Brian dragged himself up by a bush root, eyes following the slow-lifting pair of mud-stained boots in front. Sixteen hundred yards a day was still the average. You’d starve on piece-work at sixpence a hundred. Even a bob wouldn’t be much cop. We’ll go ten times as quick on the way down, though if I do come on another lark like this I wain’t carry so much stuff. Eighty pounds is a mug’s game, tins of snap chafing my back to boggery when all we need is a load of biscuits and a few mashings o’ tea and sugar. Like the Japs: a bundle o’ rice and off they went.
Coming out of the jungle, the stream had narrowed: large fallen trees lying more often across it had either to be clambered over or crawled underneath. They came to the foot of a water falling from the sky itself. It shook down in white streams, scarves gathered at evenly spaced ledges, and was transported with slow-intentioned gentleness into a pool of clear green water. “Maybe that’s the top of the mountain,” Odgeson said hopefully, but it turned out not to be. The watercourse no longer roared, was thinner and more rhythmic in its travelling the higher they climbed. To reach the escarpment top meant another spell among the trees. There were no paths and they kept by instinct to the line of the stream. Brian chopped and hacked until his muscles turned as dead as the wood under his feet. Fallen trees, overgrown with shrubbery and blocking his way, often proved to be no more than huge cylinders of purple soil held into shape by the tree’s covering of bark, which took longer to decompose: he stepped on to what had once been a tree or log and sank into soft soil. The only sign of life came from a few ants scurrying busily over the leaves or one or two leeches looping towards them like pieces of live bootlace. The whole place stank like a shit-house, Kirkby called on taking over the lead. When they stood still there was no sound but the distant spate of water from the falls or the music of a few birds in the treetops. And when they moved there was only the crashing of six men imposing their momentary will on the primeval forest, a splitting of shrubbery soon lost down the empty valleys. In the flashpan sunlight of a sudden emergence to the stream, an iguana darted into hiding.
On a ledge overlooking the valley, they hacked bushes down to make room for a fire and beds. Jack found a huge, beautifully green grasshopper with antennae-like feelers going out from it. Brian edged it away with his boot, but Jack slammed it with the rifle-butt. It still wouldn’t move, so Baker came up with the shotgun and blew it to bits. A battery of mess-cans sizzled on the fire: spam, meat and veg, tea, fruit pudding, cheese and biscuits. By seven those not on guard crept under the nets to sleep.
Brian and Knotman took the first two hours, talked in low voices: “What are you going to do when you get out?”
“Find a job, I expect,” Brian said. “I don’t know what at, though. I was on a lathe before I got dragged up: only a couple o’ years ago, but it seems a century. Christ, I’ll be glad to get back to Pauline, though.” This last wish came into the open before he had known she was on his mind, a fervent cry that surprised him in the pause that followed. “You get your ticket soon, don’t you?” he said, to break it.
Knotman reached to the fire for a light. “At Christmas — just a few months after you. They can get somebody else to guard their played-out Empire then. Not that they won’t, though: there’s one born every minute. They’ve made use of me for seven years, and now I’m going to do all I can to balls them up. Not by way of revenge, mind you: it’s just second nature, and I’ll enjoy doing it in a light-hearted sort of way.” He spoke in an easy, yet tired voice, giving Brian the impression that maybe it was possible for him to undermine the British Empire all by himself. “Sure sure, I volunteered to stay on in the air force”—having expected Brian to point this out — “but I was crazy, I admit that. I thought the Germans would want keeping under a few more years, but from fighting fascism I found myself helping the fascists out here. All I want to do now is get my hands on some hard work for a change, and if any of the friends I make happen to say they believe in the British Empire, I’ll be in a good position to tell ’em a few things about it. Not that I’ll get all hot and bothered, because they wouldn’t believe me if I did. No, I’ll drop it like a wise man who knows what he’s talking about.”
“You sound like a resistance fighter,” Brian laughed.
“No, I’m just talking. It’s so quiet in this jungle.”
“That’s what you think,” Baker called from under his net. “Don’t you two bolsheviks know that all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds?”
Dawn was grey, opened to a slow drizzle and the sound of Baker emptying his rifle down the valley, one bullet chasing another into silence while Knotman got up to make a breakfast of steam pudding and milk. An early start was planned against the summit, and waterbottles were dipped in what was left of the Sungei Pawan, because no more would be found until they crossed to watercourses on the far side of the mountain wall.
Breaking away from the stream, the undergrowth turned from moist into brittle and thorny, covering each hand and arm with shallow but livid tears, which in Brian’s flesh seemed to fester while he looked at them. It was no longer a question of conquering the mountain, to look out with pride and exultation from its summit, but only to keep on climbing, stay locked in the treadmill of intentions formed in idle dreamlike hours that had never comprehended the reality of this. What good’s it going to do us? he thought. Fuck-all. Crash — his kukri flew at a sapling of thorns, and down it went, held under by his agile boot so that Kirkby, following, wouldn’t be cut with it. They hoped to reach the top by evening and light a fire for all at the camp (twenty-five miles off) to see. The thought of this grandiose plan had excited him during the long weeks of preparation, but now that he was close to it his enthusiasm went, tempered to a hidden-away part of him by the long drag up from the coastal lowlands.
Bushes thinned, and for the next five hours they climbed without resting either to talk or drink water. Sweat, helped by the high-up blistering sun, poured out of him like a refugee soul, and after midday they walked into damp forest covering the steep surface of the escarpment — glad for once to enter it because the next clear daylight would come when they broke on to the actual summit. In places the vegetation gave way to grey-humped cliff, which on Knotman’s advice they circuited. “You wouldn’t be up to much if you slipped a couple of thousand feet,” he told Baker, who was all for going like a fly over the smooth surface. Then an hour was spent fighting another belt of thorn bushes, a strange misplaced preliminary to a pull-up through more wet forest, clinging to vines and creepers with the tenuous strength of curses and worn-out hands, arched laden backs crawling under fallen tree, boots caught in damp messes of soil. Brian no longer wanted to get to the top for the unparalleled view it would give (higher than any he’d seen) but only because the climbing would end, the expedition be as good as over. That in itself was enough to keep his legs moving. There’s no point in climbing a mountain unless there’s some purpose behind it, like to make a map or get food, collect wood or stake out a place to live, he thought, locked in his prison of leaves and branches that remained the same in spite of a continual movement.