Don’t fancy for a moment that the cry of the Indian lizard is the gentle murmur of the cricket or the tree-toad. It sounds more like the squawking of an ungreased bullock-cart:
She-kak! she-kak! she-kak!
To try to drive them off was worse than useless. The walls and ceiling, being made of grasses and reeds, offered more hiding-places for creeping things than a hay-stack. When I fired a shoe at the nearest, a shower of branches and rubbish rattled to the floor; and, after a moment of silence, the song was resumed, louder than before. Either the creatures were clever dodgers or they could not be wounded; and there was always the danger that anything thrown swiftly might bring down half the roof on our heads.
She-kak! she-kak! she-kak!
Wherever there are dwellings in British India, there are croaking lizards. I have listened to their shriek from Colombo to Delhi; I have seen them darting across the carpeted floor in the bungalows of commissioners; I have awakened many a time to find one dragging its clammy way across my face. But nowhere are they in greater numbers or more loud-voiced than in the jungle of the Malay Peninsula. There came a day when we were glad they had not been driven out—but I will tell of that later.
Early the next morning we came to a broad pathway that led us every half hour through a grinning village, between which were many lonely huts. We stopped at all of them for water. The natives showed us marked kindness, often waiting for us with a chettie of water in hand, or running out into the road at our shout of “Yee sheedela?”
This Burmese word for water (yee) gave James a great deal of amusement. Ever and again he would pause before a hut, to call out in the voice of a court crier: “Hear ye! hear ye! hear ye! We’re thirsty as Hottentots!” Householders young and old understood. At least, they fetched us water in abundance.
The fourth day afoot brought us two misfortunes. The rainy season burst upon us in fury not an hour after we had spent our last copper for breakfast. Where dinner would come from we had not the least idea; but we did not waste our strength in worry.
The first shower came suddenly. One sullen roar of thunder, the heavens opened, and the water poured. After that they came often. At times we found shelter under some long-legged hovel. Even when we scrambled up the bamboo ladders into the huts, the squatting family showed no anger. Often they gave us fruit; once they forced upon us two native cigars. It was these that made James forever after a firm friend of the Burmese.
Frequently we plodded on in a blinding down-pour that, in the twinkling of an eye, drenched us to the skin. The storm lasted only about five minutes. With the last dull growl of thunder the sun burst out, hotter than before, sopping up the pools in the highway as if with a giant’s sponge, and drying our dripping garments before we had time to grumble at the wetting. The gorgeous beauties of the surroundings gave us so much to look at that the ducking we had received was quickly forgotten, and the next down-pour took us as completely by surprise as if it were the first of the season.