This man Ryan showed us where to bathe, and told us what not to do with our wounds, though his manner implied that probably we would be fools, nevertheless. Then he listened to the story of our wanderings without a comment; he merely asked at times what could have been supposed was an irrelevant question, though he made no use of the answer. When our jejune recital was over he looked a little pensive and whimsical for a moment, then rose to place about the platform where we were reclining some dishes of hot food and basins of coffee. We looked out to the river. It was deeply below us, in a narrow passage, gliding over shelves of granite. The forest was a somber wall on the other bank. Above those personal trees some hills were monstrous and salient, for the sun had just gone down behind them. Ryan pointed at the hills with his knife. “Only seladang and Sekai over there.”
He Began to Treat His Foothold Too Punctiliously
With a friend beside me whose profile was like Ryan’s I should regard the immediate possibilities of any quite primal savagery with equanimity. The thought of it was even pleasant. We were going over there, too, in the morning. The light in the clouds beyond those hills was that of dread and wonder. A wind, an eddy from a distant thunderstorm, brought the scent of a tree in flower from the forest behind us, and carried away the heavy heat down to the river. The coffee had a flavor notably good. That was the way coffee ought to taste. A dog sat next to me, waiting for scraps. As I spoke to him I saw a leech uncoil from inside his nose and elongate and retract. One must accept such things along with sunsets and sonatas, but they do seem like insults to truth and beauty. The leech, for his part, might ask what did we suppose men and dogs were for, in a world of good leeches. The dog took no notice of his familiar, for he had no fingers to take hold of the thing; the dog was philosophically resigned. But the leech, by jerking out of sight like a piece of tense elastic released, proved to me at once that fingers were of no use against him. Ryan said the worm had had a lodging in the dog’s nostril for a month, and that it declined to be ejected. Yet it was not easy for the coffee and food to maintain its flavor with that before me, so I got a pair of forceps; and Ryan, with exclamations of vicious joy, presently executed the leech on the platform, beside the tin of biscuits. If you regard this sort of outrage boldly and steadily, the light in the sky remains almost unimpaired. The world is what we think it is; most accommodatingly, it changes with our moods. It is not always easy, therefore, to maintain a good light in the sky.
Our light failed. The opposite hills merged into the night, though arcs of them shaped again when lightning momentarily expanded in the clouds beyond. We could hear the river below, as though the thin remainder of time were rapidly running out, and we were being left stranded on a high solitude in eternity. Ryan’s quiet voice made eternity most homely. His presence on the Plutonian shore, should we have the luck to meet him there, will instantly cause the awful thought of the lord of that domain to be of less moment. Some irreverent plot against Doom may even begin then to rehabilitate the humbled soul of man. Ryan seemed to have learned, in No Man’s Land in France, a few artful underplots against the august front of eternity itself, and I found myself chuckling at its somber presentment, now and then. When a victim regards even his own extinction as a bit of a joke, can he be extinguished? Even the local cattle of some Malay settlers who lived near appeared to be aware of the nature of our hut. I heard, in the dark, grunts and blunderings near us, snorts and hard breathing. What was this? Well, the animals came around like that every night, confound them! No good sending the dog against them. The brutes came back, as close as they could. They came for society and safety. The tigers never approached his place at night.
CHAPTER XXXVI
It is all very well, but one must pay for blundering carelessly through the hindrances which discourage most men from the central hills of Malaya. Yet a reward for being thus fatigued and sickened comes early every morning in the forest. The light of dawn might be—perhaps it is—merely the tranquillity and assurance of one’s own spirit. What of that? The soaring palms, the green jib-sails of the giant arums, the pale shafts and lofty domes of the great trees, shine as though the radiance were theirs. Insects glance over the new blossoms in the clearing like vagrant prismatic rays. But the hills have gone. They have not returned with the morning. Where they were dominant last, sunset is but brilliant vacuity, which is regarded with astonishment, for hills certainly were there, and a river below them. And there the river still glides, past the wall of the forest opposite, in long inclines of flawless crystal and breaks of foam, over its shelves of granite; though now it is soundless because all the world is murmuring. But where are the hills? Where they rose opposite, standing over the valley in abrupt and gigantic shapes, is only a glimmering pallor, the luminous depth of emptiness, which thins upward into the blue of the sky. While surprise still stares at the place from which the hills have vanished, a fragment of the distant forest appears in midair, a miraculous satellite of earth, its tiny trees distinct in the upper blue. That translated wood grows downward as the jungle mist clears, till a shoulder of a dissolved hill has reformed.
Ryan cried breakfast, and by the time the pipes were lit all the hills had come back and the ecstatic dog was strangling a snake under the hut. Then we began to load a canoe—we waded in, guided it down clear canals between the rocks, brought it in to a steeply shelving beach, and packed it with pots and pans, a bag of mangosteens, and the provender for a long journey; enough to sink it to about an inch of freeboard when we had embarked, with two Malays, and Ryan’s Chinaman to cook for us.