Tide marks

by H. M. Tomlinson

While we ate them Ryan noticed a near tree, which the Sakai had scored to get poison for their darts. An ashy gum had exuded and hardened at each scar on the rough and grayish bark, but it was impossible to see the leaves of the tree, which were far out of sight. My companion had met these people, who are simple and harmless folk, elusive nomads who never leave the forest, and are very rarely seen even by those Malays whose clearings are on river banks within the forest. It was almost as unlikely that we should see them there, though they might have been watching us at that moment, as in Kota Bharu. Even the greater creatures of the woods move noiselessly, are never more than shadows, something briefly suspected without apparent reason, unless they choose otherwise. But for the insects, and an occasional bird, that nocturnal stillness might be thought untenanted. The leopard here is usually black, and in such a place he need not be even an apparition. If you look at a section of the tangle on which some light is falling there is such a confusion of shapes, all imperfect and unrelated, and so great a contrast between surfaces brilliantly reflecting the sun and hollows from which night never goes, that the eye grows weary with the problem, and refuses to see anything but an insoluble riddle. An elephant might be standing there and you would not know it.

And the heat itself of noon will dull curiosity in anything that is not near and clearly visible. You are content with the accidents of the moment, as when a large dipterous fly, as I thought it, of a bright metallic green, kept returning to the sweetish pip of a mangosteen at my feet. I caught it, and discovered with a pain that it was a bee. But who would have thought a fly of that age was a bee? Large predatory flies were hawking about, and did not invite handling. There were infrequent butterflies. Yet the expectation, natural enough after those ridiculous tours of museums, and the gorgeously colored plates of life’s variety in the tropics, that you will be even more gratified than by a perambulation of a zoölogical gardens, will be gravely disappointed in the equatorial forest itself. There the creatures watch you, but they are unseen. The occasions when you see them are momentous. Ryan told me that in his hut one evening, just as he was beginning to eat, he heard a pig munching nuts some distance across the stream, and went over. A big boar was making so eager an uproar at his feast that Ryan had no trouble in shooting him for the dogs, and left the carcass to be cut up in the morning. In the morning it had almost gone. Ryan was annoyed with the tiger, and decided to punish him the next evening.

“You know,” said Ryan, “I was a sniper in France, so I’ve had all the big-game hunting I want. If the tigers will leave me alone and not steal my dogs’ meat, fine. There’s room here for all of us. But they must kill their own pigs. That’s fair, ain’t it? Why, he’d only left enough to disappoint my dogs. Well, I couldn’t find that tiger that evening. Somehow, though, I knew he was about. The place smelled like it. I thought, well, he’s behind that bush and if he goes that way I’ve got him, and if he goes that way I’ve got him, and I waited. Nothing doing. Then I had a funny feeling run up my neck, and I gave a peep over my shoulder. There he was, sitting looking at me, ten feet away—I measured it afterward. Squatting and looking at me. Wondering what in hell I was doing, I suppose. Well ... I felt bitched. Don’t shoot, camarade. The best thing, I thought, is to slew round the gun slow, so I began. Like this. No quicker. That was when he went. He just went, sir. They can move.” Ryan smiled reminiscently. Somewhere in the forest a bird continued his song in three notes, as though an idle urchin were learning to whistle and could not get it right, but was persevering. “One thing,” continued Ryan, as he rose and began to gather his kit, “you can always see a tiger here if you want to. Keep quiet for a long time, and then begin to tap a tree. He strolls up. I don’t know why, but perhaps he wants to know who the devil has got the nerve.”

We began a long and breathless ascent, at first through a tiresome undergrowth, then through more open timber, and presently came to an opening in the foliage on the brow of a hill, like a high window of the woods. We stood, and neither of us spoke for a long time. Malaya was below us in the afternoon light, an ocean of looming forest, its billows arrested, mute, and held as though by a secret conjuration the instant we appeared. “You and I,” said Ryan at last, “are the first white men to see that.”

CHAPTER XXXVIII

It was time to leave Ryan, and make across country to the Golok. The men had made fast the loads. All was ready. I looked round that narrow well in the trees, into which the sun had just poured the morning, and wondered why I was going. What was there for me at Charing Cross? Ryan made no comment when we left him, except to express urgently a desire that I would secure for him, as soon as I got to London, Bottomley’s silk hat. “If it’s gone,” he said, “Lloyd George’s hymn-book will do.”

I will confess that when near sunset, a few days later, we came out by the Golok the sight of that river was beneficial. The day had been tiring. We were not far from Nipong, where we had stayed on our first night up country. Yet I had often felt during the journey that we were getting on too fast, especially when we were in the neighborhood of the campongs, the little communities of Malays. Sometimes we saw a new homestead, and a patch where the jungle had been only recently cleared. The burnt stumps of the smaller trees studded the earth, and the greater beams were still as they fell, too big to be moved, and amid all that wreckage a Malay pioneer had planted his first crop of dry rice; the slender blades of young rice were curiously emerald in what otherwise was a reminder of a sultry wood near Ypres. There would be a heavy barricade round it to keep out the beasts; yet it was usual, when walking through it, to see the tracks of the smaller creatures of the forest—for they were very noticeable in the new soft earth—especially the lace-like design made by the tiny hoofs of pelandok, the diminutive mouse-deer. And how friendly to us those husbandmen always were! They did what they could to make our pause longer and to keep the gossip alive. They sent their monkeys up palms to fetch green cocoanuts for drink, and brought baskets of mangosteens, lansats, and rambutans. It was our folly to hurry away from such people, from such peace in life, from such good manners.

If the place which gave us shelter that night by the Golok had a real name I do not know it, but I could easily adjust a new one to it. Smith had cheered me with words of what he called a forest checking station, an establishment of the Sultan’s foresters. We found it in open ground above the Golok; and there the local headman visited us, and promised Smith a prahu for the morning to take us downstream to Rantau Panjang, and boatmen, too, if they could be got. In the meantime, though its outward prospect was worth some days of heat and fatigue, yet the hut inside did not suggest that we should have new bodies by the morning. Bats had chosen one corner, and of course the best corner, for their droppings. The rest of the poles which made the floor were young and old, new and rotten, large and small, and some were raised and some depressed. Some were firm when they took our weight, and others groaned and sank. The earth was ten feet below, and there many frogs were honking and krexing differing tunes and with varied pitch. That meant swamp, and in fact the place looked too much like mosquitoes. I thought we had better build a fire under it, and smoke it out, and was cherishing an awkward armful of cocoanut shards and sticks when the first buffalo bull appeared. My sticks suddenly lost their value. This buffalo was not the usual inert bulk of black rubber. He moved under the stress of excitement. His eyes had an alert and inquiring glance, and his horns were yard-arms. I thought I had better get up the ladder. When on the middle rung another buffalo bull appeared on the other side of the house, and as the two met rather instantly at the foot of the ladder I finished the rest of the rungs in a stride. It was easy at the time. Then Smith and I had a good view of it, spoiled by an alarming doubt that if the two explosive tons below us touched our props then our shelter was done for. It astonished me that pensive buffaloes could show such passionate energy, and the shocks of the charges were chilling with clash and dull drumming. Which would die first? Then a child appeared, a morsel of brown innocence without even a clout of self-consciousness. He approached the battleground and severely reprimanded the bulls. They stopped, and were obviously embarrassed, with their lowered heads caught in the very act of misdemeanor. They could not deny they had been fighting. The child struck the flank of the first buffalo with a light wand and told him what he was. The bull turned and shambled off meekly.

This episode took us well toward the dark. I got down to the floor, and on my back prepared to wait for morning. I began by counting the hours—there were exactly eleven hours to 6 A.M., or half a day less one hour. To make sure that this was so I counted again, but found, unluckily, the same number, less the seconds which the calculation required to work out. The chorus of frogs now was like an iron-foundry; then it fell to one blacksmith shaping one horseshoe. The shoe got finished, and then the shipwrights began to rivet another plate to a ship. With the electric torch I found that twenty minutes had gone, and tried lying on the right side. This movement showed me that the door had swung open and that my head would be the first thing a buffalo would tread upon when entering the hut after climbing our ladder. The darkness outside, somehow, seemed very queer. That door was shut, so far as it could be lifted bodily to fit the opening. The wait for daylight was resumed. Smith, somewhere else on the floor, groaned unseen, and the boughs heaved as he changed his position. I wished I had made that fire underneath, because light wings were now brushing my face, and the mosquito who sang at one ear was as instantaneous as Gabriel’s awakening clarion. There must have been clouds of them. I experimented with my head under the cover, yet that, after ten minutes—ten more minutes gone—nearly suffocated me. Besides, it left my feet exposed, and the light wings were brushing them.