“We started on a Saturday at dawn, crossing the Bintulu and striking toward the Tatan River. I’ve said Becconi was after minerals and so he was, but his main proposition was gold. Down along south of the eastern ports he’d heard stories of a gold river somewhere in Sarawak north of the Rejang, and he carried the idea in his head, and I suppose that was what made him strike south from the Bintulu.
“We had with us Tuan and half a dozen of the Sea Dyaks and provisions for a month, and we hadn’t more than crossed the river and gone a few yards when the trees closed behind us, shutting out the sound of the village and cutting us off from the morning sun as a closed door might. I’ve never got used to the jungle, that’s to say the real thing, and it’s my opinion it is not the place for a man. It’s a kind of old glass house where the beginnings of life come from, and it’s my opinion it has outlived its uses and would be as well done away with. Maybe I’m prejudiced, having done near all my hunting in the open. Anyhow, that Saturday morning I wasn’t in any too high spirits. If I could have broke my contract and turned back I wouldn’t, though, bad as I wanted to, because I’d taken a liking to Becconi, and I had my misgivings as to his pulling through without a white man’s help.
“I’ve hinted he drank. We took a good stock of liquor with us, but it went under my eye. That was one of my conditions, and I knew if he was left alone with it the jungle would soon have done with him.
“We struck a big stretch of soggy ground where Nipah palms grew and nothing else. I’m just going to give you a sniff of that hell place they call the jungle in Borneo, and I can’t begin it better than by saying we hadn’t gone more than five hundred yards from the river when we struck this swamp. It wasn’t a true swamp, either. It was solid enough in bits, and you’d be going along saying, ‘It’s all right now,’ when your foot would go, sucked down, and you’d pull it out with a pound of black mud like treacle sticking to your boot. We went along mostly clinging to the palms that grew along the solid tracts and gave us a lead. Then, when we’d passed the swamp we found ourselves before the Big Thorn. That’s what the Dyaks called it, a big patch of wait-a-bit thorn we had to cut our way through, and it took us the whole day to do that.
“Then when we camped on a bit of high ground the black ants raised objections, and the black ants of Borneo sting like wasps.
“I give you that as a sample of twenty-four hours in the jungle. You didn’t get swamp all the time nor wait-a-bit thorn all the time, but you got lots of other things not much better, and it was always that infernal glass-house damp heat and smell. It’s the smell that gets you, not a bad smell, mind you, but just the smell of a glass house—only more so.
“Then at the end of a week we struck a rival prospector. It was the rummiest meeting. He was a chap by name of Havenmouth. He’d shoved east with an expedition from Maka, crossing the Balinean River, and he’d found the gold. But he was dying. I never did see such a skeleton. The jungle fever or something like that had done for him, and he said he’d been living on quinine and whisky, but that he didn’t care as he’d found the gold. It was in a little stream to the nor’east. He said there was dead loads of it, even though the stream was so small.
“He said that little stream must have been washing its gold for ages to make us rich. There he lay with his hands like a skeleton’s and his face like a skull painted with fever, handing us out all that talk; and then he showed us a sample of gold grains he’d taken from the stream.
“Sure enough some of them were as big as split bullets. Then he died with a whoop, and we buried him. But the bother was, he died before he could give us the exact location by compass. He hadn’t got it written down, for we searched him and his effects; he’d been carrying it in his head. He’d given us the gold grains, though.
“Well, that was the worst present a man ever got. Havenmouth had said: ‘It isn’t more than twenty miles way back there,’ and that was the string that tied us to the circle, for we went wandering round like the Egyptians in the wilderness, round and round, hunting for that darned stream for months and months. You wouldn’t believe it, unless you’d been there, how that thing held us. I’m not overset on money, but it held me, same as when you draw a chalk line round a hen and put her nose to it, she’s held.