasions when you see them are momentous. Ryan told me
that in his hut one evening, just as he was beginning to eat, he heard a
pig munching nuts some distance across the stream, and went over. A big
boar was making so eager an uproar at his feast that Ryan had no trouble
in shooting him for the dogs, and left the carcass to be cut up in the
morning. In the morning it had almost gone. Ryan was annoyed with the
tiger, and decided to punish him the next evening.
“You know,” said Ryan, “I was a sniper in France, so I’ve had all the
big-game hunting I want. If the tigers will leave me alone and not steal
my dogs’ meat, fine. There’s room here for all of us. But they must
kill their own pigs. That’s fair, ain’t it? Why, he’d only left enough
to disappoint my dogs. Well, I couldn’t find that tiger that evening.
Somehow, though, I knew he was about. The place smelled like it. I
thought, well, he’s behind that bush and if he goes that way I’ve got
him, and if he goes that way I’ve got him, and I waited. Nothing doing.
Then I had a funny feeling run up my neck, and I gave a peep over my
shoulder. There he was, sitting looking at me, ten feet away—I measured
it afterward. Squatting and looking at me. Wondering what in hell I
was doing, I suppose. Well ... I felt bitched. Don’t shoot, camarade.
The best thing, I thought, is to slew round the gun slow, so I began.
Like this. No quicker. That was when he went. He just went, sir. They
can move.” Ryan smiled reminiscently. Somewhere in the forest a bird
continued his song in three notes, as though an idle urchin were learning
to whistle and could not get it right, but was persevering. “One thing,”
continued Ryan, as he rose and began to gather his kit, “you can always
see a tiger here if you want to. Keep quiet for a long time, and then
begin to tap a tree. He strolls up. I don’t know why, but perhaps he
wants to know who the devil has got the nerve.”
We began a long and breathless ascent, at first through a tiresome
undergrowth, then through more open timber, and presently came to an
opening in the foliage on the brow of a hill, like a high window of the
woods. We stood, and neither of us spoke for a long time. Malaya was
below us in the afternoon light, an ocean of looming forest, its billows
arrested, mute, and held as though by a secret conjuration the instant we
appeared. “You and I,” said Ryan at last, “are the first white men to see
that.”