“Sure of it. The men know it, too.”
Mr. Parsell gave the still and monstrous foliage about them a cursory glance. It began to exist for him. No wonder he had not noticed it; it was so quiet. The last of the men was waiting for the ethnologist to take his place in the line. Colet hurried to the front. After all, the silence of the forest was a forcible persuader, once you noticed it. You could leave it to the look of the jungle at a pinch. Not even Mr. Parsell would elect for loneliness there. That was another hopeful sign.
XXXVI
The camp was not awake when Colet left it to go down to the river. Its surroundings were apparitional in the hour before dawn. The forest was uncreated. It was only beginning to come out of the darkness. Nothing had taken shape, except a few outlines on the surface. Creation had been roughly indicated. The rest was night. Substance was not alive, but was suspended in a void, germinal and suggestive. There had been no word yet.
It was almost cold, and Colet shivered. There was something in the scene suggestive of an autumnal dawn at home; the same hush and the unreality. The track led down past a tree with buttresses massive enough for a cathedral. Its exposed roots, in that light, were dank coils ambushed in a nightmare. They appeared to be a tangle of sleeping reptiles waiting for a touch to set them thrashing about hideously. The trail was easier below, almost free of obstructions. No. Something was there in the path. Only a shadow? It was not. That really was a snake; it twisted a little.
Better be careful. Colet advanced a few steps, watchful. He did not think he was mistaken. There had been a movement. The shadow then heaved, and humped on the ground. The snake uncoiled again and turned over. It was a tail. Colet stopped, with an urgent impulse to fly back to the camp. He overcame that impulse. He had a clear idea of the expression on the tiger’s face. It was boredom. It had pale side-whiskers; the upward glance of its bright eyes was reproachful. It stretched itself; it yawned with a gape which Colet especially remarked, and stood for a moment sideways. It sneered; and then it went. The forest took it in. There was no sound. It was there, and then it was not.
For a second Colet wondered whether human dignity would insist that he must go on. But dignity lost. He could not go on. The vague path left empty by that surprise was insuperable. He retired, in deliberate but agitated leisure, occasionally looking back. That was a gentlemanly beast. And if he’d had the gun with him he couldn’t have hit it. It went before a thought could move.
Mat was roving about, with his morning cigarette, when he reached the hut, and after a suitable interval Colet advised the Malay that he had met a tiger when going to bathe. Mat listened to the news with a show of polite interest. These tigers! They have no manners.
Mat’s own manners, now, were perfect. His courtesy and patience, which were safe from the presumption of the ignorant because he did not look safe, and because of the austerity of his bearing, made him notable even on the march, when his lithe bronze figure was almost naked. The eyes of the two men met, for no particular reason, and the Malay smiled. That was well. Colet knew he was not alone in that enterprise.
The Malay wished to speak to him. Tuan! He would not hide the truth. All his knowledge of that country had been gained when, long ago, as a young man, he had passed through with a party hunting Sakais, the jungle folk, for slaves. Yet, if he might speak, he thought that time would be saved if now they took to the river. It would not be easy to pole rakits up against the stream, but it would be easier than carrying burdens in the forest. The river was low. The jerams, the rapids, would not be bad, for the season of floods had not come.
The map, Colet saw, held with Mat’s opinion; the men very quickly made rafts of bamboo. That sort of craft had a dubious freeboard, Colet noticed, but the men behaved as though they had nothing to learn when they were turning bamboos into a means of transport. If the river allowed it, if there were no floods, they would be in the neighbourhood of Berching in a few days; and the idea of that mountain had been very distant, when considered in the woods. Their small flotilla of rafts began its upward journey towards the watershed.
Colet’s platform of green bamboo pipes, enamelled and wet, made slippery holding. It was fairly agile, too, and demanded subtle coaxing from a rider who was unused to such a seat. It would pardon no nonsense. Its surface responded to every inequality of the current. You could feel the river alive under your feet.
Mr. Parsell sat beside Colet, but was forgotten. The ethnologist showed no interest in the world about; apparently he desired nothing better than an opportunity to meditate on what could not be imparted to a man who, in an important sense, was not with him. Colet forgot him.
Their way was now at the bottom of a chasm. The dark forest was its walls. The river was a blinding mirror, but narrow; the sky overhead was hardly any wider. That region told them that man had only then entered it; but Colet, after rounding several bends, received no impulse from the thought. He lapsed gradually into limp but enduring desire, a desire for shade, for a break in the journey. The sun concentrated its heat
