Gallions Reach (24 page)

The river was low, a shining network about reefs of smooth granite boulders. A beach of white sand under the sombre forest had the shape and pallor of a crescent moon. The water could be heard; it was just audible; but its voice was subdued and stealthy. And it was the only sound, except the occasional slashing of the parangs of the Malays, and that noise was as though the sanctity of an inviolable concealment were being riven. The slash of a heavy knife across that quiet was not quite right. The trees beyond the water, however, took no notice of it. Were they an illusion, or only
dumb with astonishment? The front of the jungle opposite ascended into high cupolas and pinnacles, and was draped from its cornice to its base with a dense mesh of vines, green curtains in voluminous folds which sheeted the heights. One palm leaned out from it, its head over the river, as in an attempt at escape, which was checked, from the silent confusion. The sheen of lightning wavering round the coasts of clouds that were the colour of calamity moved and changed the hues of the sunset. The old clearing in which they stood was heavy with the scent of flowers. Over the forest, beyond the corner round which the river came down to them, was the hull of a towering berg, its flat summit dark with trees, but its walls bare and gleaming, as though of white marble. The last of the sun fired the clouds; the isolated hill became a beacon; and at that signal the cicadas and the legion of hidden creatures broke out with their celebrant jubilation. Colet had to raise his voice a little when he spoke to his companion.

“There are others here beside ourselves. We are not the first.”

“So our men say,” mused Norrie. “They want to go back.”

“Anything wrong? They have seemed moody to-day.”

“Enough to make them. They tell me this land is full of hantus, things that ought not to be about; souls not stowed safely away in Gehenna.”

“It looks rather like it, now you've mentioned it. Shall I let off a few crackers, to keep them from crowding us?”

“No good. Something more elaborate than we could think of is wanted. The tobacco is in your pack. You notice how soon the fire is going?”

“They're not afraid of the people of the woods?”

“No people there. Not the right sort. Nobody lives here. But long ago a prosperous lot of Chinese miners had this clearing. They did rather well, too.”

“God rest their Chinese souls. They're not here now.”

“They are. Our Malays say they are. They did too well. The raja got to hear of it—something he could get for nothing, being a raja, so naturally he asked for it. The Chinamen forgot where they were, though. They told the raja to take a carrot. I think that was what it was. And anyhow, Malays don't regard the Chinese as men. Why should they? Chinamen have a different religion. So the Malays had nothing to argue about, except their honour. When a talk among themselves about honour had sufficiently excited them, they went on an enjoyable and successful outing, without warning, and the country has been like this ever since, except for the hantus. It does seem lonely, doesn't it? The Malays know those Chinamen are still hanging around, though a bit changed in nature; and if I told you all the story you wouldn't wonder at it. But the end of the yarn is better if heard in daylight.… Did you see that lump over there, that high rock with the trees on top? We'll have a look at that in the morning. If we have to be turned aside by spooks, we'll try to learn why they are so stuffy about it.”

The berg rose out of the level forest by the river, and to Colet it was anomalous. It was an isolated mass of white limestone, a lofty island in the ocean of jungle. Its pale cliffs fell sheer to the green billows. Its summit was flat, but was so near to the clouds that its trees were but a dark undulating strip. Its walls, when glimpsed from below through breaks in the roof of the forest, appeared to overhang, but there were scarves and girdles of green on their bare ribs. An eagle soaring athwart its loftier crags was a drifting mote. Stalactites were pendent before the black port-holes of caves in upper stories, like corbels over the outlooks of a castle of the sagas. If the number of those dark apertures meant anything, then the berg was hollow, was honeycombed with cavities. This enormity was not inviting, even in a morning light; not in such a land as that. The unexplored dungeons of such a castle might hide anything.

But Norrie judged it with a casual and professional eye. It was curious, but only geologically. He had seen such lumps before, of course. It was only what was left of an earlier skin of Malaya, a fragment of that country's prehistoric hide. Time and the weather had peeled off all the rest. Unnatural? Well, look at it; was it not there? So how could it be unnatural? What he wanted to do was to get at it.

That was not easy, near and great as it was. The climbing palms, the rotans, flourished about it. Their taloned cables were coiled over the low ground in barriers unfriendly to the haste and impatience of men. Colet, bleeding and perspiring, had forgotten the rock by the time they had reached it. A
little journey in that kind of undergrowth, crouching and crawling, while following the sound of a Malay's parang, leaves room in the mind for but one interest. He crawled into a little clear space beside Norrie and two of the men. The island stood over them. They were at the base of a wall, and almost under a high Gothic porch, the entrance to the retreat, by the look of it, of midnight. Norrie but briefly inspected this rude resemblance of architecture, and was as indifferent to the sinister suggestions of the interior. He was not now discussing the ways of humanity, and so he appeared very cheerful. He declared that he loved caves, and insides that were convoluted and obscure. He was preparing to go in; he was testing some electric torches with a brisk assiduity which had its back to the forbidding fantasies of geological structure. The Malays, so they said, preferred to wait without. Their interest was spent. They went down on their hams and began to roll cigarettes while watching the tuans preparing to disappear on a foolish quest.

The threshold of the cave was of dry sand strewn with fallen rock. The day, venturing within as far as it could, hinted at fretted columns and aisles receding till the last shapes became what Colet chose to see there. The berg was hollow. Its recesses were capricious, and the disturbance of a rock by the invaders awoke echoes in lofty transepts and high vaultings unseen. That sharp sound brought down the dark in flying atoms. Myriads of bats fell like night whirling in shreds. The gloom moved with a screaming rush. Norrie, though, went on as if unaware of it, except that he broke out against the smell of the little beasts. It certainly was lairish, that stench; not to be forgotten.

“Keep close,” said Norrie; “but if you lose me, keep still.”

It was not easy to keep close to such erratic activity in the dark. Norrie, intently inspecting the floor at times, developed an insatiable curiosity and energy. He said little. He kept
going. He might have forgotten that such a preferable enjoyment as daylight was now well behind them.

“Come here,” he said at last. He stood then, relaxed and indifferent, as though here they would turn back, and with his lamp illuminated black sand at his feet. He idly scraped the ground with his foot.

“Know what that is?”

“Sand.”

“Cassiterite.”

“What's that?”

“Haven't you brought that Highland fling with you? I'm showing you what we came for.”

“This stuff?”

“It's as ripe as a freehold in Piccadilly. The floor of this hill is tin. It only wants spades.”

Norrie stooped, and poked the grains about with his fingers.

It only wanted spades. Colet felt a little hungry. It was near midday. Besides, Norrie himself was just scooping the sand as if he were a child at the seaside. Norrie twisted round, and turned up his torch to Colet's face.

“I say, Colet, blast you, you haven't got the expression of a lucky man. But you might try to behave like one. Sing something agreeable.”

“Me? Hang it, you're not setting a lively example. I thought it was dirt.”

“So it is. So it is. There's acres of it. Well, we've found it. Let's go and get something to eat.”

Now they had found it, now they stood firmly upon the security which most men desire but usually fail to reach, their camp-fire, somehow, burned with less of its old companionable light. This was the end of the hunt. Norrie had explained, rather seriously, with hardly a lift of his usual buoyancy, what the law of averages, or something mathematical, had calculated against the chance of good luck coming to men on a rummage like theirs. This good luck, nevertheless, had coincided with their track in space; and to some extent, it appeared, that was not wholly because of blind chance; it had happened, too, because of a little artful designing by knowledge and intelligence. Norrie, with that, then looked round the camp, not perhaps as if his interest in life had gone, but as if that particular day and place had failed in savour for him.

“We shall get used to this scene, Colet. A sort of home.”

Colet followed his friend's glance. The immense front of the forest on the opposite bank was still majestic and illegible. It was the same forest? Well, when he saw it first it had seemed outside time. Once he had seen it as a symbol of that which does not pass with the episodes of passing men; it was superior to days and nights. The cry of the tiger in the night, while he was sleepless, watching the stars, not knowing what was to happen on the morrow, was only a disturbing but relevant note in a great passage. Yet something hardly definable had happened to his view of it all. Good fortune had changed it. Perhaps the forest itself was
no different; maybe he was not exactly the same man, and so could not see things as he did before. What was lost?

It was extraordinary, but the discovery of the hoard afforded them less to talk about than had such a trivial matter as the song of an unknown bird. Yet now the song of the bird passed unremarked. Tin did not prompt Norrie, now he had plenty of it, to a pleasing similitude of his old relish of Malay fables, which have no market value, though they can keep a camp-fire bright till late. The assurance of much tin induced in Norrie even a certain correctitude. He could no longer abjure their Chinaman with his accustomed histrionic abandon. He was direct, and saved time.

Colet, reviewing it all, while Norrie was diligently drawing a map, rebuked himself. He ought to feel excited. No good. He didn't. What does not excite the interest cannot be made to do so by any deliberate concentration of reason. If intelligent discontent is the beginning of progress, is it also the end of happiness? Of all the frauds of the sensational drama, this joy on access of riches, this elation on the discovery of the treasure chest, as though it were wealth, was the silliest. There was nothing in it. More seemed to be lost than was gained. That was hardly fair of the law of compensation. One's light was not turned up, but down. Colet had hinted to Norrie that there was not so much blithe interest in these abundant and exclusive details of business, this strict adherence to the mining law of the country, as there used to be in his sparkling nonsense. Norrie's eyebrows moved in surprise at a consequence of good fortune which he had not remarked. Then he assumed a show of his drollery.

“Of course, I'm purged of dross. Fever and the tin have done it. I'm pure now. I've got salvation, I feel almost kind. Too kind to be lighthearted.”

Almost impious to say damn the tin, but Colet had that desire.

It was night, and Norrie, still at his work, not present enough in the body to notice that his pipe was out, sat beside a lamp. An apparition formed by the camp-fire.

“Sorry to disturb you. May I come in?”

Norrie scrambled to his feet in quick alarm, but before he was upright he had recovered himself. A glance had satisfied him.

“Come along in.”

The stranger entered, and sat on a box between the friends, looking in appeal from one to the other, as would a child that had been naughty, but was sick. This elderly and bearded man, with the tired, but open and wondering eyes, was sick. His wrecked shirt held to but one shoulder, and its neglect of the other exposed an ugly boil on the upper arm. Only his grizzled beard filled the hollows of his cheeks. He took off a soiled helmet, and arranged it on the floor with what might have been an amusing care for the battered relic, or it was the hesitancy of a man who was preoccupied. His delicate cranium was bald, except for a monk-like but untidy tonsure.

“I was very glad to see your camp-fire. My Malay guide, an exceptionally good man, was lost. Is the river here the Sungei Buloh?”

“No,” said Norrie, “you've taken the wrong turning. The Buloh is five miles down stream. What are you making for?”

“Mount Berching. I shall cross the divide into Perak about there. My name, by the way, is Parsell.”

Norrie, astonished, had taken his pipe out of his mouth, and had held it away for an intent inspection of their visitor. Now he put his pipe beside him and leaned forward, with his hands clasped.

“Parsell the ethnologist, the author of the ‘Mon-Khmer Influence in South-eastern Asia?' ”

The veteran gnome looked quite pleased.

“You know my name, then? Curious, curious!”

Norrie was clearly perplexed. He sang out for the Chinaman, and gave him some instructions. He stroked his nose. He looked with wariness at Colet, as if for a cue.

“No need to ask you, sir, what you are doing here. Didn't you mention Gunong Berching?”

“I am making for that point.”

To Colet it was plain that if Norrie had addressed him in the matter of that mountain, it would have been in a few choice words to demolish a folly.

“Do you think you can manage it, Mr. Parsell?”

“Of course I can; why not? That is part of my plan.”

“A good plan. But here, what with the want of food, and the floods and fevers, we have to alter our plans occasionally. It is rough going to Berching, and I should fancy that beyond it the going would be worse. Hardly anything is known about it.”