“For he on honeydew hath fed,” he quoted.
Mat was mystified. “Tuan?” he questioned, in reproach.
Colet became as explicit as he could in the vernacular. “Allah supports him.”
That, of course, was quite satisfactory, and Mat glanced again respectfully at the other tuan.
They rested for a time at that cool elevation. It was not often that they could find an outlook through the dense labyrinth of giant trees and vines, not even for a sight of the sky. They were, in a sense, travelling underground, and in the dark. When they surveyed it from above the jungle was not recognised. That aspect of it, its roof, was foreign. From where they stood then it was a sea of dusky billows arrested in its flow. It was like the sea; it was without bounds. It faded into the horizon.
Colet was awed by the magnitude of that silent and unexplored prospect. They had that before them. They had that to work through; yet always beneath its surface. That was the roof they rarely saw of the purgatory through which they usually toiled in mire, in a twilight, with thorns and leeches and the dim and questionable. There was that much more of it, to the skyline. The crests of mountains floated in the heavens on invisible vapours, regions detached from the earth. A translated peak would diminish, would vanish, and then another would appear where nothing had been seen before. Colet wondered whether his little party was not only off the map, but whether a map could contain a revelation of what was not only infinite but protean. He felt it was like his cheek, and smiled to himself, viewing his rags and dirt, to chance heartbeats against that universe.
And what a space in which to search for Sakais, or for anybody! Where were those blessed people of the woods? He would have supposed they were but a legend, a theme for campfires, but that yesterday in the forest they had stumbled on three huts, the most remote and forlorn human habitations which he had ever seen. They stood in a narrow rift of the jungle, which frowned down on the transient and pathetic evidence of man. They were abandoned. He thought their builders must have fled in a horror they were no longer able to withstand. And who could wonder at it? The floor was cumbered with wet leaves and forest rubbish. The day descended that shaft in the forest as far as it could, but it rested on a wall, obliquely, little more than halfway down. Mr. Parsell was absorbed by the unexpected discovery, and was in no hurry to move on. Yet nothing was there but the memorials, the sodden leaves, and the coarse webs of spiders across the uprights.
Mat dolefully shook his head about those Sakais. He himself, he said to Colet, did not know why it should be good to find them, but perhaps Tuan understood. Were they not savages? They were dirty, and they knew nothing. They were infidels, and they knew no shame. They were as the beasts. Why should they be sought, as though they were men? It was certain, Tuan, that they would not be found. They were but shadows in the forest, and moved like beasts. They saw, but they were not seen. They were as timid as deer, and feared men. He himself had hunted them, and he knew.
“There, Tuan,” he whispered, pointing over the dark sea of the treetops below, “is smoke. It is a Sakais camp.”
Colet could just discern a faint blue smear some miles away.
Mat, though, was discreet, even without hope.
“Tuan, we should never find them. Can smoke be caught in the hand?”
Colet felt that another outlooker was peering by his elbow. He turned, and saw Mr. Parsell beside him, intent on the same sign.
Mat at once led on down a precipitous shoulder of the hill; and Colet, but for a sense he had that any mishap now would mean the loss of the party, would have admitted that the land was beautiful. Streams hung in veils from upper shelves of rock, were lost, and reappeared under wet ferns and gigantic leaves to brim and shimmer in basins of granite. He paused by one clear spout of crystal, folded the waxen green of an arum leaf into a cup, on which the drops of water were globules of cold silver, and thought it was the best drink he had ever had.
Near there they camped; and again that night Mr. Parsell sat beside him, and spoke of a light that had been, and might be again for men. Theirs, indeed, was a journey of discovery. This was the true sort of exploration. Colet had little more than coffee and a pipe, and that tenuous confidence of his companion, to support him. The cicadas had shrilled to the last of the sun when Mr. Parsell began his lesson; but all was silent, and the Malays were asleep, and the fire down, when Mr. Parsell rose, and spread his sleeping-mat. His rumouring voice, hinting at the hidden springs of life, ceased; there was then but a sprinkle of stars overhead, and the night around, which was the forest. Colet could pick out of that silence even the roll of a dewdrop from a leaf. On a distant hill he heard the imperious voice, the snarling moan, of the lord of that region.
XXXVIII
Why was Mat standing there looking at him? Colet sat up. The sun was bright on a high buttress across the valley. This was late. Time they were on the move. Mat ought to have called him; but Mat never would. That funny Malay would never waken him, of course; a very dangerous thing to do; the wandering soul might not have time to get
