The Malays had disappeared ahead and what could I do? I cried savagely to him that if he let go he would have to die. I knew that he was almost at an extremity with fatigue, but at the shout he became lively, grabbed a better hold, and at last was aboard again, panting. I have no idea how I got over.
A tropical rain-forest is an experience which goes far to alter your conception of the quality of life. Life does not seem to be a tender plant. In the north, on the exposed ridges and sandy barrens of the world, life might be a patient but timid invader, grateful for the stoniest comfort, doing its best against the adverse verdict of fate, and perishing meekly in adversity. In a jungle of equatorial rains the earth itself is alive, and there is no death, and not even change. There are no seasons. Life is visibly as dominant a fact in the universe as great Orion in a winter sky. It is immortal. It is even terrifying in its heedless and unscrupulous arrogance, as triumphant as the blazing sun, and has no doubt that God has justified its ways. You may live with it, if you can. It has no other terms. This Malay forest varied in character. Where the ground was high it was more open, yet more dim; the trees were greater, and their buttressed trunks rose like the pillars of a cathedral whose roof was night. But on swampy ground, where day could in some diffused sort reach the earth, we could not step aside from the track. A lower riot of foliage was caught between the masts of the forests, spinous, tough, and exuberant. Bare cables were looped and pendent from above, roots meandered over the earth like flat walls and like the rounded bodies of dead reptiles of interminable length. Climbing palms, the rattans, lifted green feathers into every space, and their barbed and flexible ropes frustrated every pass. Epiphytes and ferns were posed on all the knots and protuberances of the masts and spars, and one fern, the elk’s horn, projected its masses of palmated green antlers in such abundance that it was more remarkable than the hosts on which it was parasitic. There was no sound. I paused to watch some colored flies hovering in a lath of sunlight, and their murmuring might have been the audible energy of the tense and still uprush of life about me. It was while alone, watching those insects, that I was surprised by my Malay coming back to me. He was evidently bothered by a difficulty. He told me that the other tuan was ill, was lying down in the path, and could not move.
Poor Smith was indeed on his back. He had propped his head on his helmet, and he confessed that this heat and fatigue were outside his specification. He was finished. He could not go another step. While kneeling beside him, pointing out that he was yet too young to give himself as food for ants, I noticed that my breeches were bloody and had to touch the leeches off my legs with my pipe. This was our introduction to those indefatigable creatures. The revulsion was mental, not physical. It is a shock to see the worms feeding on you before their time. Such haste is unseemly and not by the rules. I glanced at Smith, and then saw a group of them attached to his belly. He had not noticed them. How soon he was up! How well he stepped out! Even leeches can have their good points.
The day was slanting fast toward sunset, but there was no sign of any end to the forest. I found myself the leading file, and so discovered that when one reaches a queer place in the woods, some resolution is required to take it ahead of the others. For once I came out of the trees suddenly and unannounced, and found below me an extensive and forbidding inclosure in the jungle, a level lake of pale reeds round which the gloomy wall of the forest rose, as though to keep private and secluded what was there. The afternoon, sure of its privacy, was asleep within that secret bay in the darkness of the woods. Even Adam must have had some hesitances in the far and unfamiliar corners of his garden. The grass in this corner of the forest rose several feet above my head, and I parted it to find a way, remembering the while tales of the seladang, the bison who weighs a ton, does not wait to be insulted, but takes the initiative, and can reverse like a cat. But only the afternoon was asleep in that recess. Then the forest began again.
Within an hour of sunset, when even the Malays looked as though they had had enough of it, we came upon a wide clearing. The hills of indigo, which had been far from us in the morning, were now near. They were part of the forest. That open sandy space was loosely grown over with shrubs that were touched with the colors of flowers whose scents stirred only when we blundered past, as though nothing moved in that place except when man disturbed it. Its peace seemed as settled as eternal truth. I could look upon the pale bare stretches there of the sands of old floods as if this were not only another country, but I had entered another existence. Tired? I felt I could drop. But why are some moments and some scenes of such nameless significance that, though all is strange, we feel there is no need to ask what is truth? The Golok River was near us. It might have been an upper reach of the river of life. It was of crystal and beryl. The façade of the Siamese forest opposite was of gracious pilasters of palms, with cornices and capitals of plumes; the roof was domed. The clouds of evening were of rose.
But Smith was done. No more of it. The Malays, he said, were deceiving us. This was Nipong. “There,” he said, pointing, “is a house. I can see the plantains from here.” Our men stood by disconsolate. They said nothing. But when I went to inspect this house something loathly stirred within the rank herbage on its floor; for it had no roof and most of its walls of palm matting had gone. We got going again. And it was almost dark when, for the first time in that long march, we came to betel and cocoanut palms (no doubt of it now) and presently to the huts. There was a fair cluster of them, all raised on stilts with clear spaces under them, and the paths between lumbered with the bulky black shapes of buffaloes. The beasts gave one sullen stare at us, and lumbered off with about as much sense of direction as runaway lorries. I thought they would carry the houses off their props and that we should be left shelterless after all. But, anyhow, the eruption brought out a frowning and elderly little man, who stood at a distance while he read the Sultan’s letter.
He took us home. It was a larger house than the rest, with an unusual length of irregular ladder to its veranda. A corner of its bamboo floor was given to us, and a group of children became intent on our business of unpacking. The chief showed us the river, where we could bathe. When I returned from it the day had gone, and I sat cross-legged with the Malays, dressed like them in sarong and baju, and feeling that I would have gone twice the distance for such a night. The heavy shadows of that old barn-like structure were hardly disturbed by a little brass oil lamp. Some men of the village gathered to gossip, and the women and children vanished I don’t know where, but I could hear their voices somewhere in the rafters. Brass dishes were placed between us on the floor, with fruits and nuts, lansats, rambutans, mangosteens, and a kernel which tasted like walnut. One felt quite at home with these people. They spoke in low voices. They asked modestly about the outer world, but said nothing in criticism. Perhaps they believed us. Smith fell asleep, and I lay on a mat which the chief spread for me, and pretended to sleep, but was listening, smelling the whiffs which came up through the flooring of old durian shards, looking at the gossiping heads of the chief and his cronies and at the grotesque shapes on the wall, whether antlers and horns or shadows I did not know, and at a star or two showing through the cracks in the wall. When I woke, the day was entering the hut in splinters, but all my friends were motionless bundles about me.