The leisurely bird was still learning to whistle. It had nothing else to do. Nor had Colet, but to listen to it. Norrie mimicked the bird, and corrected it. A good effort, for Norrie.
“The little beggar always falls off the tune just before the end. I think I make a noise jolly well. Did you notice it?”
“I did.” Colet cheered the attempt, though his amusement was not quite assured. He was dubious. There was Norrie, but reduced to a framework. His face was not of the colour of life, so when he smiled it was anything but a smile. His sardonic nose was pinched, and with his light-grey eyes, understanding but bleak, and his rumpled grey hair, now too plentiful for his face, he suggested a crested predatory bird.
“My whistle was about as thin as me.”
“Let’s have it again. We could do with a cheerful noise.”
“Don’t shovel out any pity on me, Colet. After a bout of this sort we excite pity, but not enough for a shovel. I’ll walk your legs off in a day or two. You won’t lose me yet, so you needn’t abandon yourself to hope.”
He made to pass Colet; but paused, rested his hand on Colet’s shoulder, weighed on it perhaps rather too long, and went on. Old Norrie was strange; you couldn’t tell then whether he was sentimental, or only gave way at the knees. He did that sort of thing. He simulated humanity, for a lark, or else he pretended that satire was the best he could do.
But as Norrie said, he soon had them going again. There were new activities. He began to lead them another dance. They left the hut for whoever might want it. Colet had got used to that floor of rough boughs with its roof of brown fronds. He knew the individual bits of the floor, the beam that rolled if you put your foot on it, the catchy knot by Norrie’s hammock, the depression in which he preferred to spread his own sleeping mat. The only bare dry earth he had seen for three humid months was under that floor. Actually, the patch of ground under the hut was dusty; the dust was an experience when you crawled under for a knife which had slipped through. Their fire would go out today. Without a light there, and nobody near, that hut would be worse than the jungle. It would deepen the quietude. He turned, the end man, to see the abandoned camp for the last time. The bare thought of solitude in the old shanty gave Colet a presentiment of the horrors. One would want hardened nerves to face only oneself, in the wilderness.
The regions through which they travelled suggested that they were the first men to see it. They were under an earlier spell of the earth; it was not merely a new country. The sunlight was younger, and sounds were clearer and without fear. Its life, which was its forest, was haunting with its magnitude and extravagant outpouring. It was mute, except at sunset and evening, when it praised the sun, the only god which had yet come to it. When day came, and just as day was departing, the creatures of the woods broke out with that racket which was the sudden release of the pent vehemence of spirits that were without name or shape.
The sun was well down towards the roof of the jungle when they emerged from the twilight of the woods. They were in an open space by a greater river. The men began to build another shelter. It was a relief to see the open sky. Here was full daylight, and the sight could range to distant prospects. Colet wondered how Norrie, still absurdly thin, and bleached by fever and the forest, had maintained so evenly that day’s long hike; even the patient Malays showed they had had enough of it, and they were made of bronze. The Chinaman, of course, wasn’t human. His own body felt as if every length of elastic in it had been stretched; pulled out and snapped all day long. Now he was at ease, fatigued but contented. Norrie was a wonder. He would have given stout Cortez enough for the day, and then have shown even a conquistador, in an evening talk, that there were things he did not know as surprising as the prospect to be seen from a peak in Darien. But in these latter days good men were not conquerors, but navvies, or prospectors, or engineers, or chief mates. Nobody knew them but one or two pals.
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
