Indeed, he reflected, his kismet looked upon him with favor.
CHAPTER IX
FEVER
Like a black wedge driven from Hkamti Long into Upper Burma, its point touching the confluence of the Irrawaddi, lies a strip of territory that on British maps is marked "unadministered." Outposts have been established on either side, from Fort Hertz down to Myitkyina, paltry stations where, in many instances, one white man and less than a company of Gurkhas impose law upon primitive tribes. Thus, walled by civilization yet untouched by it, the people of this black wedge live. A peaceful lot now, this remnant of the once great Tai race. Copper-skinned men hunt through its cathedral forests with dah and crossbow. Baboons, buffalo and musk deer roam over its hills. Reptiles haunt the green mucous of miasmatic valleys. Fever and pestilence lurk in the purple fungi spawned by dark jungles, in bogs and in swamps where the stench of rotten orchids hangs like a poison-vapor.
Into this black wedge Trent traveled. Late afternoon of the ninth day found his caravan encamped on a spit of sand reaching out into a river, a stream that moved languorously between high canebrake. The man who sat on a collapsible campstool before his tent, smoking, was as little like the Englishman who got off the train at Myitkyina ten days before as possible. His khaki breeches and flannel shirt were streaked with dust; mud was caked upon his boots. The sun had burned him a deeper bronze, and every variety of insect, from sandfly to blood-sucker, had left marks upon him. A nine-days' growth of beard helped to cover tawny fever-stains, but blotches showed on his neck and hands.... The jungle had shown him how she initiates her neophytes.
As he sat there staring at the jade-green river, he went back, in retrospection, over the journey—not that he derived any pleasure from the recollections, but because his brain seemed inclined to reach behind and he was too mentally weary to make any effort to prevent it. To him, now, those nine days were a confused sequence. For many miles beyond the 'Nmai-hka travel was not difficult, along bridle-paths and past villages where Kachin and Maru women, flat-featured, ugly creatures, planted their taungya, and men sat outside fiber huts and chewed betel leaves; rugged, undulating country; rivers that flung their torrents over shallow beds and were spanned by rattan bridges, the latter impossible for the mules. Twice, where the water was too deep, Trent had the muleteers construct crude rafts and pole the pack-animals across. The first time they attempted this they lost a mule. Trent would always remember that scene: the shrieking porters on the raft, the look of the beast as the stream wrapped foaming arms about it and dragged it down among sharp-fanged rocks.
That night he had had his first attack of fever. For several hours he lay on his camp-bed, harassed by ticks and bloodflies, shivering and vomiting at intervals. Then he fell asleep, and when he awakened in the morning, with rain drip-dripping monotonously upon tapering fronds, his back ached and he was a furnace. All day it rained and all day Masein, the Lisu guide, attended him. The following morning he had only a slight temperature—a chronic touch of fever that remained for several days—and he pressed on.
Hourly the country grew wilder. They passed through thickets and underbrush as tall as a man. Wild pigs scurried away in the bracken, and jungle fowl preened their wings in the shadow of groping plants, taking flight at the appearance of human beings. The fourth night they were close to a stretch of burning bamboo—one of those sourceless fires that spring up and sweep over miles. It was an awesome sight, the flames flaring crimson against the sky, like the angry vomit of a crater, the bamboo stalks popping and crackling as loud as the rattle of machine-guns.
Soon their trail led into great, dim forests. There the sunlight, robbed of its pitiless blaze, sifted through interlaced branches and sucked up moisture from the ground, creating a weird green haze. The air was malarial, the ground ever soggy and in places treacherous. More than once the mules sank to their bellies in bogs and fens. The miasmas crawled with stealthy life—snakes and horrid land-crabs. Leeches bred by the millions, and the oozy corruption exuded a thin, luminous vapor that was warm and clammy and reeked of decayed matter. This noxious swamp-effluvia seemed to penetrate to every crevice of Trent's being; it saturated his brain; it tainted his thoughts. He ceased to marvel at the wilderness of plumed flowers, of dank jungle caverns where sunlight pulsed through the lacework of leaves in needles of white flame—stretches where convolvulus fought for possession of every limb and trunk, and insects rattled above stagnant pools of Death.... There were times when a fever-film separated him from the world about him and deprived objects of their individuality.