A storm began, though at a great distance, and something with large, leathery, winnowing pinions began flying in the hut; and therefore when a plank became alarmingly alive under me as Smith turned over again I sat up in desperation and struck at those silent but draughty pinions, though I hit nothing. It was time to try the other side. Midnight! We were getting on. Six hours to go. Possibly I slept, though creatures kept touching my face or crawling over my feet; but I was instantly awake when the hut filled with fire. The storm had come. The lightning, bursting a blue glare through the open timbers of the hut, made me think we were within the ribs of an immense skeleton.
The next day did come. I was there when it came, and in its light that hut appeared to be simple and ordinary. It was not bewitched, or else its unclean spirits went at cock-crow. Our packs were where we left them on the floor. Our tin mugs, standing yet on an old packing case, were ridiculously trite. This was mockery. The job of making a fire and some coffee was a matter for whistling. There was only coffee and hard biscuits, but I wish breakfast could be always like that. The Golok, however, had risen at least six feet in the night, and rafts of timber overturned in the storm were traveling fast on its yellow current. The sun was not yet above the hills, and so the woods were miraculously bright and revealed.
The prahu was a long and narrow dugout canoe, with a Malay at each end handling dexterously a long bamboo. They poled us into the stream, and the flood caught us and added us to the wreckage of the storm. We fled toward the sea. At least we had the assurance that we should encounter no rapids on the Golok. We merely rotated in eddies with the forest high on both banks, accompanied by floating trees whose submerged foliage was as dangerous as reefs. For the first half hour, therefore, my interest was fixed to the level of the Golok where the base of the forest was awash, so as to be sure that when the canoe at last turned over I should know of the nearest port. This, I soon saw, was an interest too concentrated for a day which was already hot, but was only beginning, for the Malays in charge of us were as apprehensive of signs and ripples and the topmost twigs which nodded on the water line above wholly foundered snags, as are spiritualists to messages from a hidden world. I relaxed. There was nothing to do but to wait for Rantau Panjang.
The jungle on one bank was in Siam, and on the other in Malaya. It had an aspect of grace. The green plumes of the climbing palms were fortuitous over the stream, and from the cornices of the woods lianas were knotted and often trailed in the water. There were, as usual, very few flowers to be seen, and a rare spray in blossom was notable. The Golok serpentined so flamboyantly that you could suppose the young sun was playing hide and seek behind the forest and was trying to surprise us from different regions of the sky. There were attractive white sandy beaches within bays of the timber, and long spits which projected into the stream like thresholds to the woods. The forest was opulent and elegant, and I remembered, in contrast, the savage majesty of some aspects of the forest of the Amazon. The Golok was a river beside which one could live, but one never felt that of the Rio Jaci Parana of the Brazils. It was not yet noon, but cramp and the heat drove us to estimate the distance we still had to go and the hours we must remain exposed to the sun on a mirror reflecting his dazzling light. He had been staring straight at us now for some time. There was no escape; a change from a thwart to the bottom of the canoe really took one no appreciable further distance from him. The weight of a tropical day is ponderable. It must be seriously upborne. The skin pricks wherever the sweat breaks at another pore, till all the pores are flowing conduits. One merely sinks the mind, and endures. We passed a beach to which a party of young Malays had made fast a rakit. They were squatting under the shadow of a shrub while a little fire burned beneath a cooking pot. An eddy caught us and whirled us away, and that picture of men in the woods, sudden and illusory, vanished.
The heat relented three hours after midday, but vast inky clouds began to tower. The evening storm was coming, and our nice calculations, based on time and the direction of the upper wind, as to whether or not we should arrive dry, gave us no comfort. In a malarial country rain may release the fever lurking in the blood. But we left the clouds behind us, with the sun behind the clouds. The upper rim of the mountain of threatening nimbus had a broad coast of opal, and this became shot with the colors of the rainbow, while presently, from the summit of the mass, a great fan of emerald light projected. A greenish tinge to a belt in a clear sky is not unusual, but vivid emerald was so strange a phenomenon that when Smith saw it he said he did not like it, as though it were evil.
The woods became interrupted with the cocoanut and betel palms of habitations, and women with water-pots stood in the evening light to watch us pass. Children waited on the banks while the buffaloes wallowed in the shallows. When the prahu touched at Rantau Panjang, and I stepped ashore and stretched, it was with the usual sense that I had earned this feeling of well-being. The evenings of Kelantan arouse no desire for the peace of the Better Land. This earth can be a good place.
CHAPTER XXXIX
We got out to the coast again at last, and so cheaply, too, for our foolish intrusion into the wild against which society protects us, that I had the feeling that we had either stolen about unobserved, or that the evil genius of the place had craftily slipped the punishment into our pocket, and that we might find it when we thought the episode was closed. When, some weeks before, I first saw Kota Bharu I had thought it a pleasingly barbarous place; but then, coming on it out of the wilderness, I saw that it was an outpost of London and Peking. Even the primitive altar in a field, which looked pagan enough when I noticed it on the outward journey, now seemed not so distantly related to St. Paul’s. We were all right again, with familiar things about us.
Next morning we boarded a little coasting steamer for Singapore. She was neat and bright, my cabin was hung with chintz having a pattern of rosebuds, and the saloon table was as well ordered as that of a good hotel. The captain, the kind man, listened to the tale of our fun up country, and then said: “You’d like some news from home. Here’s the papers by the last mail.” Most certainly, secure within chintz curtains again, and with poisoned feet already less inflamed, we wanted news of England. The smiling little sailor re-entered with a week’s bound numbers of the Daily Photograph. I opened the volume.