But Norrie judged it with a casual and professional eye. It was curious, but only geologically. He had seen such lumps before, of course. It was only what was left of an earlier skin of Malaya, a fragment of that country’s prehistoric hide. Time and the weather had peeled off all the rest. Unnatural? Well, look at it; was it not there? So how could it be unnatural? What he wanted to do was to get at it.
That was not easy, near and great as it was. The climbing palms, the rotans, flourished about it. Their taloned cables were coiled over the low ground in barriers unfriendly to the haste and impatience of men. Colet, bleeding and perspiring, had forgotten the rock by the time they had reached it. A little journey in that kind of undergrowth, crouching and crawling, while following the sound of a Malay’s parang, leaves room in the mind for but one interest. He crawled into a little clear space beside Norrie and two of the men. The island stood over them. They were at the base of a wall, and almost under a high Gothic porch, the entrance to the retreat, by the look of it, of midnight. Norrie but briefly inspected this rude resemblance of architecture, and was as indifferent to the sinister suggestions of the interior. He was not now discussing the ways of humanity, and so he appeared very cheerful. He declared that he loved caves, and insides that were convoluted and obscure. He was preparing to go in; he was testing some electric torches with a brisk assiduity which had its back to the forbidding fantasies of geological structure. The Malays, so they said, preferred to wait without. Their interest was spent. They went down on their hams and began to roll cigarettes while watching the tuans preparing to disappear on a foolish quest.
The threshold of the cave was of dry sand strewn with fallen rock. The day, venturing within as far as it could, hinted at fretted columns and aisles receding till the last shapes became what Colet chose to see there. The berg was hollow. Its recesses were capricious, and the disturbance of a rock by the invaders awoke echoes in lofty transepts and high vaultings unseen. That sharp sound brought down the dark in flying atoms. Myriads of bats fell like night whirling in shreds. The gloom moved with a screaming rush. Norrie, though, went on as if unaware of it, except that he broke out against the smell of the little beasts. It certainly was lairish, that stench; not to be forgotten.
“Keep close,” said Norrie; “but if you lose me, keep still.”
It was not easy to keep close to such erratic activity in the dark. Norrie, intently inspecting the floor at times, developed an insatiable curiosity and energy. He said little. He kept going. He might have forgotten that such a preferable enjoyment as daylight was now well behind them.
“Come here,” he said at last. He stood then, relaxed and indifferent, as though here they would turn back, and with his lamp illuminated black sand at his feet. He idly scraped the ground with his foot.
“Know what that is?”
“Sand.”
“Cassiterite.”
“What’s that?”
“Haven’t you brought that Highland fling with you? I’m showing you what we came for.”
“This stuff?”
“It’s as ripe as a freehold in Piccadilly. The floor of this hill is tin. It only wants spades.”
Norrie stooped, and poked the grains about with his fingers.
It only wanted spades. Colet felt a little hungry. It was near midday. Besides, Norrie himself was just scooping the sand as if he were a child at the seaside. Norrie twisted round, and turned up his torch to Colet’s face.
“I say, Colet, blast you, you haven’t got the expression of a lucky man. But you might try to behave like one. Sing something agreeable.”
“Me? Hang it, you’re not setting a lively example. I thought it was dirt.”
“So it is. So it is. There’s acres of it. Well, we’ve found it. Let’s go and get something to eat.”
Chapter XXXII
Now they had found it, now they stood firmly upon the security which most men desire but usually fail to reach, their camp-fire, somehow, burned with less of its old companionable light. This was the end of the hunt. Norrie had explained, rather seriously, with hardly a lift of his usual buoyancy, what the law of averages, or something mathematical, had calculated against the chance of good luck coming to men on a rummage like theirs. This good luck, nevertheless, had coincided with their track in space; and to some extent, it appeared, that was not wholly because of blind chance; it had happened, too, because of a little artful designing by knowledge and intelligence. Norrie, with that, then looked round the camp, not perhaps as if his interest in life had gone, but as if that particular day and place had failed in savour for him.
“We shall get used to this scene, Colet. A sort of home.”
Colet followed his friend’s glance. The immense front of the forest on the opposite bank was still majestic and illegible. It was the same forest? Well, when he saw it first it had seemed outside time. Once he had seen it as a symbol of that which does not pass with the episodes of passing men; it was superior to days and nights. The cry of the tiger in the night, while he was sleepless, watching the stars, not knowing what was to happen on the morrow, was only a disturbing but relevant note in a great passage. Yet something hardly definable had happened to his view of it all. Good fortune had changed it. Perhaps the forest itself was no different; maybe he was not exactly the same man, and so could not see things as he did before. What was lost?
It was extraordinary, but the discovery of the hoard afforded them less to talk about than had such a trivial matter as the song of an unknown bird. Yet now the song of the bird passed unremarked. Tin did not prompt Norrie, now he had plenty of it, to a pleasing similitude of his old relish of Malay fables, which have no market value, though they can keep a camp-fire bright till late. The assurance of much tin induced in Norrie even a certain correctitude. He could no longer abjure their Chinaman with his accustomed histrionic abandon. He was direct, and saved time.
Colet, reviewing it all, while Norrie was diligently drawing a map, rebuked himself. He ought to feel excited. No good. He didn’t. What does not excite the interest cannot be made to do so by any deliberate concentration of reason. If intelligent discontent is the beginning of progress, is it also the end of happiness? Of all the frauds of the sensational drama, this joy on access of riches, this elation on the discovery of the treasure chest, as though it were wealth, was the silliest. There was nothing in it. More seemed to be lost than was gained. That was hardly fair of the law of compensation. One’s light was not turned up, but down. Colet had hinted to Norrie that there was not so much blithe interest in these abundant and exclusive details of business, this strict adherence to the mining law of the country, as there used to be in his sparkling nonsense. Norrie’s eyebrows moved in surprise at a consequence of good fortune which he had not remarked. Then he assumed a show of his drollery.
“Of course, I’m purged of dross. Fever and the tin have done it. I’m pure now. I’ve got salvation, I feel almost kind. Too kind to be lighthearted.”
Almost impious to say damn the tin, but Colet had that desire.
It was night, and Norrie, still at his work, not present enough in the body to notice that his pipe was out, sat beside a lamp. An apparition formed by the camp-fire.
“Sorry to disturb you. May I come in?”
Norrie scrambled to his feet in quick alarm, but before he was upright he had recovered himself. A glance had satisfied him.
“Come along in.”
The stranger entered, and sat on a box between the friends, looking in appeal from one to the other, as would a child that had been naughty, but was sick. This elderly and bearded man, with the tired, but open and wondering eyes, was sick. His wrecked shirt held to but one shoulder, and its neglect of the other exposed an ugly boil on the upper arm. Only his grizzled beard filled the hollows of his cheeks. He took off a soiled helmet, and arranged it on the floor with what might have been an amusing care for the battered relic, or it was the hesitancy of a man who was preoccupied. His delicate cranium was bald, except for a m
onk-like but untidy tonsure.
“I was very glad to see your camp-fire. My Malay guide, an exceptionally good man, was lost. Is the river here the Sungei Buloh?”
“No,” said Norrie, “you’ve taken the wrong turning. The Buloh is five miles down stream. What are you making for?”
“Mount Berching. I shall cross the divide into Perak about there. My name, by the way, is Parsell.”
Norrie, astonished, had taken his pipe out of his mouth, and had held it away for an intent inspection of their visitor. Now he put his pipe beside him and leaned forward, with his hands clasped.
“Parsell the ethnologist, the author of the ‘Mon-Khmer Influence in South-eastern Asia?’ ”
The veteran gnome looked quite pleased.
“You know my name, then? Curious, curious!”
Norrie was clearly perplexed. He sang out for the Chinaman, and gave him some instructions. He stroked his nose. He looked with wariness at Colet, as if for a cue.
“No need to ask you, sir, what you are doing here. Didn’t you mention Gunong Berching?”
“I am making for that point.”
To Colet it was plain that if Norrie had addressed him in the matter of that mountain, it would have been in a few choice words to demolish a folly.
“Do you think you can manage it, Mr. Parsell?”
“Of course I can; why not? That is part of my plan.”
“A good plan. But here, what with the want of food, and the floods and fevers, we have to alter our plans occasionally. It is rough going to Berching, and I should fancy that beyond it the going would be worse. Hardly anything is known about it.”
“Very likely, very likely.” Mr. Parsell spoke with decision, and a hint of asperity. He was unwell and a little crabbed. Nor did he promise to be the kind of man who would listen at any time to the warnings of common sense, not when he was mounted on his hobby.
Norrie, tactfully, tried to draw from him confessions about his supplies, his guide, his men, and the time he had estimated would be necessary for the journey. But these to Mr. Parsell were only negligible details, of small account compared with the pursuit of truth. He was vague about them; he himself was barely concerned. The Chinaman came to them with dishes, Norrie polished his pipe thoughtfully, and Mr. Parsell addressed himself to food in an attitude of abstraction which allowed him but fitfully to acknowledge the nearness of nourishment. Indeed he would pause with entire detachment, fork held loaded and upright but forgotten, to seek, with the cool and disarming inconsequence of a barrister who knew his case, a betrayal of their own notions of the natives they had met. Had they seen any Sekais or Semangs?
Norrie humoured him. More than once Mr. Parsell sat round to look at Norrie squarely and with the unaffected curiosity of a pundit who is surprised by a suspicion that a layman may be not so ignorant as in fairness could be assumed. Yet, when the subject was not his own, he was, despite his bald head, a ragged and helpless infant one would have been prompted to nurse and cherish, if one had known but the way to hold it. The lifted appeal of his fearless but innocent blue eyes moved the paternal instinct in a man. It was not safe for him to be about.
Then, with talk and food, his nervous energy flagged; would they excuse him? He thought he would rest. He would have to make an early start in the morning. Norrie led him to the hammock, which would be easier for his bad shoulder than the floor, and tended him as carefully as though their guest were a wilful but royal orphan. When Mr. Parsell was out of the way, Norrie stood, for a time, staring into the night; then he turned to Colet with a wry smile.
“We shall have to stop this,” he whispered. “There’s enough hantus here.”
Chapter XXXIII
Mr. Parsell did not make an early start. He found their Malays and the situation of the camp too attractive. The awe of the Malays for this eager and energetic little man, who mystified them with his ease among their secrets, was manifest; no doubt they thought he was mad, and the favoured of God. He knew things which were hidden even from Tuan Norrie, and wizards should be carefully reconciled. Norrie watched the play about the hut of his men with amused concern.
“Colet, he knows more, about those fellows than they know themselves. He has scared them. He isn’t aware of it, but he could order them to heel like dogs. I wish I could.”
“You’ve heard of the old boy before, Norrie?”
“But naturally. Who hasn’t? I knew his work before I could play dominoes. And we meet him here at last. That’s how the surprises are sorted for us.”
“What about this journey of his? Can it be done?”
“Yes. Almost anything can be done, by the right people. What do you think?”
“That he won’t go far.”
“No, he won’t. Not if I can stop it. We can’t afford to lose men like Parsell.”
“You won’t stop that man.”
“Then he will die. You or I might manage that traverse, with any luck, but Parsell—it would be as reasonable to expect a kitten with a brick to come home after being dropped in the river. He’d never be heard of again.”
“You won’t stop him.”
“You don’t think he can be frightened into going back with us?”
“Frightened? I say Norrie, did you see his eyes? When they are fixed on what he thinks may be the truth he wouldn’t see Apollyon in his path.”
“Eh?” Norrie became alert, and turned to his friend, frowning, as if a new thought troubled him. He shook his head sadly. “Colet, you think so? But of course you do. There are such fools in the world. I rather fancy you’re another, and that’s how you know.”
Colet lit his pipe. Norrie, devising with resourcefulness fancies in the macabre which pictured that region as the portal to every horror of the soul, wondered whether a selection would be useful when arguing with Parsell, to warn him off. Colet smiled, but did not answer. At the end of the recital he explained that, as far as he could see, the only way to head off a man like Parsell was to give him an injection. That man would not go forward only if he could not move. Then, indifferently, he asked some questions of Gunong Berching and the country beyond; but Norrie ignored them.
“It’s no good talking about it. You know what this land is like. It has nothing to do with the case. It’s like talking of walking the waves. The man can’t do it. He simply can’t.”
Mr. Parsell came towards them quickly and nervously, his head thrust forward.
“You see,” said Norrie; “he doesn’t know even enough to regulate his speed in this climate. He oughtn’t to have been allowed out.”
“How interesting your men are, gentlemen. Most useful to me.” Mr. Parsell chuckled with a little vanity. “They will be wondering how I knew what part of the country they came from, and I’d never seen them before. Simple, simple. They tell you themselves, but don’t know it. Perhaps you have guessed it already, but they dislike this locality. What they had to say about it was a little mine to me. You’ll excuse me, but I think you will lose them soon. You ought to know that.”
“I know it, Mr. Parsell. We’re turning back here. We’re returning to the coast. You will find our company helpful, if you would care to travel with us.”
“My dear sir. My dear sir. I go on, of course. My work is far from finished.”
There was a brief silence, and then Colet turned to him, with deference.
“I don’t think you understand, sir, what lies ahead. There are very few natives above this point. The main range of the peninsula will have to be crossed, and that has not been done from here. On the other side of it you will be in the unknown till you get to the middle reaches of the Perak river. What we fear is, sir, that you will die.”
“Young man, it is very good of you. But I have considered that.”
“Sorry, sir, but you speak as if that did not matter.”
Mr. Parsell made a gesture, glanced round as though for a more interesting subject, and walked away to the hut.
“Well, Norrie, this ethnologist’s strong point
isn’t humour, is it?”
“Of course it isn’t. It never is with these fanatics. In the Middle Ages he’d have been a holy martyr, but now he is only a scientist, offering his life for a ha’porth of facts.”
“What are we to do?”
“What is there to do? Damn the man. Why did he turn up? Isn’t life complicated enough? We can’t go doddering across Malaya behind an inspired crackpot following the Holy Grail, can we? Got something else to do. I wish he hadn’t come. There’s quite enough worries in life, without wondering what one ought to do.”
Chapter XXXIV
The two partners were sitting together, pulling on their marching boots. They were returning east, to the China Sea coast, and Mr. Parsell would set out for an Indian Ocean beach. Their Chinaman placed beside them their breakfast. Parsell was over with the Malays. He preferred their circle. The last Colet had seen of him the night before was his back against the firelight of the men’s hut, with the Malays about him. The men knew he was different. An odd character; his simplicity had an importunity which compelled you to defer your own affairs, as though it were the appeal of an innocence which, so you guessed, knew more than its blue eyes rumoured. To Colet then the man was an intimidation which could not be ignored, however much he pretended that it was not really there. Something would have to be done. Parsell certainly had recovered. The respite of a few days, and Norrie’s careful feeding, had so changed the man that occasionally he had intervals of jocosity, elfish phases of erudition which, when the other two men had recovered from their start, caused them to laugh a little awkwardly. Norrie, though, said the benefit would only help Parsell into a further and deeper slough; but the idea that he could be persuaded out of his alarming project was abandoned. It was not worth trying. It was an immovable resolution. The man was going.
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