“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 today.”
“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 rajah got to hear of it—something he could get for nothing, being a rajah, so naturally he asked for it. The Chinamen forgot where they were, though. They told the rajah 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.”
XXXI
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 portholes 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 rattans, 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
