Tide marks

by H. M. Tomlinson

It is as pleasant to travel afoot in the tropics, so long as you keep intact the curiosity of a newcomer and do not expect life to be buoyant near towns, as it is in Devonshire; though one ought not to stroll off into the deep end of the unhelpful wilderness, like Smith, if the vital organs are lardaceous. To walk is the only way to learn where you are. Yet perhaps it does not get done so easily as this paragraph. Trifles that would be disregarded at home may become perilous where the sun can be an evil-doer. An extra risk should be looked at before it is taken; and fretfulness when all goes awry is as bad as ptomaine poisoning, though its effects are not so quickly obvious. Shelter and food on numerous occasions will be worse than sketchy, yet as to that it should improve the morals of a civilized man to realize how narrow is the division between his precious life and what comes after it. That division between here and hereafter in a tropical wild is so thin that you might see clean through it if what is behind it were not so dark. I set out into the woods without a mosquito curtain, because those who had never been so far advised me that I should not want it. No fever there, naturally. There never is. Yet later I used good measures of quinine and aspirin on natives who looked as sad as malaria usually makes a victim. And one despondent exile to whom I spoke of this replied simply, “I don’t know why some of ’em make such a devil of a fuss about West Africa, when there’s this place.” The mosquito net should have been an essential part of the kit. We slept in native huts, where any lurking anopheles are almost sure to be infected. Besides the mosquitoes, there are the little extras. A bug of some kind—the jungle bugs are of many kinds—stung me the first night, and left a weal which was not as large as a hot cheese plate, but felt like it. That reminder I retained for about a week. The little things count, most decidedly. We had floundered, one day, through the mud and ordure where a herd of wild elephants had rested during the heat; then we spent some hours in a canoe, and a bare foot, though I did not know it, was exposed to the sun. The consequent blisters, which became confluent, were alarming if I looked at them too long.

Then there are the leeches. An injection of the determined character of these shameless little parasites would carry a broken-spirited man to fortune against all the laws of the land, unless the gun of an indignant victim stopped him. The leeches are after blood, and they get it, if a body comes their way. They confess only to salt or tobacco juice, once they have attached themselves. A traveler, his mind occupied, may feel nothing when some leeches take hold of him, but later he is sure to note the nasty crimson mess he is in. They are small creatures, at the most not more than an inch and a half in length, and not thicker than twine before they have fed. Their color is almost black or dark olive, sometimes with yellow markings. Wherever the woods are moist these patient creatures sit on their behinds, on the ground, on the foliage, and wait. At the first tremor betokening an approaching wayfarer, man or beast, they stretch out eagerly and rotate in the air for a grip. Should you stand still and watch the track you will see them converging frantically for your boots, all overjoyed by the lucky chance that you are waiting for them and fearful of being late. They never miss such a chance. There are no sluggards among the leeches. And you cannot always be ready to fence with them. If they reach a boot heel they keep up their pace; they do not stop to congratulate themselves with a partial success, but mount desperately till they find a loophole in the clothes—a pinhole seems enough—and the instant they touch flesh they are fast to it. On one occasion I picked a leech off my sleeve just as it had arrived (from Heaven knows where) and it became part of a finger at once. They are as tough as rubber piping; no good treading on them; that helps them to a landing. In some places their numbers make a traveler furiously indignant, and but for the fact that they go off duty at sundown a night in the forest might become a very long sleep. Puttees do not sufficiently protect when on the march. It is necessary to carry carbolic soap, and after wading through a stream to give the wet puttees so generous a rubbing with it that the movements of walking convert the soap into a pungent lather. I liked to see that pretty lacework of soap suds round my ankles. It certainly disheartened the industrious little wretches.

On the chart the place was called Gemang—the usual tiny circle on the map with a name beside it to show that men had congregated on that spot of earth. But in fact it was only a large communal dwelling, a raft of boughs, raised on stilts ten feet off the ground and reached by a ladder. Round three sides of the raft were cabins. One was given to us. This dwelling, like all of its kind, was of some substance; the main beams and props were of fairly heavy boles, and the superstructure of bamboo. The walls were of flattened bamboo worked into matting, and the roof was thatched with palm leaves. All was bound together with rattan. There was no iron in it. Smith felt he would like a rest before going over the divide between the Golok and Kelantan rivers. We stayed at Gemang for a day. The novelty of our position sustained me, for the people were good natured and went quietly about their business, the women husking rice in a wooden trough with pounders, while the children chased away the chickens. I don’t know what the men did except that they crouched by us and talked, though sometimes one would take out a monkey to climb for cocoanuts. When the monkey was not climbing for our refreshment it was chasing the cats headlong over the thatch for its own, which in Malaya is sensational activity.

I felt that night that I should be glad to go in the morning. There were many ants. A spider like a mouse ran out of my mat when I unrolled it. Other things were flying and crawling. It was an old and harboring place. Each bamboo of the floor under me had its separate reminder on my body; and beneath them a buffalo had taken refuge. When he rose to change his uneasy couch, then I too rose several inches. The buffalo smell was adulterated with that of durian—a quaint mixture. One side of our cabin was open, and so, when not watching the black patterns of leaves against the stars, I could look at the heads of the gossips round the tripod flesh-pot, with its inconstant flames. There had been a whisper of a supernatural creature in this community, of which I took the usual notice of a tired skeptic. During the night, however, I did hear inhuman howls and gibbering and some thumping, and put it down, not to a revelation of the supernatural, but to the monkey, which was a robust creature. In the morning, from the cabin opposite, the head of a man on his belly poked out from the interior darkness, and his mouth slavered. The sacred creature was an idiot, and we learned that he had been there for twenty years and had never come out of his hut. It was a pleasure to pack up and go.

CHAPTER XXXV

The forest changed our thoughts as soon as we were in it. We began to climb southwest of the Golok Valley through a tunnel in the jungle. It was a day—somewhere, anyhow, it was day, though hardly there, for the valley was deep and the morning was early. The woods might not have been there. They looked unbegotten. The trunks were contorted and askew. They reclined in a watery light, wet and rotting, and rocks like unplumbed reefs in a submarine deep had to be climbed. One would not expect to hear a sound there, and in fact there was no sound in that twilight unreality. I stopped to listen. There was but a noise in my head, which I tried to shake out. But this delay left me far in the rear. Then I could not hear even our party, and so could not reach them. They might have floated upward to the surface out of it. As I crawled on along the interminable floor, looking for signs of them, I had a distinct inclination to glance backward over my shoulder to see if anything were following me. But what could have been following me?

By noon we were near the height of the divide, and paused for a rest. A stream was beside us, unwinding slowly past hindering trees whose roots were like outcrops of weathered rock. The water was black, like the roots, till I noticed spectral fish, vividly dyed, suspended low down among the buttresses of what could have been a column of basalt. The water was really clear. Yet the fish could have been an illusion, so unlikely were their circumstances; but I was too tired for any verification. One becomes weary to the point of moribundity on rough ground in a forest of the equatorial rains. You don’t care any more.

By the time the day is mellow you have tripped in fatigue too often to bother about anything that matters. Nothing matters. Another stream has to be waded just when you had hoped you would arrive at camp almost dry. There is a pause to pick off the leeches. When you try to see whether there are any attached to your person where direct vision is difficult and in part impossible, you slip in the mud. Impatiently you step out. The leeches you can’t see may stay where they are, and be damned to them. Anyhow, the last stream washed off the mud. Then a quagmire made by elephants is reached, and the muck is returned to you, and more also. Out of the bog you mount a steep bank, feeling you could move no faster if the elephants were charging it, and slip; as you fall you grasp desperately at a rattan full of thorns, which gives way. Then there are more leeches to pick off.

Some hours before sunset we descended to an upper reach of the Kelantan River, and came to a hut occupied by two white men. The one who met us wore a beard, but not much else except a pipe, for his trousers were useless for their purpose, and his singlet hung from one shoulder. I understood he was prospecting for gold. I hoped that his cheerfulness was more than mere ignorance of his fate, for his alabaster pallor suggested that long exposure to a moist heat had drained the virtue from his flesh. His companion, an older man, then briskly approached. But he was dressed so neatly that perhaps he respected the society of the trees. His bearing reminded me that through mud and leeches a stranger could not see me at my best. He stood regarding our small party as though it were a dog on a parade ground; I fancied there was still something remaining of the sergeant major about him and that recently he had been sardonic with duffers. He was nursing a Winchester rifle as if it were a delicate child. He surveyed us steadily for so long that I wondered what he would say when he spoke. But he only remarked, “My God!” I dare say we were, too.