“We know what they are in the cities, I suppose.”
Across the river, a mile away, as it fell dark a local storm thundered and flashed.
“Another sector catching it to-night,” said the man in the dark beside me.
“What’s the game?” I asked. “A local raid?”
Maguire chuckled. Then he said: “The Somme told me all I wanted to know of Europe—that and the Vimy Ridge and some odd corners. If you smart city people arrange a show like that again, don’t worry about me. I shall be fine here with the orang-utans.”
My now invisible partner said more, which would have been allusive except for the easy derision which his fun did not sufficiently moderate. I got the idea that I was included in his mockery. Then he began to chant softly a very indecorous song, a specialty of the Australian soldiers when they felt most hilarious on the march. I knew it and joined in. Maguire thereupon broke loose, and together we bawled the offensive words at the mute desolation of central Borneo, just as once they had been shouted in defiance of the nightmare in France.
For some time after that he took care of us, and what otherwise would have been a region where men like myself most likely would have died, he turned into an attractive and adventurous prospect. The Malays, wherever we met them, greeted our leader as though he were good fortune. Certainly we never found a difficulty—though sometimes I thought they were insuperable—which did not vanish as soon as Maguire went to it.
I lost count of the days, and often could not have guessed within a score of miles of our place on the map. That did not matter. It is something like a miracle that another human soul, without knowing what it is doing, should change the look of the world to us, turn a steaming forest full of unknown dangers into an exhilarating pleasure, and make even the loathsome leeches, hunger, and the thought of fever only the jokes of the place.
The rains, rather before they were due, began in almost continual seriousness. We had to plunge into and half swim some of the streams. The leeches increased by myriads. Darkness settled down on the hills, penetrated, like something palpable, into the everlasting woods, and remained there, a settled gloom. We were never dry. Maguire was working round to the hut by the river where we had spent the first night with him.
But something had gone wrong with that country. The hills had become morasses and the low ground was water. The jungle was flooded for miles. But Maguire was concerned about a Chinaman he had left in that hut, and he was going to reach it. To me it seemed impossible. We were thwarted at every approach. And it still rained, as though the solid earth were doomed and there would never be dry land any more. Maguire at first was comical at any new check, with eloquent outbursts against Chinamen and their entire uselessness and inconsequence. Let the beggar die. Then we would turn back as if he had abandoned his quest. Soon, though, we found he was only trying another device.