When day did come, it approached like thought: impossible to say from where. Grey light crept out of the fibre of each bush, escaped from thin leaf veins to show bodies sleeping roundabout and tree trunks developing a neutral though positive shade. They rolled blankets in silence, were damp and exhausted, each face showing the bewildering fight of attempted sleep. Baker passed around biscuits spread thickly with jam, hard to get down the throat on a swallow of water.
Mist cleared while they were packing, a curtain drawn from a vast area of north Malaya. Below and far into the distance, long bars of white mist were drifting across lesser summits and spurs, breaking up over rice fields and coastal swamps as the sun gained strength. Smaller hills of Gunong Barat reared at them from across the valley, whose waterline, hundreds of feet below, was buried deep in the green furrowed jungle.
Loftier mountains, far to the south, formed a low line of blue amorphous summits in the far-off sky. Small villages were dotted about the coast, lay in loops and bends of silver rivers that twisted from the hills towards greener landscapes, mingled with mangrove swamps, and entered the indistinct frontiers of the sea.
“That’s a view and a half,” said Jack. “It’s a pity you can’t drink it, though.” Baker thought it the least they could expect after a four-day climb. Brian had nothing to say, yet when they began filing down into the forest, he held back and was the last to leave. It was too much to grasp in a mere few minutes, impossible to carry away so soon. He wanted to stay until the sight of it drove him down by its familiarity, to sit where he was for a long smoke and look of contemplation at the land spread out below in choicer and more living colours than the most artistically produced map. All this climb, he thought, hearing the others already on the crashing descent, and I’ve got to leave it. I might never come up here, or any other such mountain, again — which put such a dismal shadow over his heart that the next thing he knew he was ploughing with drawn kukri into the cool gloom and familiar dank smells of the wood.
They came to the brink of a precipice, a thousand-foot sleeve of grey rock on the mountainside blocking the way to water farther west, so they backed up three hundred feet and found a thin ledge with a few bushes and shrubs growing on its surface. Baker pushed his paybook into Brian’s hand: “My will’s in there.” Brian shrugged and stuffed it into his shirt pocket: “Don’t blame me if I lose it, you loon.”
Knotman dropped his pack and was feeling a way over, looking like a brigand with unshaven face, dirty clothes, and rifle sticking above his broad shoulders. He spanned the first gap, his legs a pair of compasses about to draw a circle in empty air, hands clutching the rock above. The sky was blank below him for hundreds of feet, a few insecure bushes sprouting out occasionally. Fascinated by such peril, Brian wondered whether it would have been lessened had they talked among themselves and ignored him. Jack threw down his cigarette and leapt forward, even before Knotman’s boot-studs had stopped sliding.
He hung from a bush, his boots waving methodically about for a foothold: “Stay where you are,” he called hoarsely. “I’ll be all right.” Brian already wondered how they’d get down to the plain if Knotman brained or injured himself, and how they’d find him if he fell like a stone into the treetop forest below.
He made footholds, coaxed the fair weight of his body slowly back, his rifle a guiding finger of safety at the ledge he was trying to reach. He stayed still a moment, seemed to relax his efforts as if uncertain whether or not it was worthwhile saving himself. No one spoke, fearing to break the spell of survivaclass="underline" then he gathered strength for a terrific pull-up, and was on the ledge from which he had fallen.
He organized a chain to get the rest of them over. Brian stood with feet spanning two gaps in the rockface, unafraid only because he resisted looking up or down as he reached for packs and rifles passed to him, easing them over his chest to the next pair of hands.
On the other side they sat for a smoke, and Brian unhooked his waterbottle. “I’d save it,” Knotman said.
Brian opened the map: “We’ll reach water soon.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Knotman replied. So he didn’t drink, though his throat felt like cracked celluloid.
They went in single file, bushes curving overhead, wet leaves brushing hands that swung at creepers as they skirted the roots of great trees — against which they occasionally crashed if accelerated by weakness and a top-heavy load. Brian felt done-for, and crouched under creepers rather than drag energy to his bones and chop them out of the way. The brown whip-like tail of a snake disappeared through the leaves, a sight that cleared his vision and gave back strength. The last thing he wanted was a skinful of poison, so he walked upright. He stayed in the lead to go at his own rate rather than follow someone else’s pack, for the more exhausted he grew the quicker became his pace — though never so great that the others were left too far behind. A look of effort marked everyone: they came down with kukris no longer used, and loads bearing no resemblance to the neat shape of a pack. Their shirts were dark with sweat and soil patches, trousers and sleeves torn, faces set hard with tiredness, and a week’s growth under slouched bush hats — coming through the tunnels of the forest, fatigued at having climbed a small upshoot of the earth on which they were lost like insects.
He turned, to slosh at creepers in a new-found strength that kept him ahead, swinging with joy down each bank that lay in his path, until one led him between lips of brown soil that formed the dry bed of a stream. He followed it, stepping over lichen-covered boulders, and soon saw water jerking out of a spring, the beginning of a stream copious enough to sink his tin mug when he threw it in. “I was ready to do a Rupert Brooke on you,” Baker said, “in the corner of this foreign field. Brian has my will, so it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“We were lucky to find water so soon,” Odgeson thought.
“It was due to my good navigation,” Brian claimed. “I steered by the sun and had my map open all the way.”
“You couldn’t see the sun,” Baker cried, pulling off his boots, “and the map you drew is no bloody good.”
“You won’t be able to get them on again if they’re wet,” Knotman said. Baker ignored him: “I could have steered better with my cock,” he called to Brian.
“If there’d bin a brothel down here, I suppose you could.”
Tributaries came in by thorn-covered gullies as they tramped along, unnoticeable until threads of water were elbowed from under bushes by their side. They reached an island in the stream and split up for the evening tasks. Baker sat on a rock in his underwear, patching his trousers, while Jack and Brian were high up the bank, filling the air with the splinter of branches and dragging wood back to the fire.
It grew dark, and water formed two phosphorescent humps as it dropped into a deep pool at the foot of the cliff face. Fire shadows danced at the bordering wall of the forest a few yards away, and they ate a hot meal, back in the familiar sound of water travelling out of nowhere into nowhere, a stream that hurried by six men locked in the shadows of the forest, mocking the purposelessness of their journey as it passed.
Brian lit a cigarette and lay back, stars like the eyes of fishes set between black tree-shapes towering about. The primeval noise of the water receded into another locker of his mind, leaving his immediate senses in a vacuum of half-consciousness. Then the noise poured back into his brain and ears and he heard Baker say: “It looks as if Seaton’s asleep”—so he pulled off his shirt and swilled himself in the icy water, then, in spite of its sting, fell straight into a deep blank slumber.