Long sandy islands were humped in the stream, and on them had stranded trees out of old floods, trees gaunt and bleached, like the skeletons of mastodons. A dragonfly would hover over the raft with a lustre of wing-beat as its nimbus, the only inhabitant, and then it would shoot off as a streak of prismatic light. The reach they were in was always enclosed, as though it were a brief lake, with high walls on either hand, unscaleable, and abrupt hills corrugated with the everlasting forest overlooking both ends of it. No way out. But round the corner, as they turned it, shot the uproar of rapids, and the river above was taut in glassy sheets over inclines. All had to jump overboard, and persuade the mutinous rafts to go up and over against their weighty and tricky insistence that down was the right way to go. That was a lively and cooling interlude. It was play for the men. They chanted; they raised their shrill war-cry when they got a rakit free from the snags and fairly on the run.
The late afternoon gloomed with the threat of the daily storm. Colet watched those pitchy masses in the sky with a concern for the coming of rain which was instinctive, but puzzled him. Here he hated rain, and that seemed unreasonable. Yet these were more than storms; they were threats to existence. The earth cowered under that savage frown, and waited, in surrender. The sky lowered to the forest in ponderous keels of bitumen solid and ominous, illuminated, so it seemed, by livid glowings from hell. The trees that had been cataleptic began to tremble, leaves and birds whirled in upper gusts, the outer branches shook in helpless desperation; and then the sky collapsed, roaring. Nothing could be seen but a screen of falling water which glittered with incessant convulsions of lightning. The raft was battered. The storm ceased with a shocking detonation, as though on the signal of a gun-burst. In the silence which followed, when there was only drainage drumming through the leaves, they heard the crash of a forest giant. The Malays were glum now, chilled and depressed. It was nightfall when they sighted some lights ahead, and moored by a cluster of huts.
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
