Authors: H. M. Tomlinson
Mat overlooked the disembarkation. He knew what to do. Colet changed into a dry sarong and shirt, made coffee, and sat by himself, not wondering, after all, how much more ahead of them there was of this sort of life, but sunk in fatigue and content, a tranquillity in the cool of a tropical night, within its foreign smells, which was a hint of experience in another dimension. He was satisfied with the stars over the hills he must traverse. So when Mr. Parsell, who had been with the people of the village, appeared beside him, rubbing his hands, Colet half resented an invasion of the privacy of nature. The old fellow was satisfied with his affairs so far, it appeared. What did he want?
Mr. Parsell certainly was satisfied. It was late, but there were no mosquitoes about, and he evidently wished to be companionable. What was the matter with him, Colet wondered. For he talked. And presently, through Colet's apathy when ethnology was the subject after a tiring day, there began to penetrate an understanding of Norrie's respect for Mr. Parsell. The man was animated. He knew the secrets of the strange place already, or thought he did, by all accounts.
He made a confidant of Colet. He treated him as an equal in ethnology. Mr. Parsell forgot the difference between them. And Colet began to be stirred by surmises of a human tradition of an antiquity he had never suspected. He turned to his companion as though he had not met him before. He forgot where he was. This was the man who had taken no notice of the jungle; who only admitted its existence when he had to. Colet listened to a new voice. Mr. Parsell was murmuring, persuasive and lenient; and, leisurely, he divined
the probabilities of extended human understanding with the allusiveness of a poet. He was generous, perhaps, because he had just learned of what to him was an accession to knowledge. He had a pupil; he wished to share this wealth. It was for everybody.
Colet was shown a vision of a long past humanity, few in numbers and in dire peril, the chances all against its survival, fumbling out of a darkness where the beginnings were hidden, and drifting, or impelled by forces unknown or half-guessed, to this discovery and to that, from land to land, to a partial control of circumstance.
Now and then, as Colet listened, he watched a spark wavering about the huts. Humanity was still securing itself against the powers of the night? Lightning flickered over the untraversed hills to the west. Sometimes a creature unknown called in the forest. Colet heard that interruption as though a listener had mocked Mr. Parsell's happy auguries, had derided his faith in human destiny.
Those satiric cries, and the remoteness of the stars above the mysterious penumbra of earth, did not take the scientist's attention. He went on, sometimes stroking his beard. There were tribes that, at long last, built cities; they grew haughty with a new strength. Some of them, he thought at times, had been carried a little too far the wrong way in their confidence in engines and mechanical power. If that clever fellow had found the fulcrum to shift the earth, he might only have wrecked the solar system. Mechanical power, to him, was a terrible power, easy to control, but it could be disastrous in its undesigned outcomes, as though its exactitude were a delusion and held a diabolical cheat. It interested him far more, Mr. Parsell explained, that other tribes had never come out of their original fastnesses. They were still in the woods, not far from the beginning of human impulses. Not far, in truth, from that spot. It might be true, he thought, that man had come to the steam-engine too soon for our good. The
engine, very likely, had not taken us as far from the jungle as we imagined. What was worse, it was possible that we were moving at full speed on the wrong track. Eh? Perhaps we were going in the wrong direction; but that was for us to learn. We knew what we wanted. It was not his concern. No doubt we should find out presently, if things did not appear to be right, that our power had taken us too far the wrong way.
It was those other men who had taken no turning at all, but were still where they were at the beginning, who meant most to him. Mr. Parsell thrust a hand towards the unknown.
“There, Mr. Colet, they are just out there still.” And he continued, coming a little closer to his companion in an odd eagerness:
“Suppose those people know what we have forgotten? Has that doubt ever occurred to you? It has to me. It has to me. They surely know what I do not. We may have thrown away cluesâthink of itâwhich these people still keep, without knowing what they are, omens that would have taken us along a better road. I am going back.”
“What's that?” Colet ejaculated; for he wondered suddenly whether a clue was there.
Mr. Parsell soothed him. He explained that these original men were almost virgin documents; they were not scrawled over, they were not obscured by the palimpsest of many civilisations. They must have preserved secrets, long overlaid by civilisation, which were worth many inventions. A body of them was hovering, so the villagers had been telling him, near there. Those folk of the woods had not been seen, but they were about. The villagers called them shadows. Shy folk. Very rare and elusive people, who avoided even the Malays. But he would find them. He must find them.
The feeble glim of their lamp hardly more than suggested Mr. Parsell's face, which hovered in the dark. That faint and uncertain star at the end of a brass stalk was the sum of
their effort at the illumination of the vast Malayan night. The elderly scientist's smile, as he bent forward towards the light, was all of wisdom in the wilds that Colet could see; and, when the lamp flickered, the expression of cheerful and speculative discernment was evasive, it was tremulous, as though on the verge of being engulfed.
In that sharp confusion of forested mountains, with ridges in the clouds, and all based in an inferno of precipice, chasm, and torrent, to the depths of which the sun never reached, it was hard to say where you were, within a few miles. It was no wonder the Malays disliked the heights, and said they were the abode of spirits, and quietly declined to accompany Mr. Parsell on extravagant asides in that menacing solitude.
They were anxious to work through. Mr. Parsell was not. It was hard enough to keep to what trails there were, without adventuring on excursions from which there might be no return; so Colet stood by Mat, whose woodcraft was as astonishing in its intuitions as though the man were aided by another sense. Mat told Colet frankly that his home was by a river in the plains beyond, or else, would a man be so foolish as to do this thing?
“A man, Tuan, will find his home, even across such as this forbidden ground.”
All the time they were working through the range, that expression of elation on the face of Mr. Parsell, all of him that could be seen one night by the glow of a lamp, would intrude on Colet's preoccupation with the difficulties of the day. It would return to him suddenly, a fading but troubling wraith, when toiling through the savage undergrowth of a gully; and he would see it, when, hurriedly, Mat and he were scanning the ground above, anticipating, after a storm, the irruption of a flood into a natural trap. Colet had a doubt whether any man should have a light so bright and happy on a face so worn.
Yet Parsell had come through it well. He could have been counted the best man of the party. He was as ardent as a little flame burning from an inexhaustible source. He was showing the marks of the experience, for the going was arduous and the food was no better than a pretence at eating, but maybe he drew nourishment from the circumambient; nothing else would account for his quiet cheerfulness. Mat, too, had observed Mr. Parsell's unconcern with what, from them, required cunning and fortitude. Mat, who had led them to a spur of the range from which they overlooked an ocean of jungle to which even the sun could set no limit, paused beside Colet, and shook the sweat from his face. He saw Mr. Parsell standing contemplating, as though it were a land of promise, that immense estrangement from man below. Mat murmured his wonder to Colet. He asked from what it was that Tuan Parsell found his strength. Colet turned to see, and felt jocular. They had done some good work that day. They were getting on.
“For he on honey-dew hath fed,” he quoted.
Mat was mystified. “Tuan?” he questioned, in reproach.
Colet became as explicit as he could in the vernacular. “Allah supports him.”
That, of course, was quite satisfactory, and Mat glanced again respectfully at the other tuan.
They rested for a time at that cool elevation. It was not often that they could find an outlook through the dense labyrinth of giant trees and vines, not even for a sight of the sky. They were, in a sense, travelling underground, and in the dark. When they surveyed it from above the jungle was not recognised. That aspect of it, its roof, was foreign. From where they stood then it was a sea of dusky billows arrested in its flow. It was like the sea; it was without bounds. It faded into the horizon.
Colet was awed by the magnitude of that silent and unexplored prospect. They had that before them. They had
that to work through; yet always beneath its surface. That was the roof they rarely saw of the purgatory through which they usually toiled in mire, in a twilight, with thorns and leeches and the dim and questionable. There was that much more of it, to the skyline. The crests of mountains floated in the heavens on invisible vapours, regions detached from the earth. A translated peak would diminish, would vanish, and then another would appear where nothing had been seen before. Colet wondered whether his little party was not only off the map, but whether a map could contain a revelation of what was not only infinite but protean. He felt it was like his cheek, and smiled to himself, viewing his rags and dirt, to chance heart-beats against that universe.
And what a space in which to search for Sakais, or for anybody! Where were those blessed people of the woods? He would have supposed they were but a legend, a theme for camp-fires, but that yesterday in the forest they had stumbled on three huts, the most remote and forlorn human habitations which he had ever seen. They stood in a narrow rift of the jungle, which frowned down on the transient and pathetic evidence of man. They were abandoned. He thought their builders must have fled in a horror they were no longer able to withstand. And who could wonder at it? The floor was cumbered with wet leaves and forest rubbish. The day descended that shaft in the forest as far as it could, but it rested on a wall, obliquely, little more than half-way down. Mr. Parsell was absorbed by the unexpected discovery, and was in no hurry to move on. Yet nothing was there but the memorials, the sodden leaves, and the coarse webs of spiders across the uprights.
Mat dolefully shook his head about those Sakais. He himself, he said to Colet, did not know why it should be good to find them, but perhaps Tuan understood. Were they not savages? They were dirty, and they knew nothing. They were infidels, and they knew no shame. They were as the
beasts. Why should they be sought, as though they were men? It was certain, Tuan, that they would not be found. They were but shadows in the forest, and moved like beasts. They saw, but they were not seen. They were as timid as deer, and feared men. He himself had hunted them, and he knew.
“There, Tuan,” he whispered, pointing over the dark sea of the tree-tops below, “is smoke. It is a Sakais camp.”
Colet could just discern a faint blue smear some miles away.
Mat, though, was discreet, even without hope.
“Tuan, we should never find them. Can smoke be caught in the hand?”
Colet felt that another outlooker was peering by his elbow. He turned, and saw Mr. Parsell beside him, intent on the same sign.
Mat at once led on down a precipitous shoulder of the hill; and Colet, but for a sense he had that any mishap now would mean the loss of the party, would have admitted that the land was beautiful. Streams hung in veils from upper shelves of rock, were lost, and reappeared under wet ferns and gigantic leaves to brim and shimmer in basins of granite. He paused by one clear spout of crystal, folded the waxen green of an arum leaf into a cup, on which the drops of water were globules of cold silver, and thought it was the best drink he had ever had.
Near there they camped; and again that night Mr. Parsell sat beside him, and spoke of a light that had been, and might be again for men. Theirs, indeed, was a journey of discovery. This was the true sort of exploration. Colet had little more than coffee and a pipe, and that tenuous confidence of his companion, to support him. The cicadas had shrilled to the last of the sun when Mr. Parsell began his lesson; but all was silent, and the Malays were asleep, and the fire down, when Mr. Parsell rose, and spread his sleeping-mat. His rumouring
voice, hinting at the hidden springs of life, ceased; there was then but a sprinkle of stars overhead, and the night around, which was the forest. Colet could pick out of that silence even the roll of a dewdrop from a leaf. On a distant hill he heard the imperious voice, the snarling moan, of the lord of that region.
Why was Mat standing there looking at him? Colet sat up. The sun was bright on a high buttress across the valley. This was late. Time they were on the move. Mat ought to have called him; but Mat never would. That funny Malay would never waken him, of course; a very dangerous thing to do; the wandering soul might not have time to get back and re-enter the body; his soul then would be lost. He smiled, and cheered the morning to the guide. Mat looked grave. Something wrong with him?
“What news to-day?”
“An evil thing has happened, Tuan. We cannot see Tuan Parsell. Where is he?”
Where is he? Oh, spirited away, of course. Colet glanced over at the professor's corner. Why, Parsell never left the camp, unless accompanied. He never had. But his place was empty.
Nobody, Colet was told, had heard him go. They supposed that he had gone down to bathe, but no, he had not been to the pool. He had gone downhill, though; that they knew for they had found the signs. If they might say so, the Tuan had walked lightly, but as though he knew where he was going, and yet would not disturb those who slept. It was hard to follow his track below, for truly, Mat explained, he thought the Tuan had been gone many hours. There had been rain. What thing was this?