XXXVI

The camp was not awake when Colet left it to go down to the river. Its surroundings were apparitional in the hour before dawn. The forest was uncreated. It was only beginning to come out of the darkness. Nothing had taken shape, except a few outlines on the surface. Creation had been roughly indicated. The rest was night. Substance was not alive, but was suspended in a void, germinal and suggestive. There had been no word yet.

It was almost cold, and Colet shivered. There was something in the scene suggestive of an autumnal dawn at home; the same hush and the unreality. The track led down past a tree with buttresses massive enough for a cathedral. Its exposed roots, in that light, were dank coils ambushed in a nightmare. They appeared to be a tangle of sleeping reptiles waiting for a touch to set them thrashing about hideously. The trail was easier below, almost free of obstructions. No. Something was there in the path. Only a shadow? It was not. That really was a snake; it twisted a little.

Better be careful. Colet advanced a few steps, watchful. He did not think he was mistaken. There had been a movement. The shadow then heaved, and humped on the ground. The snake uncoiled again and turned over. It was a tail. Colet stopped, with an urgent impulse to fly back to the camp. He overcame that impulse. He had a clear idea of the expression on the tiger’s face. It was boredom. It had pale side-whiskers; the upward glance of its bright eyes was reproachful. It stretched itself; it yawned with a gape which Colet especially remarked, and stood for a moment sideways. It sneered; and then it went. The forest took it in. There was no sound. It was there, and then it was not.

For a second Colet wondered whether human dignity would insist that he must go on. But dignity lost. He could not go on. The vague path left empty by that surprise was insuperable. He retired, in deliberate but agitated leisure, occasionally looking back. That was a gentlemanly beast. And if he’d had the gun with him he couldn’t have hit it. It went before a thought could move.

Mat was roving about, with his morning cigarette, when he reached the hut, and after a suitable interval Colet advised the Malay that he had met a tiger when going to bathe. Mat listened to the news with a show of polite interest. These tigers! They have no manners.

Mat’s own manners, now, were perfect. His courtesy and patience, which were safe from the presumption of the ignorant because he did not look safe, and because of the austerity of his bearing, made him notable even on the march, when his lithe bronze figure was almost naked. The eyes of the two men met, for no particular reason, and the Malay smiled. That was well. Colet knew he was not alone in that enterprise.

The Malay wished to speak to him. Tuan! He would not hide the truth. All his knowledge of that country had been gained when, long ago, as a young man, he had passed through with a party hunting Sakais, the jungle folk, for slaves. Yet, if he might speak, he thought that time would be saved if now they took to the river. It would not be easy to pole rakits up against the stream, but it would be easier than carrying burdens in the forest. The river was low. The jerams, the rapids, would not be bad, for the season of floods had not come.

The map, Colet saw, held with Mat’s opinion; the men very quickly made rafts of bamboo. That sort of craft had a dubious freeboard, Colet noticed, but the men behaved as though they had nothing to learn when they were turning bamboos into a means of transport. If the river allowed it, if there were no floods, they would be in the neighbourhood of Berching in a few days; and the idea of that mountain had been very distant, when considered in the woods. Their small flotilla of rafts began its upward journey towards the watershed.

Colet’s platform of green bamboo pipes, enamelled and wet, made slippery holding. It was fairly agile, too, and demanded subtle coaxing from a rider who was unused to such a seat. It would pardon no nonsense. Its surface responded to every inequality of the current. You could feel the river alive under your feet.

Mr. Parsell sat beside Colet, but was forgotten. The ethnologist showed no interest in the world about; apparently he desired nothing better than an opportunity to meditate on what could not be imparted to a man who, in an important sense, was not with him. Colet forgot him.

Their way was now at the bottom of a chasm. The dark forest was its walls. The river was a blinding mirror, but narrow; the sky overhead was hardly any wider. That region told them that man had only then entered it; but Colet, after rounding several bends, received no impulse from the thought. He lapsed gradually into limp but enduring desire, a desire for shade, for a break in the journey. The sun concentrated its heat into that stagnant cleft in the forest, down the bottom of which waters drained from the heights. The poles of the Malays clinked, splashed, and echoed. The men cried out to each other, and their voices sped like the first flaws in the original peace. They broke the solitude at last. The stillness of the forest, in which not a leaf stirred, and the insistence of the heat, were mesmeric; they reduced Colet to a pair of eyes which travelled, that first afternoon of it, without a body. Occasionally he was brought round, and found that he was able to move, when the rakit was swept under a projecting bough, and globular fruits hanging in its shade, like emerald and yellow lamps, threatened to clear the deck. There was a brushing and cracking, the raft heeled, and they came clear into the sun again, half foundered, the Malays laughing.

Long sandy islands were humped in the stream, and on them had stranded trees out of old floods, trees gaunt and bleached, like the skeletons of mastodons. A dragonfly would hover over the raft with a lustre of wing-beat as its nimbus, the only inhabitant, and then it would shoot off as a streak of prismatic light. The reach they were in was always enclosed, as though it were a brief lake, with high walls on either hand, unscaleable, and abrupt hills corrugated with the everlasting forest overlooking both ends of it. No way out. But round the corner, as they turned it, shot the uproar of rapids, and the river above was taut in glassy sheets over inclines. All had to jump overboard, and persuade the mutinous rafts to go up and over against their weighty and tricky insistence that down was the right way to go. That was a lively and cooling interlude. It was play for the men. They chanted; they raised their shrill war-cry when they got a rakit free from the snags and fairly on the run.

The late afternoon gloomed with the threat of the daily storm. Colet watched those pitchy masses in the sky with a concern for the coming of rain which was instinctive, but puzzled him. Here he hated rain, and that seemed unreasonable. Yet these were more than storms; they were threats to existence. The earth cowered under that savage frown, and waited, in surrender. The sky lowered to the forest in ponderous keels of bitumen solid and ominous, illuminated, so it seemed, by livid glowings from hell. The trees that had been cataleptic began to tremble, leaves and birds whirled in upper gusts, the outer branches shook in helpless desperation; and then the sky collapsed, roaring. Nothing could be seen but a screen of falling water which glittered with incessant convulsions of lightning. The raft was battered. The storm ceased with a shocking detonation, as though on the signal of a gun-burst. In the silence which followed, when there was only drainage drumming through the leaves, they heard the crash of a forest giant. The Malays were glum now, chilled and depressed. It was nightfall when they sighted some lights ahead, and moored by a cluster of huts.

Mat overlooked the disembarkation. He knew what to do. Colet changed into a dry sarong and shirt, made coffee, and sat by himself, not wondering, after all, how much more ahead of them there was of this sort of life, but sunk in fatigue and content, a tranquillity in the cool of a tropical night, within its foreign smells, which was a hint of experience in another dimension. He was satisfied with the stars over the hills he must traverse. So when Mr. Parsell, who had been with the people of the village, appeared beside him, rubbing his hands, Colet half resented an invasion of the privacy of nature. The old fellow was satisfied with his affairs so far, it appeared. What did he want?

Mr. Parsell certainly was satisfied. It was late, but there were no mosquitoes about, and he evidently wished to be companionable. What was the matter with him, Colet wondered. For he talked. And presently, through Colet’s apathy when ethnology was the subject after a tiring day, there began to penetrate an understanding of Norrie’s respect for Mr. Parsell. The man was animated. He knew the secrets of the strange place already, or thought he did, by all accounts.

He made a confidant of Colet. He treated him as an equal in ethnology. Mr. Parsell forgot the difference between them. And Colet began to be stirred by surmises of a human tradition of an antiquity he had never suspected. He turned to his companion as though he had not met him before. He forgot where he was. This was the man who had taken no notice of the jungle; who only admitted its existence when he had to. Colet listened to a new voice. Mr. Parsell was murmuring, persuasive and lenient; and, leisurely, he divined the probabilities of extended human understanding with the allusiveness of a poet. He was generous, perhaps, because he had just learned of what to him was an accession to knowledge. He had a pupil; he wished to share this wealth. It was for everybody.

Colet was shown a vision of a long past humanity, few in numbers and in dire peril, the chances all against its survival, fumbling out of a darkness where the beginnings were hidden, and drifting, or impelled by forces unknown or half-guessed, to this discovery and to that, from land to land, to a partial control of circumstance.

Now and then, as Colet listened, he watched a spark wavering about the huts. Humanity was still securing itself against the powers of the night? Lightning flickered over the untraversed hills to the west. Sometimes a creature unknown called in the forest. Colet heard that interruption as though a listener had mocked Mr. Parsell’s happy auguries, had derided his faith in human destiny.

Those satiric cries, and the remoteness of the stars above the mysterious penumbra of earth, did not take the scientist’s attention. He went on, sometimes stroking his beard. There were tribes that, at long last, built cities; they grew haughty with a new strength. Some of them, he thought at times, had been carried a little too far the wrong way in their confidence in engines and mechanical power. If that clever fellow had found the fulcrum to shift the earth, he might only have wrecked the solar system. Mechanical power, to him, was a terrible power, easy to control, but it could be disastrous in its undesigned outcomes, as though its exactitude were a delusion and held a diabolical cheat. It interested him far more, Mr. Parsell explained, that other tribes had never come out of their original fastnesses. They were still in the woods, not far from the beginning of human impulses. Not far, in truth, from that spot. It might be true, he thought, that man had come to the steam-engine too soon for our good. The engine, very likely, had not taken us as far from the jungle as we imagined. What was worse, it was possible that we were moving at full speed on the wrong track. Eh? Perhaps we were going in the wrong direction; but that was for us to learn. We knew what we wanted. It was not his concern. No doubt we should find out presently, if things did not appear to be right, that our power had taken us too far the wrong way.

It was those other men who had taken no turning at all, but were still where they were at the beginning, who meant most to him. Mr. Parsell thrust a hand towards the unknown.

“There, Mr. Colet, they are just out there still.” And he continued, coming a little closer to his companion in an odd eagerness:

“Suppose those people know what we have forgotten? Has that doubt ever occurred to you? It has to me. It has to me. They surely know what I do not. We may have thrown away clues⁠—think of it⁠—which these people still keep, without knowing what they are, omens that would have taken us along a better road. I am going back.”

“What’s that?” Colet ejaculated; for he wondered suddenly whether a clue was there.

Mr. Parsell soothed him. He explained that these original men were almost virgin documents; they were not scrawled over, they were not obscured by the palimpsest of many civilisations. They must have preserved secrets, long overlaid by civilisation, which were worth many inventions. A body of them was hovering, so the villagers had been telling him, near there. Those folk of the woods had not been seen, but they were about. The villagers called them shadows. Shy folk. Very rare and elusive people, who avoided even the Malays. But he would find them. He must find them.

The feeble glim of their lamp hardly more than suggested Mr. Parsell’s face, which hovered in the dark. That faint and uncertain star at the end of a brass stalk was the sum of their effort at the illumination of the vast Malayan night. The elderly scientist’s smile, as he bent forward towards the light, was all of wisdom in the wilds that Colet could see; and, when the lamp flickered, the expression of cheerful and speculative discernment was evasive, it was tremulous, as though on the verge of being engulfed.