The track was often unmistakable; usually it was compulsory; there could be no divergence. A riot of green cordage as repellent as flourishing cusps, antlers, spines and bodkins, was piled between the trees on either hand; hooked fronds were suspended to catch in the neck and the helmet; the track was reduced to a loose tunnel meandering through edged foliage. Sometimes a prone giant had to be mounted, for it had fallen across the path, a tree that was a hilly jungle in itself, to be climbed, its vegetation forced, and a descent discovered through its bastions to the other side. Roots like low easy walls, or coiled like pythons, made a maze of the track. It descended into a morass where, apparently, monsters had floundered, leaving wallows and pits which compelled Colet into the trees to find a way; and there he paused, while avoiding the taloned raffle, to pick a sound out of the heavy quiet to get the direction of his friends. Nothing moved there but themselves, except flies which hovered and flashed wherever a beam of sunlight fell through a hole in the roof. They waded across streams, and picked leeches off their bodies; as if clothes were meant to be kept constantly wet, and bodies were the normal feeding-ground for worms. Colet compelled his mind to fight against the desire for cleanliness and dryness, and to regard without surprise a bloated and pendant black parasite taking the blood from a white limb. But he was surprised, nevertheless. That worm was the emblem of a world which was new, potent, inimical, and besieging; and not very particular. It waited silently, without respite, for its chances. You couldn’t be always on your guard. It had you, whenever you were not. Colet became wary even of trifles. They stung.
The sun was going when they sighted areca palms ahead. Colet already knew that glad sign. The slender mast of the betel-nut palm, with its cluster of stalked knobs just below its graceful crown, was the sign that fellow-creatures were near. The brown thatches of huts appeared, like haven to seafarers. Nobody was about, but huge shadows rose from the ground as they arrived, and then went walloping loudly among the frail structures, a black torrent of buffalo. Colet felt so limp then that he would not have cared if they had been elephants, so long as they left the house props intact.
A brown little man came out to the verandah of one dwelling to see what all this was about. Like the others, that house stood on stilts, well above the earth, and now, as night was at hand, with a stowage of darkness already underneath it. The old fellow, in a tartan sarong, descended the ladder of his home to them as coolly as though such visits were usual. He conversed with Norrie in a gentle voice which was part of the quietude. Their carriers had disappeared. Except for two children above them on the verandah of the chief’s place, nobody in that hamlet had the curiosity to note this invasion of its solitude. Perhaps the huts stood there to serve as chance sanctuary for wayfarers caught by night in the forest. Or, perhaps, except for that one home, the huts were abandoned, and the old man and the children were alone in the forest.
They went up the ladder of rough beams, its steps slippery with clay, and catchy in their spacing for legs careless through travel. Norrie and Colet reclined on mats of grass, mats which did something towards levelling the floor of separated boughs. They put themselves at ease in native dress. Other men joined the chief; they betrayed no surprise to find white men there. Now and then a newcomer hailed Norrie with mild jocularity. There was a brass lamp on the floor, and brass dishes with fruit about it. The figures murmured to each other. Somewhere, perhaps in the rafters, Colet thought he heard the subdued whispering of women and children. He relished the picture of those men, with their apocryphal background. It was as unconformable as the chiaroscuro of a book belonging to another age. Yet he felt more at home than ever he did at the Gridiron in Soho. He knew only a few words of their speech, but he understood that it could be trusted. They did not move their heads, and scarcely their lips, as they spoke, which was soberly, as men would at night in a house with the wild at its door. Colet, through interstices of one of the walls, could watch sections of palm fronds motionless in moonlight. These fellows had a lot to say to Norrie. If one of them retired but slightly from the lamp, then the shadow almost absorbed him. Several of the men were only bright eyes; or they showed the ridge of a cheekbone when the head turned, and the feeble glow put a polish on bronze skin. But even the figures in the obscurity were not more strange than the smell of the quiet place, a smell faint, but zealous and nameless.
Norrie, later, was appealed to sombrely by the Malays. They wanted his wise confirmation. Anyhow, he was assuring them, that was plain enough, of his warm agreement that a conclusion of theirs was just and right. His wary and skittish eye, his ironical mouth, his expression of intelligence too drowsy and good-natured to contradict anybody, for he was comfortable, stirred a little curiosity in Colet, who divined this phase in his companion more readily than would these simple folk.
“Now, what’s this you are telling them? What’s the game?”
“Game? Not at all, my son. It’s about a mystery. I love mysteries, and treat them with proper respect. I wish you could have picked up the yarn that the
