Gallions Reach

penumbra of earth, did not take the scientist’s attention. He went on, sometimes stroking his beard. There were tribes that, at long last, built cities; they grew haughty with a new strength. Some of them, he thought at times, had been carried a little too far the wrong way in their confidence in engines and mechanical power. If that clever fellow had found the fulcrum to shift the earth, he might only have wrecked the solar system. Mechanical power, to him, was a terrible power, easy to control, but it could be disastrous in its undesigned outcomes, as though its exactitude were a delusion and held a diabolical cheat. It interested him far more, Mr. Parsell explained, that other tribes had never come out of their original fastnesses. They were still in the woods, not far from the beginning of human impulses. Not far, in truth, from that spot. It might be true, he thought, that man had come to the steam-engine too soon for our good. The engine, very likely, had not taken us as far from the jungle as we imagined. What was worse, it was possible that we were moving at full speed on the wrong track. Eh? Perhaps we were going in the wrong direction; but that was for us to learn. We knew what we wanted. It was not his concern. No doubt we should find out presently, if things did not appear to be right, that our power had taken us too far the wrong way.

It was those other men who had taken no turning at all, but were still where they were at the beginning, who meant most to him. Mr. Parsell thrust a hand towards the unknown.

“There, Mr. Colet, they are just out there still.” And he continued, coming a little closer to his companion in an odd eagerness:

“Suppose those people know what we have forgotten? Has that doubt ever occurred to you? It has to me. It has to me. They surely know what I do not. We may have thrown away clues⁠—think of it⁠—which these people still keep, without knowing what they are, omens that would have taken us along a better road. I am going back.”

“What’s that?” Colet ejaculated; for he wondered suddenly whether a clue was there.

Mr. Parsell soothed him. He explained that these original men were almost virgin documents; they were not scrawled over, they were not obscured by the palimpsest of many civilisations. They must have preserved secrets, long overlaid by civilisation, which were worth many inventions. A body of them was hovering, so the villagers had been telling him, near there. Those folk of the woods had not been seen, but they were about. The villagers called them shadows. Shy folk. Very rare and elusive people, who avoided even the Malays. But he would find them. He must find them.

The feeble glim of their lamp hardly more than suggested Mr. Parsell’s face, which hovered in the dark. That faint and uncertain star at the end of a brass stalk was the sum of their effort at the illumination of the vast Malayan night. The elderly scientist’s smile, as he bent forward towards the light, was all of wisdom in the wilds that Colet could see; and, when the lamp flickered, the expression of cheerful and speculative discernment was evasive, it was tremulous, as though on the verge of being engulfed.

XXXVII

In that sharp confusion of forested mountains, with ridges in the clouds, and all based in an inferno of precipice, chasm, and torrent, to the depths of which the sun never reached, it was hard to say where you were, within a few miles. It was no wonder the Malays disliked the heights, and said they were the abode of spirits, and quietly declined to accompany Mr. Parsell on extravagant asides in that menacing solitude.

They were anxious to work through. Mr. Parsell was not. It was hard enough to keep to what trails there were, without adventuring on excursions from which there might be no return; so Colet stood by Mat, whose woodcraft was as astonishing in its intuitions as though the man were aided by another sense. Mat told Colet frankly that his home was by a river in the plains beyond, or else, would a man be so foolish as to do this thing?

“A man, Tuan, will find his home, even across such as this forbidden ground.”

All the time they were working through the range, that expression of elation on the face of Mr. Parsell, all of him that could be seen one night by the glow of a lamp, would intrude on Colet’s preoccupation with the difficulties of the day. It would return to him suddenly, a fading but troubling wraith, when toiling through the savage undergrowth of a gully; and he would see it, when, hurriedly, Mat and he were scanning the ground above, anticipating, after a storm, the irruption of a flood into a natural trap. Colet had a doubt whether any man should have a light so bright and happy on a face so worn.

Yet Parsell had come through it well. He could have been counted the best man of the party. He was as ardent as a little flame burning from an inexhaustible source. He was showing the marks of the experience, for the going was arduous and the food was no better than a pretence at eating, but maybe he drew nourishment from the circumambient; nothing else would account for his quiet cheerfulness. Mat, too, had observed Mr. Parsell’s unconcern with what, from them, required cunning and fortitude. Mat, who had led them to a spur of the range from which they overlooked an ocean of jungle to which even the sun could set no limit, paused beside Colet, and shook the sweat from his face. He saw Mr. Parsell standing and contemplating, as though it were a land of promise, that immense estrangement from man below. Mat murmured his wonder to