Tide marks

by H. M. Tomlinson

The river seemed much swifter now we were committed to it, and it poured just under my elbow. The forest, too, mounted over us to an astonishing height. We were in a narrow chasm. The upper Kelantan is often in anger among so many thwarting hills. The hills crowded in round us and sometimes gave the river the semblance of a narrow lake. Precipices of trees prevented a landing, our way ahead was closed by one bold mountain, and other heights stood over our retreat. Yet somehow our Malays always got us out of it. They stood up, one at the stem, one aft, each with a bamboo, and just when we were charging into the trees they shouted and poled us round a surprising corner. Or the canoe grounded in some snarling rapids—tilted and began to fill—and we all climbed out to persuade her upward against the stream; the stream lay in ambush behind rocks, sprang at us as we approached, and tried to wrench the long narrow craft out of our hands. It was while doing this against one barricade of granite hummocks that some monkeys hooted at us, and the Malays jovially answered them, sharply clapping their hands. The panic-stricken monkeys fled, plunged desperately from tree to tree, became frantic and crashed the boughs when we increased our yells.

More than water flowed through that chasm. The sun filled it with a sluggish tide of burning air. When the stream narrowed and we moved under the foliage it was like going into the shadow and coolness of a cave. Fruits, legumes like scimitars, pale green globes, and clusters of yellow balls hung in the shade, and were often seen with only just time to duck the head. There were lenticular banks of bleached sand in midstream, for this was the dry season, and stranded on them the bare skeletons of trees, like the towering bones of dinosaurs. On the damp margins of those sandbanks clusters of butterflies quivered their petals like beds of stalkless flowers strangely agitated; when we splashed near they planed over the mirror, with an image below each, or shot up the green wall of the forest. Sometimes we passed a rakit going downstream, a raft of bamboos, with its man and wife and family as still as images. Once another canoe passed us going up, with several gaudy Malay youths showing off as noisy paddlers. They smiled at us and had a comparison to make between our load and theirs; their load might have been Cleopatra, a dark little lady in orange and emerald silk, gold ornaments in her black hair, and haughtily unconscious, even in that place, that we were present. Myriads of dragonflies and nymphs interlaced the sunlight just over the stream, as though the crystal air were being flawed by the heat. They settled on the edges of the canoe, transitory decorations, with wings like flinders of quartz and hard bodies enameled in ruby and turquoise.

From behind one mountain, late in the day, a vivid cloud appeared, and the tops of the trees showed a strange uneasiness. A flock of hornbills, which had been quiet and unseen on the high roof where a tree was in fruit—except for chance obliquities you might suppose the forest was untenanted—suddenly mounted in an uproar, as though exploded from their tree, soared so swiftly and disorderly that they might have been in the power of a mad spiral of wind, and were gone.

Ryan began to show activity. He consulted his chart. He energized the Malays. He ordered us to leap out and help over the bad places. He looked at the sky. But there was no need to look at it. Its shadow rested on us. The trees suddenly shouted and turned white, and then vanished in falling water. It was then that the canoe jammed in some rocks; which made no difference to us, though we stood up to our middles when clearing her. In any case the river was warmer than the rain and did not smite so hard.

We landed at a beach and a hut at last, the place for which Ryan had been making to escape the downpour, but only when the worst of the storm was over. It was near a strange natural tower of white marble, which must have risen five hundred feet sheer from a little plain. There was a forest on its flat summit, and aprons of foliage hung wherever it had a narrow shelf. As we worked round it and looked up, its mass seemed to be hollowed with caverns. When a stone was flung at a dark window in a lower story a cloud of bats unsettled, like thick black dust.

There we left the river and camped; and in three more marches got to a hut of Ryan’s in the heart of the hills, near a corner where Siam, Kelantan, and Perak were immediate on the map, but I could see no difference in the jungle. That land was a congestion of steep hills, with torrents circling their bases. Here and there in it a clearing let in the direct sunlight to mortals, who else moved in a lower confused murk lost to the sight of Heaven. On the way to the hut, Smith, whose indifference to all but his own suffering occasionally led him into more trouble, ignored the presence of some inquisitive wasps, which hovered about his head in the woods while he was reducing his misery with a long drink. He flapped a hand insultingly at one of them, though they looked as big as one-pounder shells, and made the same sort of noise in flight. In that instant I saw we stood close to their fort, from which the first wave of the attack, having got the signal, was coming over the top. I fled. Ryan had already gone. But Smith did not seem to know that we yelled to him because time was short. It was the wasps who really impressed that on him, and then he came faster than I should have thought he could, and brought them with him. The enemy had made up their minds, however, that only Smith had insulted them. They ignored Ryan and myself, though we used violence to keep them off our friend. For barely ten seconds, with those heroic insects coming at us like projectiles to repair their honor, the affair was grave, for we could retreat no more with the thorny rattans about us, and the only obvious track led back past the nest. But the attack was called off, in the moment of victory for the wasps, just as I struck another off Smith’s neck. They could have killed us, but they let us off, with the exception of the bayonets remaining in various parts of Smith’s body and even in his scalp. There was no doubt about the venom of those stings; Smith was really a casualty.

The day was almost done when we reached the hut, and at the moment of arrival it looked to me the flimsiest vantage that man had ever built amid the powers of darkness. It had no walls. It was only a thatch raised on poles, with a floor of rough boughs about a yard above the earth. It was open to the jungle, which pressed round it and stood over it, so that, at such an hour, it seemed lost at a fathomless crepuscular depth, where the light and sounds of a world of men could never reach. A noble fire of aromatic timber burned at one end of it; Ryan said the smell of it helped to keep the beasts away. The Chinaman who had been left to watch the place smiled at this. He shook his head. Last night, he explained, an elephant, he come. He come there. The Chinaman pointed to the margin of a stream beside the hut, where certainly something large had rioted among the shrubs. He come, he stop. No good. He make noise. The Chinaman curled an arm above his head in the semblance of a trunk, and imitated a cornet. I go. The man pointed to the thatch. Yet the elephant, it seems, though he argued loudly about it all night, could not make up his mind to cast the sticks and grass of which the hut was made back into the forest; and at daybreak the Chinaman thought of some festal crackers he had secreted in a box, got down bravely, lit one, and threw the serpentining firework at the elephant, which fled.

As the man finished his tale the cicadas began theirs. They did that every evening. When from our place by the stream we could see the declining sun glance for the last time on the top story of the forest, where there was a break in the tangle, it was as though his straight beam, like a plectrum, struck the silent life of the place into an immediate chorus. The solitude woke. The cicadas and crickets shrilled, whirred, made the sound of a wind through wires, the sound of cutlery being ground, of circular saws singing through logs, the humming of dynamos. It all came suddenly, and I thought I could hear at last the very note of the high tension of life there. Yet it put me apart. I heard, but the triumphant chorus was not for me. My own life was not at that terrific pitch and confidence. That sound antedated the chant of the priests before the Ark, the Eroica Symphony, and the National Anthem. It may even be heard, some day, by some survivors of humanity, as their Last Post.