“In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood astray,
Gone from the path direct. And e’en to tell
It were no easy task, how savage wild
That forest, how robust and rough its growth … scarce the ascent
Began, when, lo! a panther, nimble, light,
And covered with a speckled skin appeared …”
You’d think he’d written it on Gunong Barat, he thought, glad when Kirkby crawled from under the net and told him to get some kip.
After breakfast he sighted bearings on visible hill-points and plotted them. “Hey,” he called from a ledge of higher rock. “You know how far we’ve come so far?” Nobody guessed. “One thousand three hundred paltry yards,” he yelled. “We’re a thousand feet above where we set off yesterday.”
“Three more days. It looks as if you’re going to be right,” Odgeson said to Knotman, who merely nodded and slung on his pack, ready to lead upstream.
A waterfall — two ashen lines on a green limestone cliff — meant another climb up through the jungle to get round it. Some falls twisted like threads of snow down easy slopes and were overcome on all fours, but mostly the sheer cliffs were dangerous to scale with such anchoring packs. At tunes the sores on Brian’s back forced their pain into the open, making him lag behind until he could bear weight resting on them again. By the end of the day, he had worn down their stings, knew it was only a matter of time before the skin hardened and he didn’t notice it any more — like the first time he’d gone with soft hands into the factory. Sweat dripped from his face as he toiled in the rear-guard, his whole body — legs and armpits, belly and groin and shoulder blades — caked in salt.
“What’s the matter?” Knotman asked, seeing him shift his pack around. “I’ve got the galloping singapores,” Brian said. “The bleeders itch and chafe.”
“I’ve got ’em as well, only mine are the galloping rangoons.” They sat around and smoked, everyone dwelling on his sores. Jack claimed the galloping hong-kongs, and Odgeson laughed at the idea of being stricken with the galloping penangs. “I’ve just got bleeding scabs on my bad back,” Kirkby raged, “and I wish they’d gallop away.” Hard biscuits and chocolate were handed around, tin mugs dipped at their feet for water.
They sat among boulders in a scattered group, and a small green-fringed bird perched on a bough they all could see. Probably no human being had been there for years, since it wasn’t on the way anywhere and nothing grew there that men wanted. Even elephants had disappeared from that particular dent of the mountains. Jack quietly raised his.303, aimed, and shot the air wide open. The bird fell on a rock, red mixed with green. “With my crossbow I shot the albatross,” Brian laughed.
“Fortunately for us,” Baker said, “it was only some jungle sparrow, otherwise Brian’s right: we’d really be in the shit.” Knotman gazed at the bird, stroking the stubble across his chin. “You’d better go easy on the ammo”—meaning: “You cruel bastard: you didn’t need to shoot it.”
“Every bullet we fire is less to carry,” Jack said, back on his feet. “This pack’s giving me hell.”
“Why did we bring rifles anyway?” Brian thought aloud. “They weigh an effing ton.”
Odgeson laughed: “Instinct. Nobody questioned it, did they?”
“Nobody questions bogger all. I wouldn’t take a rifle in Sherwood Forest, and this place ain’t more dangerous.”
“What about that tiger you saw last night, then?” Jack asked.
“That worn’t no tiger,” Kirkby jeered. “More like a shadder: yo’ lot’s a bag o’ nerves.”
“It was something big,” Knotman said. “I saw it, and so did Brian.” Standing to the renewed weight of his pack before starting, Brian wondered whether he had. Noise of twigs and a shadow blacker than those around, then a cascade of bullets chasing it: the obtruding terrors of imagination that might or might not have added up to a tiger. Maybe I was seeing things, though it’s hard to believe Knotman was. As long as I didn’t wing it, because there was no need.
He sat by one of the two heaped fires during the night, and the few yards of swirling stream held forth a pair of luminous pinheads growing slowly to green eyes, then diminishing again. Rushing water had filled his ears for days, was so familiar (like the factory at the yard-end in Radford) that the noise was no longer noticed. Only at certain times — like now when his mind turned fully to wondering what the phosphorescent lights across the stream belonged to — did the sound rush back. From humps of net-protected blanket someone grunted in his sleep: lucky sod — I expect he’s a long way out of this, on the back row at the pictures with his juicy young girl. I wish I was dead to the wide and dreaming away. The eyes still shone. Not another tiger, he hoped, and was about to laugh out like a donkey, but instead raised his rifle to fire before he got too terrified to do so. The eyes drifted apart and vanished, and he stared out each one until he had to close and refocus his own eyes. If the others knew I’d been frightened at a couple of fireflies, he laughed. The trouble is I’m too ready to lift this bleeding rifle when it’s not needed, almost as bad as Jack. A bullet never did anybody any good. I’ll jump at my own shadow next.
“What’s going on?” Baker demanded from the other fire.
“Nothing.” He laid more wood on the embers, and was startled by a dancing scuffle from Baker, whose shotgun exploded with a dull roar, the wake of its echo filled with curses. “What’s up?” Brian cried.
“A snake. It just uncoiled near my boot.”
“You want your brains testing.”
“I’m not the only one,” Baker said.
Even though each morning the amount of stuff to be packed diminished because of food eaten, it was hard to fit everything in. Blankets, capes, mosquito-nets, food, and ammunition lay scattered around waiting to find a place in the packs. It looked as if someone had tipped a dustbin over.
They set off for the third day. No greater distance was spanned, but it was accomplished with less grumbling and exertion. At one place they saw the peak, a scarf of white cloud across its throat, two thousand feet above. “Tomorrow night,” Knotman said, “and we’ll be up there looking down on where we are now.” Everyone derided this, argued that by the look of it they’d be on top tonight, or early in the morning. Knotman hitched up his pack and went on, whistling to himself a good fifty yards in front.
“But when a mountain’s foot I reached where closed
The valley that had pierced my heart with dread,
I looked aloft and saw his shoulders broad
Already vested with that planet’s beam,
Who leads all wanderers safe through every way.”
“What’s that?” Jack said, catching up.
“Poetry.”
“I thought it was. You like poetry, man?” Baker and Odgeson overtook them: Brian heaved a swig from his waterbottle. “Sure.” He was bone-tired and exhilarated, caught in the jungle with water that seemed continually pouring through his heart. They tramped on, boots clashing over beds of small stones, stepping carefully across green-mould rocks. The peak was out of sight. A bird in the stream brought them to the foot of another waterfall. The file became a group, realized it was impossible to scale the cliff, made another file that went into the jungle.