CHAPTER XXXVIII
It was time to leave Ryan, and make across country to the Golok. The men had made fast the loads. All was ready. I looked round that narrow well in the trees, into which the sun had just poured the morning, and wondered why I was going. What was there for me at Charing Cross? Ryan made no comment when we left him, except to express urgently a desire that I would secure for him, as soon as I got to London, Bottomley’s silk hat. “If it’s gone,” he said, “Lloyd George’s hymn-book will do.”
I will confess that when near sunset, a few days later, we came out by the Golok the sight of that river was beneficial. The day had been tiring. We were not far from Nipong, where we had stayed on our first night up country. Yet I had often felt during the journey that we were getting on too fast, especially when we were in the neighborhood of the campongs, the little communities of Malays. Sometimes we saw a new homestead, and a patch where the jungle had been only recently cleared. The burnt stumps of the smaller trees studded the earth, and the greater beams were still as they fell, too big to be moved, and amid all that wreckage a Malay pioneer had planted his first crop of dry rice; the slender blades of young rice were curiously emerald in what otherwise was a reminder of a sultry wood near Ypres. There would be a heavy barricade round it to keep out the beasts; yet it was usual, when walking through it, to see the tracks of the smaller creatures of the forest—for they were very noticeable in the new soft earth—especially the lace-like design made by the tiny hoofs of pelandok, the diminutive mouse-deer. And how friendly to us those husbandmen always were! They did what they could to make our pause longer and to keep the gossip alive. They sent their monkeys up palms to fetch green cocoanuts for drink, and brought baskets of mangosteens, lansats, and rambutans. It was our folly to hurry away from such people, from such peace in life, from such good manners.
If the place which gave us shelter that night by the Golok had a real name I do not know it, but I could easily adjust a new one to it. Smith had cheered me with words of what he called a forest checking station, an establishment of the Sultan’s foresters. We found it in open ground above the Golok; and there the local headman visited us, and promised Smith a prahu for the morning to take us downstream to Rantau Panjang, and boatmen, too, if they could be got. In the meantime, though its outward prospect was worth some days of heat and fatigue, yet the hut inside did not suggest that we should have new bodies by the morning. Bats had chosen one corner, and of course the best corner, for their droppings. The rest of the poles which made the floor were young and old, new and rotten, large and small, and some were raised and some depressed. Some were firm when they took our weight, and others groaned and sank. The earth was ten feet below, and there many frogs were honking and krexing differing tunes and with varied pitch. That meant swamp, and in fact the place looked too much like mosquitoes. I thought we had better build a fire under it, and smoke it out, and was cherishing an awkward armful of cocoanut shards and sticks when the first buffalo bull appeared. My sticks suddenly lost their value. This buffalo was not the usual inert bulk of black rubber. He moved under the stress of excitement. His eyes had an alert and inquiring glance, and his horns were yard-arms. I thought I had better get up the ladder. When on the middle rung another buffalo bull appeared on the other side of the house, and as the two met rather instantly at the foot of the ladder I finished the rest of the rungs in a stride. It was easy at the time. Then Smith and I had a good view of it, spoiled by an alarming doubt that if the two explosive tons below us touched our props then our shelter was done for. It astonished me that pensive buffaloes could show such passionate energy, and the shocks of the charges were chilling with clash and dull drumming. Which would die first? Then a child appeared, a morsel of brown innocence without even a clout of self-consciousness. He approached the battleground and severely reprimanded the bulls. They stopped, and were obviously embarrassed, with their lowered heads caught in the very act of misdemeanor. They could not deny they had been fighting. The child struck the flank of the first buffalo with a light wand and told him what he was. The bull turned and shambled off meekly.
This episode took us well toward the dark. I got down to the floor, and on my back prepared to wait for morning. I began by counting the hours—there were exactly eleven hours to 6 A.M., or half a day less one hour. To make sure that this was so I counted again, but found, unluckily, the same number, less the seconds which the calculation required to work out. The chorus of frogs now was like an iron-foundry; then it fell to one blacksmith shaping one horseshoe. The shoe got finished, and then the shipwrights began to rivet another plate to a ship. With the electric torch I found that twenty minutes had gone, and tried lying on the right side. This movement showed me that the door had swung open and that my head would be the first thing a buffalo would tread upon when entering the hut after climbing our ladder. The darkness outside, somehow, seemed very queer. That door was shut, so far as it could be lifted bodily to fit the opening. The wait for daylight was resumed. Smith, somewhere else on the floor, groaned unseen, and the boughs heaved as he changed his position. I wished I had made that fire underneath, because light wings were now brushing my face, and the mosquito who sang at one ear was as instantaneous as Gabriel’s awakening clarion. There must have been clouds of them. I experimented with my head under the cover, yet that, after ten minutes—ten more minutes gone—nearly suffocated me. Besides, it left my feet exposed, and the light wings were brushing them.
A storm began, though at a great distance, and something with large, leathery, winnowing pinions began flying in the hut; and therefore when a plank became alarmingly alive under me as Smith turned over again I sat up in desperation and struck at those silent but draughty pinions, though I hit nothing. It was time to try the other side. Midnight! We were getting on. Six hours to go. Possibly I slept, though creatures kept touching my face or crawling over my feet; but I was instantly awake when the hut filled with fire. The storm had come. The lightning, bursting a blue glare through the open timbers of the hut, made me think we were within the ribs of an immense skeleton.
The next day did come. I was there when it came, and in its light that hut appeared to be simple and ordinary. It was not bewitched, or else its unclean spirits went at cock-crow. Our packs were where we left them on the floor. Our tin mugs, standing yet on an old packing case, were ridiculously trite. This was mockery. The job of making a fire and some coffee was a matter for whistling. There was only coffee and hard biscuits, but I wish breakfast could be always like that. The Golok, however, had risen at least six feet in the night, and rafts of timber overturned in the storm were traveling fast on its yellow current. The sun was not yet above the hills, and so the woods were miraculously bright and revealed.
The prahu was a long and narrow dugout canoe, with a Malay at each end handling dexterously a long bamboo. They poled us into the stream, and the flood caught us and added us to the wreckage of the storm. We fled toward the sea. At least we had the assurance that we should encounter no rapids on the Golok. We merely rotated in eddies with the forest high on both banks, accompanied by floating trees whose submerged foliage was as dangerous as reefs. For the first half hour, therefore, my interest was fixed to the level of the Golok where the base of the forest was awash, so as to be sure that when the canoe at last turned over I should know of the nearest port. This, I soon saw, was an interest too concentrated for a day which was already hot, but was only beginning, for the Malays in charge of us were as apprehensive of signs and ripples and the topmost twigs which nodded on the water line above wholly foundered snags, as are spiritualists to messages from a hidden world. I relaxed. There was nothing to do but to wait for Rantau Panjang.
The jungle on one bank was in Siam, and on the other in Malaya. It had an aspect of grace. The green plumes of the climbing palms were fortuitous over the stream, and from the cornices of the woods lianas were knotted and often trailed in the water. There were, as usual, very few flowers to be seen, and a rare spray in blossom was notable. The Golok serpentined so flamboyantly that you could suppose the young sun was playing hide and seek behind the forest and was trying to surprise us from different regions of the sky. There were attractive white sandy beaches within bays of the timber, and long spits which projected into the stream like thresholds to the woods. The forest was opulent and elegant, and I remembered, in contrast, the savage majesty of some aspects of the forest of the Amazon. The Golok was a river beside which one could live, but one never felt that of the Rio Jaci Parana of the Brazils. It was not yet noon, but cramp and the heat drove us to estimate the distance we still had to go and the hours we must remain exposed to the sun on a mirror reflecting his dazzling light. He had been staring straight at us now for some time. There was no escape; a change from a thwart to the bottom of the canoe really took one no appreciable further distance from him. The weight of a tropical day is ponderable. It must be seriously upborne. The skin pricks wherever the sweat breaks at another pore, till all the pores are flowing conduits. One merely sinks the mind, and endures. We passed a beach to which a party of young Malays had made fast a rakit. They were squatting under the shadow of a shrub while a little fire burned beneath a cooking pot. An eddy caught us and whirled us away, and that picture of men in the woods, sudden and illusory, vanished.
The heat relented three hours after midday, but vast inky clouds began to tower. The evening storm was coming, and our nice calculations, based on time and the direction of the upper wind, as to whether or not we should arrive dry, gave us no comfort. In a malarial country rain may release the fever lurking in the blood. But we left the clouds behind us, with the sun behind the clouds. The upper rim of the mountain of threatening nimbus had a broad coast of opal, and this became shot with the colors of the rainbow, while presently, from the summit of the mass, a great fan of emerald light projected. A greenish tinge to a belt in a clear sky is not unusual, but vivid emerald was so strange a phenomenon that when Smith saw it he said he did not like it, as though it were evil.
The woods became interrupted with the cocoanut and betel palms of habitations, and women with water-pots stood in the evening light to watch us pass. Children waited on the banks while the buffaloes wallowed in the shallows. When the prahu touched at Rantau Panjang, and I stepped ashore and stretched, it was with the usual sense that I had earned this feeling of well-being. The evenings of Kelantan arouse no desire for the peace of the Better Land. This earth can be a good place.