A BREAK-NECK VENTURE.
It is more than thirty years since my medico-military lines were cast in the little picturesque station of Badulla, the capital of Oovah, in the interior of Ceylon. This district was the centre of very considerable European enterprise in coffee-growing, and, both socially and commercially, was an important unit of the Kandian provinces; hence government, in addition to a small garrison of troops, had established in it a staff of its Civil servants, for the administration of fiscal and judicial affairs, and it is concerning one of these officials—the assistant district judge, as he was called—that my story is now to be told.
The judge was a young gentleman of good parts and attractive manners. He was a dead-shot, an excellent angler, a perfect rider, a very Dr Grace or Spofforth of a cricketer, and an intelligent, chatty, pleasant companion to boot. He had also a sure foot and a steady head. He could walk along the verge of a rocky precipice with a sheer descent of hundreds of feet as unconcernedly as many a man trudges over a turnpike road. Chaffingly, we were wont to tell him that he had entirely mistaken his vocation in life, and that instead of being ‘an upright judge,’ trying ‘niggers,’ he ought to have been another Blondin, trundling wheelbarrows on a rope stretched across Adam’s Bridge from Manaar to Ramisseram, and cooking a prawn curry in a stove when in the very middle of the Straits. However, even in the capacity of the aforesaid judge, this proclivity of being able to walk safely upon next to nothing once stood him in good need, as I myself witnessed.
One afternoon he came into my quarters holding in his hand a letter, which the post had just brought him. I ought perhaps to mention that thirty odd years ago there were neither railroads nor electric telegraphs in Ceylon, and that travelling was comparatively slow, and to some extent uncertain. In the case of our station, however, we had little to complain of. The postal authorities at Colombo forwarded our mail-bags to Kandy—the first seventy-two miles of the way—by a daily two-horsed coach; and from that city to their destination, ‘runners’ carried the letters. But these ‘runners’ now and again met with accidents of various sorts, such as being killed by elephants or tigers; and it so happened that something of the sort—I forget what—having occurred to detain my friend’s letter, it was older by more than twenty-four hours than it should have been, when he got it.
‘I must be off sharp to Colombo,’ said he, addressing me as he entered my room. ‘I have had awfully bad news: it is a question of life or death with a very dear friend there. I can’t lose a moment over my departure. But get leave from the Commandant, and keep me company as far as Attempyttia—it is only a dozen miles away—and we will talk over things as we go along.’
‘All right,’ I said; ‘I’m your man.’
In a very few minutes the required permission was obtained; after which my pony was saddled and we were off. After leaving me at the travellers’ bungalow at Attempyttia, my companion would have to proceed to Kandy, to catch the downward coach, leaving at daylight next morning for Colombo. To accomplish this—some eighty odd miles—he would be forced to ride all night, assisted stage by stage with fresh mounts, which the kind-hearted coffee-planters, whether known or unknown to him, would willingly place at his disposal.
‘Let’s see,’ said the judge. ‘I’ve a good fourteen or fifteen hours before me to find that highly respectable rattle-trap of a royal mail-coach drawn up at the post-office at gun-fire to-morrow morning. Fourteen hours, six miles an hour, including stoppages—eighty-four miles! A snail’s pace; but I won’t calculate upon more speed. Bar accidents, I’m safe to do it, and do it I must.’
So on we galloped, little heeding the romantic scenery through which we were hurrying, and the faster too, as the sun was becoming obscured by thick, heavy, black rain-clouds, which were gathering over it and all around.
‘We are in for a drenching,’ I remarked.
‘If a drenching were all,’ was the reply, ‘it would not much matter; but’——
‘Well! But what?’
‘The Badulla Oya, the river which runs through the deep gorge between the spurs of the hills you see yonder—I know that river well. In dry weather, it is little more than a shallow streamlet, over the stones of which an inch or two of water trickles. But when these sudden monsoon downpours come on, it has the unpleasant knack of swelling, swelling, until it becomes a large, wide, deep mountain torrent, tearing like mad to empty itself somewhere. And you have no idea of the rapidity with which this metamorphosis is accomplished. Let’s push on, for the river crosses the highway; and by Jove, here is the rain and no mistake!’
A vivid flash of lightning, a loud clap of thunder right overhead, and before its reverberations were half ended among the echoing mountains, a deluge of rain was upon us. We were soaked to the skin in a few seconds.
‘How far is the river?’ I asked.
‘Good five miles; and five miles with these flood-gates of the skies opened, mean touch and go. Twenty to one, the Badulla Oya will be swollen and impassable.’
‘Is there no canoe or bridge?’
‘Canoe! What on earth, in your Ceylon griffinage, are you dreaming about? As for a bridge, well, metaphorically speaking, there is a thing which the natives call a bridge; but practically, not what you and I and the department of Public Works would class as one. However, it will not be long before you see what sort of a concern the bridge is like.’
We now hastened as fast as the animals we rode could lay hoofs to ground; but before the five miles were traversed and the banks of the river reached, we distinctly heard it roaring.
‘It is down already,’ said my companion.
Down it was with a vengeance, as we presently realised. Over a bed of rocky boulders it foamed and boiled and tumbled, a dark, deep, angry chocolate-coloured torrent, sixty feet wide at least.
Squatting under a large tree on the bank opposite to us, accepting the situation with that stolid indifference for which the Asiatic is so very remarkable, and chewing betel, that panacea for all the ills which Singhalese flesh is heir to, was a Kandian villager, well advanced in years. The judge hailed him in his own language. ‘Hi! father! Did you swim the river?’
‘Am I a fish, think you, my son?’ the man responded.
‘Did you cross it by the bridge, then?’
‘Does the English mahatmeya [gentleman] take me for a Wanderoo monkey, or for a jungle-cat, to walk upon broken twigs high up in the air?’ he answered evasively.
‘How, then, did you manage to get over?’
‘I have not got over at all. I have come from my village on this side, and I wait here until the flood subsides.’
‘How long will that be, think you?’
‘If the rain ceases, the river will be again fordable in three or four hours. If the rain continues—who can tell? Buddha only knows!’
‘Three or four hours!’ muttered my companion despondingly. ‘Too long, much too long for me.’ Then again speaking to the Kandian: ‘Is there any possibility of crossing the bridge?’ he asked.
‘None, none, my master. Alas! it has been shattered for some time past, and has not yet been repaired.’
‘Let’s go,’ said my friend to me, ‘and reconnoitre.’
We dismounted, gave our ponies to the horsekeepers, who had closely followed us, and walked a short distance along the bank. Suspended in the air, resting upon the forked branches of two forest trees, which grew nearly opposite each other on either side of the stream, were the relics of one of those primitive bridges which the Singhalese villagers build to enable them to pass ravines and mountain torrents. Bamboo and the withes of a ground creeper called waywel are the usual materials they employ; but if they can get slabs of timber, they use them as well. This was the case here: the rough-hewn trunk of a tall but slender cocoa-nut palm spanned the river, its ends being firmly fastened to the two trees which served to support it. Originally, a sort of hand-rail of the waywel had been tied to uprights nailed along the stem; and thus hemmed in, the bridge was safe enough to traverse by any one not subject to dizziness on ‘giddy heights;’ but as time and mischief had partly removed this protection, leaving long gaps with nothing to hold on by, a more precarious, break-neck, risky crossing, save for the monkeys, no one could possibly imagine. Picture to yourself this tapering pole strung at a height over a deep rushing whirlpool of a current, and you will comprehend what we saw and what I fairly shuddered at.
Not so, my companion. He sprang up the tree, and stood for a moment or two upon the end of the mutilated bridge. Then he said quite determinedly: ‘I’ve made up my mind; I’m going over.’
‘Are you mad?’ I exclaimed; ‘going over that narrow, frail, up-in-the-clouds thing? Why, it’s certain death if you fall.’
‘Even so, old man; but I have walked with sure steps narrower planks than this.’
‘Perhaps so; but not with a torrent rolling under you.—Don’t attempt it!’ I exclaimed; ‘wait until the waters go down.’
‘Wait! for four hours or more. Impossible! As I told you when we started, my errand is a vital one. I must be in Colombo on Sunday at the latest; and as to-day is Friday, to do that I must hit off to-morrow’s coach in Kandy. Well, you and the other fellows have often joked me about my Blondin-like propensities; I am going to try now how nearly I can tread upon the heels of that worthy acrobat. Never fear; I will get across safely enough. It is a pity, however, that the nigger architects have not been a little more liberal in their breadth of timber; but your Singhalese native is invariably a skinflint.’
Again I attempted to combat the foolhardiness of my friend; but he threw me off, said half jocosely, half in earnest:
‘I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die;’
and with the words in his mouth, began the crossing.
I am not, generally speaking, a nervous man, and I have had to witness some trying things in my time; but now I confess that fear and trembling came over me, and that I could not look upon my friend in his perilous transit. I half crouched and cowered behind a tree, my heart in my mouth, and every nerve strung to its utmost degree of tension. I expected every instant to hear a shriek, a splash, and then to see my friend buffeting with and carried away by the boiling torrent. Now and again, the voices of the old Singhalese and the Malabar horsekeepers, who had crept up to the neighbourhood of the bridge, broke upon my ears, first as if in tones of entreaty and warning, then in those of astonishment, and lastly in shouts of admiration and joy. At the jubilant sounds I roused myself, looked up, and hurrahed, too, at the very top of my voice, for on the opposite bank the adventurous judge stood safe and sound!
A weight such as I had never borne before was removed from my breast. ‘Thank goodness you’re all right!’ I called out.
‘Yes, as a trivet,’ he replied.—‘Now, screw your courage to the sticking-place and run over.’
‘Am I a jungle-cat, or a Wanderoo monkey, or even a district judge in the Ceylon Civil Service, to walk upon a hair? No; my good sir. If I took two steps upon that infinitesimally narrow palm’s trunk, my doctoring occupation would be gone.—Thank you; no! I’ll return to Badulla, and resume my physicking there.’
‘Good-bye, then. I’ll write to you from Kandy, if I can.’
He was gone. And it will no doubt satisfy the reader’s curiosity to learn that, thanks to the mounts provided by friendly coffee-planters, he caught the coach, went on to Colombo, and found the person for whom he had risked his life out of danger and in a fair way of recovery.