But above all they had not been persecuted by men for a thousand years and they took no more notice of human beings than of cattle; and Stephen found to his stupefaction that he could walk through a herd of rusa, pushing his way where they stood thick, as though he were one of themselves. He could offer the mouse-deer's fawn a green frond growing too high and it would not hesitate for a moment. Although the comparatively few birds were a little more diffident, no doubt because being airborne they were more experienced (very few other creatures could manage the bare, steep, shaley outer crater-wall, and it had only the single gap, by the Thousand Steps), but even so they sometimes perched on him; and the whole effect was very like being in a waking dream, of losing human identity, or even of being invisible as well as wonderfully supple and reposed after hours in the three basins hollowed in the rock and fed by three faintly sulphurous springs, each hotter than the last.
The grazing animals it was that took least notice of him; the swine - there were two kinds - were curious, sometimes embarrassingly so, and playful; but it was the primates, the golden and the proboscis monkeys and above all the orangutangs that showed most interest. The orang-utangs were gentle, placid, rather lethargic creatures upon the whole, not particularly sociable and not at all gregarious - Muong never showed him more than five at once, two sisters and their young- but they often came down from the flattish nests in which they spent so much of their time and sat with him and Muong, looking earnestly into his face, their lips pursed and thrust forward, as though they were going to whistle, and sometimes gently touching him, his clothes, his meagre hair, his pallid, almost naked arm (their hands, though scaley, were quite warm) Once it was a perfectly enormous old male that came down by a liana as thick as a cable and sat at the foot of has tree with them he was old, he had the expanded cheek-pads and the throat-pouch of the aged mias, but none of the peevishness and ill-nature so usual in the elderly. He positively caressed Stephen's shoulder before going up his liana again, with a swing as light and easy as a topman for all his prodigious weight. What communication there was between Muong and her friends he could not make out, though he tried hard: sound audible to him had little to do with it - a small vocabulary of grunts - and he could only suppose that it was a matter of the language of eye and minute change in expression. Whatever it was, she knew where they were and how, from a distance, to invite them to come down from their trees or through a bamboo-grove.
Those he most attentively watched were the two sisters, both rather a fine red, and their half-grown, playful, very active young. They spent much more time on the ground and he stayed with them for hours together, hoping he would remember all he observed. But Muong did not really approve of this frequentation, and gradually it was borne in upon him that she thought the children tiresome and the young mothers rather discreditable, even common.
Indeed it was his insistence upon going to see the group on his last day that led to their only disagreement. Muong knew perfectly well what he wanted and by now he knew perfectly well from her expression that she was not pleased; still, when both Ananda and he asked her to do so she did lead him to the far side of the lake, sometimes going along with her knuckles to the ground when they reached the open grassy slope, sometimes leaning on his arm.
The family band was there, where a tongue of trees ran almost to the water; and that was where Muong left him, obviously intending to go home alone.
The twins, lighter and more spidery than their one-at-a-birth cousin, were guarding the top of a boulder from him, a great rounded grey boulder at the edge of the water. With boundless energy the little apes attacked, repelled, fell on to the muddy shore or into the water, splashed and began again. Apart from some muted gibbering they were remarkably quiet for perhaps half an hour, but then in an excess of zeal one bit another's ear: they all fell into the lake, screeching; the mothers came rushing down - oaths, reproaches, blows, reddish hair torn out, and the game ended with the whole group shambling off over the grass and into the trees.
From his discreet observation-post, not a hiding-place at all but a comfortable tussock that gave him a general view, Stephen watched them disappear and then looked back to the boulder to estimate the orang-utang's ordinary unhurried quadrupedal speed over a moderate slope, but as it travelled his eye was caught by an object that stopped his breath, that almost stopped his heart and that banished all thought of calculation. What he had hitherto taken for another grey boulder was in fact a rhinoceros.
Rhinoceros unicornis. A male, by his long single horn and his size, something between sixteen and seventeen hands: though that was difficult to judge because of the huge bulk below its withers and the relative shortness of its legs. Three birds were perched upon its back.
Without moving from his tussock Stephen brought out his spy-glass - he was filled with a sudden illogical caution - and as well as he could with his shaking hands he focussed it upon the rhinoceros. Since the animal was not much above a hundred yards away this brought it very close indeed, so close that Stephen saw it close its eyes. It appeared to him that the rhinoceros had recently been wallowing - mud was drying on its massive back - and that on leaving the muddy shore it had gone to sleep there, facing up the grassy slope, a little way from the lake. The final outburst of the orang-utangs had woken it: now it was going to sleep again.
But this was a mistaken view. The rhinoceros was thinking. Presently it opened its eyes again, breathed in and out with enormous force, raised its head, sniffed the air from right to left, brought its ears to bear and set itself in motion, surprisingly buoyant motion for such a solid mass, going straight up the hill And as he watched Stephen understood its reputation of shocking strength and savagery, disembowelling elephants, devastating thorn-brakes for hours on end out of mere blind fury and malignance, tossing bulls as though they were footballs. The speed increased; the thick short legs fairly twinkled as the creature ran, gathering impetus. Looking beyond, Stephen saw another rhinoceros at the top of the slope, quarter of a mile away; it too was male; it too was running at the same smooth, powerful, very rapid pace. At the half-way point they converged, and half turning met shoulder to shoulder in a blow that sent up a cloud of dust; but neither staggered, and each completing its turn they came down abreast, faster and faster still, straight for him. The ground trembled shockingly: Stephen leapt to his feet; and then with a great trampling rushing din they were past, racing towards the lake. Within a yard of its edge they wheeled together, wheeled as quick as boars, and raced up the hill again, shoulder to shoulder, their hooves twinkling in time as they crossed the ridge and disappeared.
Chapter 8
The way up the Thousand Steps had been wearisome but intensely happy both in anticipation and in the present; the way down was more wearisome by far, partly because an exceedingly heavy warm rain fell from the moment he crossed the crater's rim, so thick that he could not see fifty yards ahead and so violent that the drops splashed high, wetting him to the middle. It also obscured the worn, uneven steps, which made the descent anxious, tense, full of care; but beneath all the physical tension there was an even greater happiness than before, that of a fulfilment that had gone beyond any anticipation, and of something not far from the beatific vision.
It glowed within, under the sodden straw cloak the monks had given him, and it was glowing still when he staggered down the last steps and on to the level sward of the durian-grove. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the forest was filled with the sound of running water.
He looked expectantly round, but seeing no one he felt in his bosom, the only moderately dry place about him, for the repeating watch that hung there by a string. It was as he inclined his head to hear its tiny bell state that he was an hour and a half behind his time that he noticed the horses' rumps glistening under the lee of the Hindu tower: beyond them a pyramid of tall palm-fronds, inverted to throw off the wet, and inside it Seymour, with two Malays smoking tobacco.
