We turned aside, while recovering, to a small cluster of native huts. They were built on a narrow step of the slope, from which we looked out over treetops to the place where the village we had left was a smudge on a long serpentining coast. Under a thatch apart were several shrines to the spirits of the sea and land, and in one of them was a good model of a sailing canoe, beside which was placed a little rice to prosper somebody’s voyage. But only the chickens were about; we saw no spirits of the sea or land, and not even a solid husbandman.
The sun was now above the trees, apparently crystallizing the foliage into rigidity with its straight glare. We continued our upward toil. The sun was on our backs. Above a half acre of scratched earth, in which were hasty pineapples, tobacco, and cassava, the track vanished completely at a point where an earthquake had flattened three huts. That clearing was grown over with labiate herbs and a kind of raspberry. Above it the cliff of the forest regarded the huts and the advancing wayfarers with such impassive aloofness, as though man were a late and unimportant curiosity on the earth, that I myself thought it might be as well to erect a shrine to whatever hamadryads haunt tropical groves. But my Dutchman, though he affably agreed, did not appear to get more than a misty notion of the idea, so we continued the ascent.
Our guide disappeared in a canebrake. We stooped and followed him, and at last were crawling astern of the sound of the Malay’s busy knife. This original progress began in amusement; at least it was a relief from the sun; but I could not help noticing, in about two minutes, that a spiky tunnel, in which the air is like steam, has its disadvantages. Then we had to stop and wait on our hands and knees, for we could not hear our guide. Suddenly his parang broke loose again somewhere on my left, and as suddenly ceased. The guide’s face, after a long silence, pushed aside the stems near us—how native to the wilderness is a Malay’s face when morosely it just peeps out of jungle grass!—and he told us he was lost. It had seemed to me that it might be so, for his knife strokes had had a wild and erratic ring, as though the obstinate vegetation were being punished. We crawled back, therefore, in the reverse order, and the elegant young Dutchman reverted to his native language, as that, probably, was better equipped for expressing the results of the brittle but resistant nature of the herbage on the knees. The guide, though, was a good man. The world is wide, his manner led us to infer, and the day is young—why not get lost? He turned on the mountain again with a quiet energy altogether different from his early display. For the first time I began to suspect that we might reach the summit.
He went to the gigantic grass again, struck it with his knife, and thus sank into it. We stooped in slow pursuit of him; sometimes crawled, were whipped in the face by elastic stems, were stilettoed and bayoneted. I learned, being so near to the earth, why grains and spores turned at once into such a high tumult, for what was under my hands was warm and humid, and I should not have been surprised to feel it stir at my touch. We continued to move carefully on hands and knees, but, excepting that we were going up, I had no sense of our direction; only a tangle of dark ribbons could be seen overhead. Why was I enjoying it, as I withdrew another broken dagger from my trousers, wiped the sweat from my face on my sleeve, and looked at the blood on my hands? I don’t know. Perhaps some of the energy which jetted upward in that mass of hard green fountains was charging me. The smell was strange, and it may have been the original smell of earth; we may have been close to a young and salutary body. I had an idea that if I crawled long enough there I might overtake some lost time. It was while bravely continuing with this fortifying thought that we emerged, and found ourselves in an open space, with the jungle at hand. But before toiling up to attack that louring palisade we thought we ought to pause and recover uprightness, so we disposed our gear about us, reclined on a fallen tree, and contemplated the way we had come. The Malays crouched below us. They are very good at contemplation. They can maintain it, all day if necessary, without a movement. Our log was situated well on the way to the clouds. It might have been a seat on the edge of a darker cloud. The log was hot and dry, being nearer to the sun. I was idle-minded—I felt that I had been excused from what was necessarily occupying the attention of envious men, who were now a long way below me. The way we spent time here was no matter, because it was unlimited and unmeasured. The corrugations of the log were lanes and alleys for an industrious population of ants, and I watched them with the calm abstraction of an immortal who was far too great to understand the reason for so much activity and resolute enterprise that apparently got the tiny laborers nowhere, except into trouble now and then. But they appeared to like it. They did not know they were ants. With what industry and courage they carried particles up and over the ridges of the log, which were mountain ranges to them, determined to get their burdens somewhere, however high their mountains! They took no notice of the contemplating gods above them, and very little of the commotions and earthquakes the gods made on the log with idle fingers. Probably that log was too immense for them to know, so how could they understand that it was only one log of a forest in a small island which, to the knowledge of the immortals, was insignificant among many islands of a vast globe? No doubt most of them got their particles safely home by evening. Success, success!
A little way down the incline, upright on the verge of space, were two areca palms, but far more distinguished and remarkable shapes than ever before I had seen those trees. They framed a far vision of Gilolo and cloudland. It was not easy to say at once which was island and which was vapor. But then, even the minor projecting sprays and fronds about us there seemed strangely posed and of more than the usual significance. The bee which alighted on a labiate flower at my feet was not related to anything I knew. I was invading his world, which seemed to have been warned of intruders and was curiously intent and quiet. Nothing moved there but the bee, and perhaps he had not yet heard news of the invasion. Immediately below the black figures of the areca palms the eastern coast of Ternate and the sea reminded me of the indentations of a chart on which the ocean was symbolized with the usual color. It was not easy to believe that our mountain top was based on anything more substantial than a tinted presentment of earth.
Gathered from the Submarine Gardens of the Tropics
The Dutchman overcame the spell and the silence with a shout, and we rose to face the rest of the upward journey, which was only half done. A little climb brought us to the woods, and there we worked at first along the edge of a ravine the bottom of which was in night. We entered by a wilderness of bamboos, and the crackling of the dry parchments of their spathes under our feet made an uproar which startled me, for it announced us to every dryad on the mountain. And there is no arguing with bamboo piping. If the pipes are stacked in any abundance in your way, then you must find a path round them or go back. The forest grew darker as we worked toward the head of the chasm. It was dank and elfish. The light was suspect. The shapes of the trunks and boughs were gnome-like. The way along the edge of the ravine was difficult with wreckage which looked like fallen trunks, but the shapes collapsed at a touch. They were only a treacherous semblance. The profusion and variety of the ferns, the queer tricks of parasitic growth—one decadent climber, its air roots no more than a spider-webbing, studded a tree with fleshy disks like green dollars—and an occasional view on the stem or the under side of a leaf of a shield-bug as brilliant as a black-and-scarlet flower, ought to have kept us from going farther, but the intelligent curiosity of adventurers always moves them on from what they see is good to what they know nothing about.
The slope often rose so steeply that the angle seemed unsafe for so heavy a load of forest. When we looked upward the trees might have been falling on us at a noiseless speed. We were always on the point of being overwhelmed. It was an act of faith when a projection was grasped for support, because you imagined the vast overhanging weight would at once begin to revolve with the extra burden. That sense of insecurity made the shock the greater when a bough gave way. But we did not fall far; the next tree below checked us and flung us against another tree, and that one threw us to the ground. Luckily it was much cooler up there. A full view of the sky was infrequent, even when we looked back. When we looked down, during a pause to recover breath, instead of the contorted tentacles of aged roots ridden by fungi and moss reaching toward our faces and the columns leaning out of the shades, there was an upper show, in a light which was as fixed and greenish as a rare fluid that no wind could stir, of giant leaves even more fantastic than the succuba of roots; banners of wild plantain, pendent epiphytes, and the crowns of tree ferns which suggested, in that light, that we were lost in time and not in space, and had worked backward to the Mesozoic epoch.