Part 7

What he was pointing to was certainly unusual. It is not right, or at least it is most irregular, for forest rubbish to gather in such a mass against a ship’s cables that the danger of something coming adrift is evident. “Ever see anything like it? Eh? I bet you haven’t, mister. It isn’t right. Trees and bamboos and meadows--a whole raft of it, like a day in the country. All it wants is a few cows. And what’s going to happen if she drags, in this place? No steam and the damned jungle under our counter. We should have to rot here, mister, for we’d never get her off. We’re out of touch of everything civilised.”

So it seemed. Not only were great trees caught against the cables, but the trees were in green leaf. They were clouds of leaves, and perhaps birds were still perched in them. A few acres of top-heavy forest had collapsed into the river the night before, and there it was, or what was left of it, verdant and dense. No doubt more of it was to come.

“That’s a new job for a sailor,” commented Mr. Bullock. “Clearing away a copse from a ship’s bows. I shall have to get a boat away to see to that.”

An area of the tangle, a stretch of meadow and a height of foliage, became agitated, and detached itself in the pull of the stream as we watched. It foundered a little, uplifted again, pivoted in a half-circle, came free, and went swiftly by the length of the ship, a travelling island. Behind it swam a peccary.

“There you are,” exclaimed the excited mate. “What did I tell you? Pigs, mister. We’ll get the whole farmyard in a minute.”

Next morning the surrounding forest seemed to have gone. We had nothing but an opaque silence about us. The vapours of the miasmic solitude shrouded the high palisades of trees and leaves. Somewhere the sun had just risen, and the mist was luminous. Imperceptibly the white steam rose, till the bottom of the forest across the water was plain. The jungle looked as though it were sheered off a few feet above the bank in a straight line. But the curtain rose quickly as I watched. To starboard again was the towering and ominous barrier of still leaves and fronds, the place where no man had ever landed. The sun looked at us. Languor fell over the ship. The parrots and the monkeys cried aloud for a minute or two, and then the day became silent. It was no place for a ship. That was an unpleasant word of the mate’s, that we should rot. The sensation in that heated stillness, where there was nothing for us to do but to wait, was certainly of ferment and stagnation. The ironwork of the steamer felt like the plates of an oven.

On the poop, under an awning, the steward was spreading our breakfast. The captain appeared, a slim and stooping figure in white linen and a Panama hat, and walked towards me, fingering his grey beard as he eyed things about him. He did not wear the expression of a man who would respond to a hearty “good-morning.” He rested his hands on the bulwark, and looked overside, contemplating the stream. He stopped by the open door of the chief’s cabin, and wondered to the engineer whether it might not be wise to rig a dam round the rudder, so that wreckage might not get entangled with the propeller. It was at that moment that pandemonium broke out in the bunkers. The noise rose through a bunker hatch, which was open for ventilation; yells, clanging of shovels, crow-bars ringing on bulkheads, shouts, and hysterical laughter. The chief came out in his pyjamas, and the three of us peered down into the twilight below.

The chief bawled commands to his men. There was no answer. The infernal scuffling and clanging below went on. Then as suddenly it stopped. The chief cried down peremptorily, and the stokers heard him. One of them appeared below us, a blackened gnome, his dirty mask veined with pink where the sweat ran. He was panting. When he saw the stern faces above him he showed a broad white smile.

“All right, sir, we’ve done him in. Took some doin’, though.”

“What the hell do you mean? What’s this row about?”

The man vanished. Some whispering went on under the deck. Then several stokers appeared, hauling on a rope. It had a great snake at the end of it, its head limp, its body gashed. The hilarious stokers kicked and shoved the dead twelve feet of it into coils which we could inspect from above.

“There you are, sir,” said one of the showmen. “That’s it. All right to find that in the coal, ain’t it? You ought to have seen the way he scrapped.... And don’t forget we didn’t sign on to kill boa-constrictors, sir,” added a quiet voice, from the dark.

“I don’t wonder at it,” said the mate at breakfast. “Crawled in by a hawse pipe, of course. The ship will get full of ’em, with that green stuff about the cables.”

“Glad to hear it. That will give us some occupation, captain,” our surgeon commented. “Otherwise, we should be dull here.” The surgeon’s mind was inclined to curiosity in wayward things, and he always kept a butterfly-net handy. “One of the men this morning showed me a wound on his elbow. It was hard to stop the bleeding. He didn’t know how he got it, and I didn’t tell him. But there are vampire bats in the fo’cas’le.”

The captain gave an impatient exclamation, and blamed the surgeon for frivolity. “Bats! Vampire bats! You talk like a novelist, doctor. Never heard of bats in a fo’cas’le. You’re thinking of belfries.”

The surgeon chuckled. “You’ll hear all right, captain, when the men find out.”

The captain grumbled through all the meal. Place didn’t smell like a ship, smelt like a hothouse. Nice place to be in. In all his years at sea, nothing like it. Another charter like this, and the owner could look after his boa-constrictors himself. “Mr. Mate, just keep the men from thinking too much about it. A good time now to get some of that work done.”

For me after breakfast, with the decorative office of supercargo, there was no work. There was only the forest to look at, the yellow flood with its flotsam, and the river ahead tumultuous and gleaming in the rapids. The heat increased. The silence was a heavy weight. One felt a little fearful because so much forest made no sound whatever, no more sound than if it had been a dream, not a murmur nor the rustle of a leaf. It was quite still, like an illusion of trees. We might have made a ridiculous escape to the world’s end, and now were a little scared, not knowing what to make of it.

The only movement was the tumult of the cataracts, a glittering and flashing about a mass of black rocks. But that gave no sense that water was falling, but only that it was inclined, for its pour never ended. Beyond those rapids there was nothing; only trees and the sun. Nobody had ever been there. There was no reason why a man should go. The parapet of the cataracts, where black triangles of waves above our heads continually leaped but never seemed to descend, was the edge of the world. While I was gazing at that line of leaping waves, which stretched between the high barriers of the forest, the figure of a man appeared there. He poised for an instant on the verge, in the centre of the line, against the sky, arms stretched out as if in appeal, and then vanished in the spray below.

“See that?” exclaimed the chief. He hurried along to me. “See him? That must have been an Indian. Couldn’t stop himself, there. Can you see him now?”

We could not. We could see only the incline of heaving water. We must have been mistaken, and were beginning to argue about it when an object came slowly away from the foot of the falls. It was an overturned canoe. A swimmer righted it, got in, and began to paddle towards us.

The man came alongside, standing up in his scallop, stark naked, a paddle in his hand, grinning. I thought he must be of some unnamed tribe. He was a little lighter in colour than an Indian, but his curly black hair and beard made him remarkably different. The natives never have beards, though that difference was not so astonishing as his light-hearted grin, which was absurdly familiar in that laughless and inhuman wild. He did not speak, but airily waved his hand as he came alongside, and grabbed our Jacob’s ladder. Up he came, in leisured nonchalance.

“Pardon me,” he said, as he stood up before our gaping company of seamen still smiling, and his fine body glistening. “Anybody lend me a pair of pants?”

Our captain was frowning at him in wonder, but at that he grimaced. “Come aft,” he said. The brown figure nodded to us in good humour, and followed the captain, stepping like a god. He turned, as he was about to descend the companion, and gazed at our house-flag. You may see profiles like his in any collection of Greek antiquities. When he had gone we leaned overside to stare at his dug-out canoe, hitched to our ladder. There was nothing in it but some arrows and a bow, and a machete, all lashed to a peg.

The stranger, that night, came with the chief to my cabin. He inspected our books with evident enjoyment. “Books!” he said. “Books, eh!”

“You know,” he continued looking round at us, “I thought I’d gone light-headed when I saw your ship below the falls. I was so surprised that a jerk sent me over side, and I came down the rapids with an arm over the canoe. I was sure I was going to miss meeting you after all. Too bad!”

He gave us his name. It was that of a learned English judge. I reminded him of that. “Oh, yes. My father. He’d have been amused if he’d seen me this morning. Is he all right?”

He was quite cool about it. This sort of thing, I gathered from his manner, might happen to anybody. “Never expected to meet Christians at a place like this.”

Where had he come from? “Mollendo,” he replied, rolling a cigarette.

Was the man a liar? Mollendo was a thousand miles away on the Pacific side. The Andes were between us. The youngster saw our doubt, and smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Mollendo. And I crossed the Andes, though don’t you do it unless you want to. This side of them I lost my gun. Lost everything. Got a canoe and some arrows and a bow, and here I am. You know,” he went on, “you can shoot fish with an arrow. I’ll show you in the morning. That’s how I lived, when I wasn’t with the natives.”

“Is that all?” I asked. I thought of the rumours of cannibals and head-hunters, and the stories of what was in store for those who ventured alone into the region beyond us.

“Well,” he said, taking down a book to see what it was, “well ... it took some months. It’s a bad country. But I say! Fancy your knowing my dad. I thought I was quite out of touch here.”

III. ELYSIUM

That garden, which sloped seaward to three areca palms, was a place which I felt might vanish, if I moved, or changed my thoughts. The daylight was the private illumination of an imagined land, and the strange fronds were a capricious revolt from the conventions of avenues and parks. Then a butterfly, immense in green and black, broke into the picture from above, and fanned his colours slowly over a white trumpet that was upheld noiselessly by an unseen hand from a shrub. He touched it, and the trumpet swayed. The picture was solid.

A tall, stiff figure came out of the rest-house and sat with me on the verandah. That elderly missionary’s white linen suit, neatly creased, and his collar and black bow, which would have been unremarked in Oxford Street, made me conscious of my own careless and limp attire. I always felt that that man might, as a reasonable and friendly neighbour--for we had the rest-house to ourselves--concede something in his dress. But he never relented. The Malay servants could be in no doubt as to which of us was the important Tuan. One of those silent familiars now shaped near us. He brought tea and two queer little cakes. I liked the look of those cakes, but the missionary whistled for the dog, and gave away the cakes perfunctorily. He rubbed his fingers with a handkerchief, and then turned his signet-ring into its right position. He inclined his head kindly to me in a little cross-examination. What had I seen to-day?

He stirred his tea, and shook his head in depreciation over some native wares I had bought. Poor stuff, he said. No good. Better bring it to him in future, before buying it. But it was very hard now to get the genuine old material. He had been collecting it all over the islands for years. He enumerated what rare treasure he had been able to acquire from time to time. The European collectors were willing to pay highly for it. But it was getting very scarce.

He carefully crossed his legs, for to keep neat an ironed linen suit for an hour or two in a moist heat demands the unremitting attention of a man whose self-control is automatic. Why, in the past, he continued, when he visited one of the islands of an isolated group, with some tact and wholesale baptism he could persuade a village to surrender all its totems, idols, carvings and copper drums. Not to-day, though. The whole region has been swept clean. Everybody is converted, or has no God, or is a Mohammedan. But you could buy plenty of English and American stuff. After a pause, which was like an interval for silent regret over good things lost in the past, he spoke, dispassionately, and with the forgiving voice of an ethnologist, who understood the deep springs of astonishing human conduct, of the immoralities of the islanders. He was no bigot. He did not tell me that, but I was sure he forgave irregularities in all but Europeans, and he understood even those.

He had spent fifteen years among the islands. The natives had the minds of children. I learned from him how they should be treated by any benefactor. I was looking at his moustache, for it was interesting to see how little his lips moved as he spoke. There was firmness even in those short iron-grey bristles. His eyes, under those shaggy brows, looked on me from a rectitude which now he could trust without bothering about it. The tropics had made no difference to him. His skin was fresh, and looked hard. He offered me one of his excellent Dutch cigars. He became grimly amused over the instructions left by a white trader for him to carry out. He had buried that man the week before last. That fellow had begged the missionary--because he knew his Malay mistress with her four half-caste children would be careless about it--to have erected a sort of shrine over his grave, with pictures from the Scriptures to hang in it, and this text in a principal place: “I am the resurrection and the life.”

A group of women, their bright gowns as noticeable in the quiet as a burst of gay music, idled slowly past the foot of the garden, and one of them turned her dark face shyly to look at the missionary, but very sternly he did not look at her. The tropics were outside his heart. He could not be invaded. His stiff figure could at any time assume its winter dress in Europe, and he could begin again as though sly but inviting glances across a tropical shrubbery, and sunny islands where life is different, were only like the phases of the moon, which may be observed, if the almanac is watched, and you are sufficiently interested.

The crowns of the areca palms changed, as the sun went down, into three high fountains of gold, which quickly sank into the shades. There were burning films of rose in the sky. Then their light, too, went out. A firefly began to glint in zigzags before the verandah, and a cricket shrilled. A servant brought a lamp. “These islanders come to my church, when I am here, or they go to the mosque,” said the missionary gravely, “but they are all pagans at heart. A man and woman will live together for years, and then come and be married for luck, and bring their children with them. They are baptised for luck. They try to be on the right side all round. I know them. I haven’t given them fifteen years of my life for nothing.”

“But you suggest that you have when you tell me they are still pagans.”

The missionary did not answer. He recrossed his legs carefully. “I like them,” he said simply. “They are good-hearted.”

“If ever you are on the main island come and see me,” he said late that night. “My home is there. You may like to look at my collection.”

The next day he had gone to another congregation across the water. When presently a ship came for me, and I left that beach, she touched on her way home at the village the missionary had named, and there was time to visit his home. The afternoon was almost done. The sun was setting over Borneo, across the water, in a clear saffron sky. I waited for the evangelist on his verandah, and could see through his dwelling of timber to the bright light in the west. The interior of the house was in darkness, but that further doorway was a shape of gold, in which distant coconut palms formed a design in black. I felt I had discovered in that home its resident and privy dream. I spoke of this to the missionary. He did not look at it. “It is very beautiful,” he said gravely.

He led me through that further door of gold to the garden that we might watch the sunset. “I have an arbour on the beach,” he said. A frail little woman was seated within that arbour. She wore an old-fashioned shape of crochet work on her grey hair. She smiled at me but did not speak. “My wife,” the missionary explained. I thanked her for lending me so beautiful an outlook on the world. There could be no nobler place anywhere from which to see the sun go down. She nodded, and smiled sadly, and said “Yes, isn’t it?”

The missionary interrupted my attempt to come to an understanding with my hostess. He had a request that I should take his mail with me. “You can take the letters with you when you board your ship to-night.” We both walked back to the house, leaving his wife in the arbour. She was still looking over the sea to the western light.

He turned to me and shook his head. He touched his forehead significantly.

“She sits there all day,” he said. “She sits there, and when she sees a ship going home, she weeps.”

IV. THE RAJAH

We were told that if we followed the track through the forest for three more days we should reach the River Golok, by Nipong. Then, supposing we could find a prahu and men, another day’s journey would bring us down stream to Rantau Panjang. There we should see so unlikely an object as a railway station, on a branch of the Malay States Railways. With further luck we should catch one of the rare trains, and so reach Tumpat at our ease.

There was no hurry. I did not wish to catch a train again before I was compelled. Just then there were no days of the week. We had morning and night, and sun or rain. At night, the rain drumming on the leaves was always on the same leaves, and it was the same rain. We were nowhere, and I suspected that the real calendar might dispute with my diary over three missing days. What had we done with them? But three days mislaid in that forest might look like three dead leaves. Wherever we camped the place looked like the spot where we halted the evening before. Nothing had changed. The cicadas struck up the same song at the moment when day became exalted, that moment before its light went out. Those still trees suggested our exemption from what concerned an outer world; we were held by the very spell which kept the jungle from progress.

But one afternoon our canoe shot out of the solitude. While watching glide past us what I thought was the same forest, I saw a woman on the bank glance up in surprise from her water-pot as our shadow went by her. A little later there was an incredible modern bridge of iron across the river ahead of us. It was as surprising as coconut palms would be at Charing Cross. We landed, and found bottled beer could be had by asking for it. To the Chinese shopkeeper those English labels were as familiar as his own symbols. I thought, for a moment, that a London excursionist could be at home in that remote Malay village in five minutes.