IN CHAINS
IT WAS rather more than five and twenty years ago that I returned from leave of absence in Europe, and took charge of the district which forms the interior of the native state of Pahang, and is the exact core and centre of the Malay Peninsula. It was a big tract of country, over three thousand square miles in extent, and in those days. was reckoned the wildest part of the protected Malayan states. It did not boast a mile of made road or bridle path in all its vast expanse; it was smothered in deep, damp forest, threaded across and across by a network of streams and rivers, the latter the best of our highways; and a sparse sprinkling of Malay villages was strewn over its surface—a dozen or two of thatched roofs in shady palm and fruit groves adjoining wide, flat stretches of rice-field and grazing grounds studded with rhododendron scrub. Besides the Malay population there were a few camps filled with Chinese miners engaged in fossicking for gold: a band or two of sulky Australian prospectors, sorely discontented with the results which they were obtaining; and an odd thousand or so of squalid aborigines, living in dirt and wretchedness up in the mountains. For the rest the inhabitants of my district were native chiefs. the overlords and oppressors, and Malayan villagers, the serfs and the
oppressed. The power of the former (which was
usually exerted for evil) had not yet been broken or
fettered; the spirit of independence which to-day
animates the latter class had not at that time been
awakened, and the world into which I was suddenly
precipitated an influence shot straight out of the
civilized nineteeth century into a living past-was
one as primitive as any which existed in Europe in
the early Middle Ages.
I had a hut on the banks of the Lipis River, a single
room staggering upon six crazy piles some fifteen
feet in height, which was at once my dwelling, my
office, my treasury, and my courthouse. The ceiling
was formed by the browny-yellow thatch running
up into a cone, supported upon an irregular arrange-
ment of beams and rafters in which by day the big,
black, flying beetles bored their holes, covering me
with fine wood dust, while at night-time the rats
chased one another along them, squeaking dismally.
When I looked out of my window, a little lopsided
oblong of sunlight sawn unevenly out of the ragged
bamboo wattle, my sight dropped fifty feet sheer into
the olive-green waters of the Lipis, for the long stalk-
like legs upon which the flooring of my hut rested
were canted dangerously riverward. From under
their feet the bank fell away in a headlong pitch, so
that I lived in the expectation of seeing my habita-
tion take a leap into the cool waters of the stream;
and when the wind came down in the heavy gusts
which, in the spring, heralded the daily afternoon downpour, I could feel the whole thing bracing itself
for the jump, with a creaking of timbers and a noisy
whining of the strained wattling.
It was not much of a hut, it must be confessed, and
I speedily got myself into much better quarters; but
in those days I stood in no great need of a dwelling-
place of my own. The district under my charge
was extensive and it seemed to be cut off from the
rest of the world almost as effectually as would have
been the case if it had been located on the surface
of some alien planet. I had been set apart from
my fellow civil servants to learn all that was possible
concerning it, to win the shy confidence of a people
to whom white men were a new and suspect breed,
to make myself a factor in their everyday life, and
thereby to establish a personal influence among them,
The which, in a new land, is the first, surest founda-
tion of British rule. All this meant that it was my
lot to rival the restlessness of the Wandering Jew;
to sleep rarely more than a single night in the same
casual resting-place; to live on what I could get,
which often enough did not amount to much; and
little by little so to familiarize the natives with my
ubiquity that they should come to regard me and my
visits as among the commonest incidents in the ex-
perience of every village scattered up and down a wide
countryside.
It would not be easy to conceive a life more delight-
ful for a healthy youngster blessed with a keen in-
terest in the much which he was learning and in the
little that he was slowly and cautiously teaching. A hurried meal soon after the dawn had broken; a
long tramp from village to village while daylight
lasted; a swim in the river; a huge plate of rice and
curry, cooked by the womenfolk of the place and
caten with a hunter’s appetite; a smoke and a yarn
with the elders of the place, pieturesque figures
grouped around one in a semicircle, chewing betel
nut, as the placid cattle masticate the end; a dis-
pute or two, perhaps, settled between smoke and
smoke, without any magisterial formalities; a shred
or two of information picked up here and there upon
matters which would some day be of importance;
and then sound, soul-satisfying sleep, and early
waking, and another long day of labour and of life.
By boat and raft on rivers small or great; tramping
through the gloomy depths of forests hitherto un-
explored by white men or across rice-swamps sizzling
in the midday heat; camping at night in my boat on
the river, in a headman’s house under the peaked roof
of a little village mosque, or in some crop watcher’s
laut; sleeping out on a sandbank, or on the ground in
the dead jungle, with my mat spread upon a bed of
bonghis and with a green palm-leaf shelter to ward off
the worst of the drenching dews; shooting rapids,
paddling down or poling up the rivers; skimming the
cream of inviolate snipe grounds, or watching for
game on the edge of a salt-lick-however I travelled,
wherever I stayed or halted, no matter who the
strange folk with whom I daily consorted, I tasted
to the full the joys of a complete independence, the
delights of fresh, open air and hard exercise, and enough work to keep the mind as fit and supple as the
limbs. I had been jerked out of the age in which I
had been born, out of the scurry and bustle of Euro-
pean life, out of touch with the mechanical contriv.
ances which restrict a man’s freedom of action and
judgment and cause his love of responsibility to
atrophy into a world of unfettered freedom among a
semi-civilized people, where nature still had her own
way unchecked by the intrusions of applied science,
and where men and things were primitive and ele-
mental.
I had had plenty of experience as a jungle-dweller
long before I look charge of the interior district of
Palang; and since a knowledge of how to travel and
how to live in a Malayan forest land is more than
half the battle, I escaped, for the most part, the
heavy troubles of which so many newcomers are
able to tell such moving tales. None the less, the
jungles played their pranks with me more than once,
and the first trip which I took after my return to
duty was packed as closely with small adventures
as is the average boy’s book with hair-breadth es-
capes and perils miraculously overcome.
I left my hul early one morning with half a dozen
of my Malay followers trailing behind me in single
file. A Gladstone bag, a japanned despatch box,
and a large basket carried knapsackwise, and filled
to the brim with cooking-pots, plates, dishes, and
miscellaneous kitchen utensils, were the three princi-
pal loads. A fourth man carried my bed. I remem-
ber thinking, when I was a small boy, that the facility with which the man sick of the palsy complied with
the divine command, “Take up thy bed, and go unto
thine house,” was the major part of the miracle;
and this impression was confirmed by a picture in the
old family Bible, in which the whilom invalid was
represented staggering away under the weight of a
vast four-poster. It was not until I came to the
East that I realized how simple a matter is the sleep-
ing gear of the average Oriental. My “bed” con-
sisted of a native mat of plaited mengkuang palm
leaves, a narrow flock mattress, half an inch in thick-
ness, and a couple of European pillows. The whole
thing did not weigh more than twenty pounds, unless it
was saturated with rain water, when it tipped the scale
at about double that figure. It had the additional
advantage of possessing no sharp corners of projec-
tions calculated to gall the bearer’s back, and con-
sequently it was the most popular piece of my bag-
gage, and was usually annexed by the strongest and
most violent-tempered of my men. The unyielding
despatch box generally fell to the lot of the man
among my followers who was least capable of stick-
ing up for his rights and who was accordingly the
least fit to bear the burden.
It was a bright, cool morning when we started with
a little ribbon of cloudlike mist showing above the
treetops as one looked up the valley of the Lipis,
marking faithfully the windings of the river. The
birds were noisy and a few gayly feathered paroquets
fluttered from bush to bush as we made our way
through the low scrub jungle near the bank of the stream. The spiders had been busy all night, and
their slimy webs stretched across the footpath we
were following glued themselves so unpleasantly to
my face that, contrary to iny wont, I bade Akob, one
of my men, walk in front of me to keep the way
clear of these frail barriers. In this manner we had
trudged along steadily for a couple of hours and the
heat of the tropical day was already beginning to
make itself felt, stilling the noisy life of the jungle
and drying up the dewdrops, when suddenly Akob
halted abruptly and pointed, in evident excitement,
at something ahead of him. We were standing on
the brink of a narrow creek on either side of which a
steeply cleft bank rose at a sharp angle from the
water’s edge. Leaning forward to look over Akob’s
shoulder, I saw half a dozen yards away, upon the
surface of the opposite bank, a curious patch, ir-
regular in shape, and discoloured a peculiarly blended
black and yellow. It had a strange furry appearance,
but shimmered with a suggestion of restless life.
All this I noted in an instant, not realizing in the
least the nature of the object at which I was gazing;
and then, without any warning, the patch rose at us,
rose like a cheap black and yellow railway rug tossed
upward by the wind. A humming, purring sound.
accompanied its flight, and a second later it had
resolved itself into its elements, and had precipitated
itself upon us a swarm of bees, mad with rage and
thirsting for blood and vengeance.
Akob, hiding his head in his arms, slewed round
sharply and charged away, nearly knocking me off my legs. I followed headlong, broke through my
bewildered followers, tore out of the little belt of
jungle which we had just entered and sprinted for
my life across a patch of short grass beyond. For a
moment I believed myself to have given the enemy
the slip, and I turned to watch my people, their
burdens thrown to the winds, tumbling out of cover,
yelling like madmen, and beating the air with their
wildly whirling arms. Another instant and I was
again put to ignominious flight. I pulled my huge
felt hat from my head and flogged with it the cloudlike
squadrons of my foes. All the while I ran as fast
as my legs would carry me, but the bees were not to
be outpaced. They plunged their stings deep into
my flannel shirt and into the tough Cananore cloth
of my rough jungle trousers; they slung my bare
arms, and hands and neck mercilessly, and I had the
greatest difficulty in warding them off my face and
eyes. I was panting for breath, sweating at every
pore and was beginning to feel most uncommonly
done and to experience something akin to real fear,
when suddenly I caught sight of the waters of the
Rengai, a little river which flows through these forests
to the Lipis.
“Take to the water! Take to the water!” (
shouted to my howling men, and only waiting to slip
my pistol belt with its pouches for watch, compass,
money, tobacco, etc., a delay for which I had to pay.
a heavy price in stings, I plunged neck and crop into
the shallow water. My Malays came after me helter-
skelter, like a flock of sheep following at the heels of a bell-wether; but with us all came the army of bees,
stinging, stinging, stinging, for the life.
I was thoroughly winded by the time I took to the
water, and it was impossible to keep under for more
than a few seconds; yet when I rose to the surface
the bees were still there more angry than ever, and
I was driven under again, while my lungs pumped and
sobbed painfully. Again I rose, again was set upon,
again was driven under water. My heart was leap-
ing about in my body like some wild thing seeking to
escape; I was so distressed for breath that my senses.
were reeling; I was rapidly becoming desperate. It
flashed across my mind that to be drowned or stung
to death in a puddle by a swarm of insignificant in-
sects was about as ridiculous and as ignominious
a way of making one’s exit from life as could well
be conceived; yet, at the moment, it seemed almost
certain that this was the preposterous lot which a
capricious fate had assigned to me.
As I came sobbing to the surface to meet yet another
furious assault, I heard Saleh, my head boatman, cry
aloud:
“Throw a bough for them to alight upon!”
The words were in my ears as I was again driven
to dive, and in a flash their meaning was made clear
to me. I struggled toward the bank, tugged off a
branch from an overhanging tree, threw it on the
surface of the stream, and dived once more. One
or two of my men followed suit, and when, having
remained under water as long as I could, I rose once
more in a state of pitiful exhaustion, I saw half a dozen branches floating gayly downstream covered.
three deep by clusters of struggling and stinging bees.
I rose to my feet, waded to the bank, and for a
good quarter of an hour sat there panting and
hawking and fighting to regain my breath. Then
we fell to counting our losses and to estimating the
damage done. One of my men, a Sumatran Malay
named Dolman, was in a fainting condition. He
had been stung in nearly two hundred places; his
face was reduced to a shapeless mass in which no
feature was any longer distinguishable; and he
vomited so violently that I feared for his life. We
put him into a boat and the neighbouring villagers of
Dolut undertook to send him back to my hut at
Penjum. Then the rest of us limped across grazing
grounds to the village and lay down upon the clean
mats spread for us on the veranda of the headman’s
house, where we endured the fever that was burning
in our blood. Our hands were like great boxing
gloves, our heads and faces were swollen, and puffy,
and we had to abandon all idea of proceeding far-
ther upon our journey that day.
We were profoundly sorry for ourselves, and we
were less relieved than disgusted when one of our
number, who had been missing and whom we had
reckoned as dead, came in half an hour later per-
fectly unharmed. He had seen the bees coming,
he told us, and had squatted down and remained
quite still to await their assault. They had covered
him from head to foot; but as a bee is aware that
using his sting usually results in his own death, he never strikes unless he has persuaded himself
that the last sacrifice is demanded of him on behalf
of the hive. Accordingly the clouds of insects had
settled all over my Malay, had investigated him
closely, and then had passed on leaving him unhurt.
It was exasperating to realize that we had had our
frantic stampede, our fight, our suffocation under
water, and the pains we were then enduring for
nothing, and that all might have been avoided by
the exercise of presence of mind coupled with a
sufficiency of cool nerve. The latter, of course, was
the really vital possession and fresh from my recent
encounter, I questioned whether I had enough of
courage in me to enable me to sit calmly under a
load of investigating bees, knowing that a single
voluntary movement would entail a peculiarly pain-
ful and ugly death. Therefore, I sat in silence,
listening to my follower’s account of his proceedings,
while he picked six and thirty stings out of my felt
hat and more than a hundred out of my flannel
shirt.
The bees, he said, were irascible and unreasonable
creatures. Their nest had, on this occasion, been
swooped down upon by a kite, which had borne off
a portion of the nursery before the fighting part of
the population had become aware of the danger.
Then the standing army had been called out, and
sinee we elianced to be the next living thing to come
their way, they had mistaken us for the thieves and
had promptly declared war upon us. Therefore we
had been made to bear the punishment due for the sins of a kite, and had run ourselves dizzy and had
half drowned ourselves in the river when we should
have done better to sit still. The situation was
sufficiently humiliating.
Next day we continued our interrupted march,
and nothing worth detailed record happened for a
week or so. At one village a stealthy visit was paid
to me by three young nobles, whose father had
recently had a difference of opinion with the rulers
of the land, which had resulted for him in a violent
death. His sons who had had no share in their
father’s misdeeds, had promptly taken to the jungle,
and as they were fighting men of some repute, all
manner of wild rumours as to the trouble they were
meditating were afloat in the district on my arrival
in it. I had known them intimately before I left
Pahang on leave, and as soon as they learned that I
was once again in their neighbourhood, they sought
me out for the purpose of talking matters over and,
if possible, of making their peace with the Govern-
ment. They crept into my camp in the dead of
night, armed to the teeth, very apprehensive, and
ready for all eventualities. At first they were like
hunted jungle creatures that feared a trap, but they
ended by spreading their sleeping mats alongside
mine and snoring contentedly until the daybreak
woke us.
Another night I passed in a mining camp, where a
crowd of depressed Australians were squatting in a
couple of makeshift huts beside a pool filled to the
brim with dirty water, green with arsenic and duckweed This was all that at that time represented
the Raub Mine, which later became a rather notori-
ous centre of speculation, and was at one time ex-
pected to prove one of the great gold producers of
the East.
From Ranb I tramped on to the foot of the main
range, where people of many nationalities were
busy shuicing for tin; and thence I decided to cut
across the forest so as to strike the head waters of a
river called the Sempam which at that time had
never been visited by an European and was terr
incognita to all save a very few of even the Malays
of the district.
Not without difficulty I succeeded in enlisting the
services of an aboriginal tribesman-a Sâkai-who
undertook to guide me to the banks of the Sempam,
but stoutly declined to have anything to do with my
proposed attempt to descend that rock-beset river.
He moved along in front of my party, with the
noiseless, catlike gait which distinguishes the jungle-
folk, and once he complained bitterly that the “klap-
klip-klap of my canvas shoes on the ground behind
him was so bewildering that he feared that “the
doors of the jungle would thereby be closed to him.”
which was his way of suggesting that he thought
it likely that he would lose his way. In common
with the rest of his race, he possessed no power of
instituting a comparison between one thing and
another, and when we were within a couple of hum-
dred yards of our destination he still obstinately
maintained that it was as far ahead of us as our orig. inal starting-place was behind us. When, a few
minutes later, this assertion was disproved, he re-
mained quite unabashed. The difference between
the two distances a matter of some seven miles-
was to him, he declared, imperceptible. They were
both “a long way,” and viewed from this standpoint,
they were to the limitations of his intellect indis-
tinguishably alike.
At the point where we struck the Sempam River,
its banks were covered by dense clumps of bamboos
of the kind the Malays call buloh padi, graceful,
drooping stems, tapering to slender shoots five and
twenty feet from the ground, all rising, plumelike,
from a common centre, and set with innumerable
delicate branches and feathery foliage. The river,
at this point about a dozen yards in width, ran
swiftly and silently, an olive-green flood, flecked here
and there by little splashes of sunlight. The forest
around us was intensely still, for the hot hours of the
day were upon us, and a sense of the wildness of
the place and of its utter remoteness from mankind,
filled me with a sort of awe. It was with a feeling akin
to shame that I gave the word which was to disturb
the profound peace and to set man’s defacing thumb
mark upon all this inviolate beauty.
As soon as they had stacked their loads, however,
my men drew their woodknives and set to work
felling bamboos from which to fashion cur rafts.
The ringing notes of their blades simiting the hollow
stems carried far and wide, awaking the forest echoes,
and the bamboos creaked and groaned like things in pain, as one by one they slowly collapsed, toppling
into the river, whence they were towed into the shal-
lows to be trimmed of their branches and cut to the
requisite length. A couple of hours’ hard work saw
four stout rafts floating high out of the water, the
river fretting and fuming about their slippery green
sides, the newly cut rattans exuding a milky sap as
my men bound the bamboos together by means
of strong cross-pieces fore and aft and amidships.
Small raised platforms were erected in the centre.
of each raft, and on three of these we stowed our
baggage. The fourth raft was reserved for me; and
when I had rewarded the Sâkai for his pains with a
wedge of coarse tobacco and a palm-leaf bag filled
with black rock-salt, I took my seat upon the plat-
form prepared for my accommodation and bade my
men push out into the stream.
“In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compas-
sionate!” they cried; and my raft slid across the
glassy surface into the tug of the current, the three
others following us in single file.
Until you have had the good fortune to taste of it,
the peculiar fascination of exploring a belt of coun-
try in which no white man and very few human be-
ings of any kind have hitherto set foot cannot easily
be realized. To find one’s self penetrating, the first
of all one’s kind, into one of Nature’s secret fast-
nesses, where free from the encroachments of man-
kind she has worked her mighty will during cons
upon eons of unrecorded time, is extraordinarily
stimulating to the imagination. One looks round upon a world in the fashioning of which the hand
of man has had no part. Age has succeeded age;
race has swept forward, has surged up and has
obliterated race; history has been made and unmade
a thousand times by myriads of puny men; but all
the while in this hidden cranny of the globe the
great Mother has been working her gradual miracles.
It is old, old, old; older than record; older than
speech; older than man; and yet for you it is newer
than aught else, a secret kept faithfully through all
the ages to be revealed at last to you. You look
around you with a keen delight, with eager eyes that
find a fresh interest in all they light upon, with a
heart chastened by the solemnity, the mystery of
this unfrequented wilderness. The awfulness of your
surroundings, the aloofness from your fellows, the
sense of your exclusive privilege, impart to you a
feeling akin to that by which the newly initiated
priest may be inspired when, for the first time, he
lifts the veil that cloaks the inner temple of his wor-
ship; but here there is no grinning idol to dispel
illusion, but rather a little glimpse vouchsafed to
mworthy man of the vision of the true God.
For nearly an hour we glided downstream through
long, calin reaches, where the sunlight flecked the
dancing waters between banks thickly set by bam-
boo thickets backed by impenetrable forest, and
each bend in the winding river revealed yet another
perfect picture of the beauty and the splendour of
this jungle paradise. We were heading for the un-
known, passing thither through untrodden ways, and at every turn we looked for some surprise, some
difficulty to be encountered and overcome, some wild
prank that this untamed river might try to play
upon us. It lent a fresh zest to our journeying, put
an additional throb of excitement into the scanning
of each reach of running water, as the frequent twist-
ings of our course displayed them to us one by one.
On either hand low hills ran steeply upward from
the water’s edge, smothered in vast clumps of bam-
boos, the stents resembling some gigantic, irregular
palisade crowned by bunch above bunch of feathery
plumes, the highest making a broken, undulating
line of fretwork against the colourless afternoon sky.
Near the river brink huge ngerum trees leaned out-
ward, clasping friendly hands above our heads,
throwing a grateful shade, and staining the waters to
a deeper olive tint with their sombre reflections.
From root to branch tip they were festooned with
innumerable parasites, great tree ferns, smooth or
shaggy, with their roots in deep, rich mosses; orehids
of many kinds with here and there a little point of
colour marking where a rare blossom nestled; creepers
and trailing vines, some cating into the marrow of
the boughs to which they clung, some hanging from
the branches like fine drapery, some twined about
and about in an inextricable network, others drop-
ping sheer to the stream below and swaying con-
stantly as the current played with their tassels.
It was a fairyland of forest through which the river
was bearing us, and I lay back upon my raft, feast-
ing lazy eyes upon the constantly shifting scene, and fully conscious of my own supreme well-being.
How fair was my lot, I thought, compared with
that of the average young civil servant who rarely
got much beyond a pile of dusty files on an over-
loaded office table.
The stream ran rapidly with a merry purring sound
and the rafts, kept end on to the current by polers
at bow and stern, slid forward at an even pace.
Suddenly we whisked round a sharp bend, and be-
fore we knew what awaited us we were caught in the
jaws of a formidable rapid. I was aware of a waste
of angry water, white with foam, stretching away
in front of us; of a host of rugged granite blocks.
black with spray, poking their sharp noses out of the
river, which boiled and leaped around them; of an
instant acceleration of pace, and then I found my
self standing in the bows of the raft, punting pole in
hand, helping ny forward boatman to fight the evil-
tempered thing which a moment earlier had been
the placid, smiling river. We were travelling at a
headlong pace now and the raft reeled and wallowed
and canted with such violence that, even bareshod
as we were, it was no easy matter to keep our footing
on the slippery, rounded surfaces of the bamboos.
Of the length, extent and difficulties of the rapid
into which we had been so suddenly tossed we, of
course. knew nothing. Of prospective dangers,
however, we had no leisure to think, for we were
wholly preoccupied by those which we were already
beset, and every instant decisive action had to be
taken to meet crowding emergencies, grasped, mel and dealt with all in a breath. At the end of a
hundred yards of running fight we reached a point
where the stream was split in twain by a great out-
erop of granite, and in a flash we had to make our
selection between the alternative routes offered.
Instinctively we chose the left-hand channel, which
looked the more likely of the two, and on we whirled
at a perilous pace. The battling waters broke above
my knees; the uproar of the stream deafened me; the
furious pace set every nerve in my body tingling
gloriously; the excitement of each new danger
averted or overcome filled nie and my Malays with a
perfect intoxication of delight. On we whirled,
yelling and shouting like maniacs, plying our clash-
ing poles, leaping down fall after fall, our raft sub-
merged, our souls soaring aloft in a veritable delirium
of excitement. It lasted for only a few moments
and then the end came-came in a jarring crash upon
a rock which we had failed to avoid, a violent thrust
ing upward of one side of the raft till it ran almost
on edge, a sudden immersion in the wildly agitated
water, and three sharp yells, stiffed ere they were
fully uttered. Presently I and my two Malays
found ourselves clinging to an outlying projection
of the rock which had wrecked us, though none of
us clearly knew how we had got there; and to our
surprise, except for a few euls and bruises, we were
entirely unhurt. The raft, bent double like a piece
of folded paper, lay broadside on across a wedge of
granite, one side lifted clear of the stream, the other
under water, the two ends nearly meeting on the far side of the obstruction. Such of my gear as had
been placed upon my sitting platform had been
whirled incontinently downstream, and I could see
portions of it bobbing and ducking on the tumble of
waters thirty yards below me. Then, one by one,
these bits of flotsam dropped suddenly below the line
of sight, disappearing at a point where an upleaping
line of founi seemed to cut the stream at right angles
from bank to bank.
Looking upriver, we saw the second of our rafts
plunging down toward us, the two Malays at its
bow and stern trying vainly to check its wild career;
and even as we watched, the catastrophe befell and
they were left clinging to a rock in the same plight.
as ourselves. Their raft, breaking away, darted
down toward us, scraped past us by a miracle, and
disappeared in a shattered condition in the wake of
my lost baggage. My men on the two remaining
rafts had become aware of the danger in time, and
we could see them making fast to the bank a couple
of hundred yards upstream.
Sitting stranded upon a rock in the middle of the
river with the boiling waters of the rapid leaping up
at me like a pack of hounds when its kill is held
aloft, we shrieked suggestions to one another as lo
what should be our next move. The only thing was
to swin for it, and cautiously I let my body down into
the torrent and pushed out vigorously for the shore.
The current fought me like a live thing, but the
river was narrow, and after a rather desperate strag-
gle I drew myself out of the water on the left bank and sat there panting and gasping. I had come into
violent collision with more than one rock during my
short swim and I was bruised and cut in many places,
but it seemed to me then that I had escaped almost
scot free, and I and my fellows screamed congratula-
tions to one another at the top of our voices above
the roar of the rapids. Then we rose to our feet
and picked our way along the bank, through the
thick jungle, to rejoin our companions farther up-
stream.
Here a blow awaited us. The raft which had been
following mine proved to have contained, among
other things, our cooking utensils and our store of
rice, and its loss meant that our prospects of having
anything to eat that night was unpleasantly remote.
We knew that there existed a few Malay villages on
the banks of the lower reaches of the Sempam; but
what might be the distance that separated us from
these havens of refuge we could not tell. This was a
problem that could only be solved by personal in-
vestigation, which for hungry men might well prove
a lengthy and therefore painful process.
The first thing to be done, however, was to find
out the nature of the river below the rapid which had
wrought our undoing, as we still hoped that it might
be possible to lower our two uninjured rafts down the
falls by means of rattan painters. Those who have
never seen a Malayan forest will find it difficult to
realize the difficulty which “getting out and walk-
ing presents to the wayfarer in an unfrequented
portion of the country. The rivers in such localitie; are practically the only highways, and the jungle
upon their banks is so dense, so thorny, so filled with
argently detaining hands, that progress is not only
very slow, but speedily saws your nerves and temper
into shreds. I bade Saleh, my head boatman, follow
ne, and the other Malays stay where they were until
we returned to them. Then I climbed back along
The steeply shelving bank to the foot of the rapid in
which the remains of my raft still flapped feebly,
and thence scrambled through the dense forest and
underwood to a point whence a view of the next
reach of the river could be attained. It took us the
best part of half an hour to gain this point of van-
tage; but at last, clinging with one hand to a stout
sapling, I swung out to the very edge of the forest-
clad hill and looked about me.
Then my heart stood still in my body, for there
suddenly was revealed to me the appalling danger
which we had escaped by providentially coming to
grief at the point where the rapid had defeated us.
Certain destruction had awaited us only some thirty
yards lower downstream.
From where I clung to the hillside I could look
upriver to the point where the flotsam from the raft
had dropped below the line of sight, and their abrupt
disappearance was now explained. The Sempam ran
here through a narrow gorge, enclosed by steep hills
smothered in jungle; but at the top of the reach the
river fell in a shaggy white curtain down the face of a
precipice, which was walled on either side by black
dikes of granite, clean-cut as though hewn by a single stroke of some giant’s axe. With an intolerable
roar, the whole body of the river leaped in a sheet
of foam into the black abyss seventy feet below,
throwing great jets of spray aloft that hung like a
mist in the still air, drenching rocks and trees for
many yards around till they dripped with moisture,
and churning up the waters of the pool into which it.
fell, so that their surface was a boiling, heaving
mass that looked as white and almost as solid as
cotton wool. A little lower downstream the pools
widened out somewhat, and here the waters were
so deep a green that they were nearly black, circling
slowly round and round in innumerable, sullen-
looking eddies, ere they shot forward again upon their
course to plunge down fall after fall in never-ending
strife. Even under the brilliant afternoon sunlight
the place was steeped in a profound, mysterious
gloom.
From where I was perched I could see for near a
quarter of a mile along the river’s length-a most
unusually extended view in the heart of a Malayan
jungle and at every yard of the way Death was
written in unmistakable characters for any living
thing that the falls might succeed in sucking into
their grip. Had we taken the channel on the right,
instead of that which we had chanced to select,
nothing could have saved us; had our raft not come
to wreck exactly where it did, a moment later
malchwood would have been nade of it and of us;
for once within the clutch of the upper fall, nothing
could have saved us from a dreadful death. As l gazed at the masses of water plunging sheer down
the face of the rock, I realized with a shock how
closely I and my fellows had looked into the eyes of
death so short a while before, and how unthinkingly,
how light-heartedly we had seampered to the very
brink of destruction while half intoxicated by the
fierce joy of living.
I sent Saleh back for my fellows, and sat down
where I was to await their coming. I wanted a ciga-
rette to aid my meditations upon man’s precarious
tenure of life; but the river had rendered tobacco
and matches alike useless.
The insistent roar of the rapids filled my hearing;
the wild beauty of the scene held me spellbound;
but most of all was I impressed by the insolent free-
dom, the vigour, the complete, unrestrained savagery
of the river. IIere was a stream which for countless
ages had leaped and thundered down this granite-
bound pass, had slain innumerable living things in
its day with the callous cruelty of the mighty, and
had never known an instant’s restraint, a moment’s
check, a second’s curbing or binding. As the stream
below me tossed its white mane of spray restlessly
to and fro, it seemed to me to be in truth some wild
monster escaped from a primeval world, charging
down this rock-pent defile, instinct with life and
liberty. The very roaring of those resistless waters
seemed to me a shout of triumph wherewith they
boasted of their freedom; their furious commotion
mocked aloud at the restraints of nature and of man.
It was the embodiment of unfettered power, this river it was free, free, free-and the noise of its
falls set my nerves quivering with a sympathetic
excitement.
When my men had rejoined me we pushed on
through the thick jungle and by dark we had suc-
ceeded in passing out of hearing of the resonant
thunder of the falls. But there were other rapids
all along the river, and the music of the troubled
waters was constantly in our cars. We camped
on a sand bank by the river’s side, and we went to
bed supperless. We had paid tribute to the river
of our last grain of rice, and Saleh, my head boatman,
who had been selected for that post because he com-
bined in a remarkable degrec a short temper and a
long vocabulary, expressed himself on the subject
of fate and of our situation with refreshing lati-
tude.
The dawn broke grayly through a dense and drench-
ing mist, and it found us very hungry and unhappy.
We made an early start and scrambled and swarmed
along the shelving river bank, through the bamboo
brakes, the thorn thickets, and the tangled under-
wood of that unspeakable forest, hour after hour,
to an ever-increasing accompaniment of famine and
fatigue. It was not until the afternoon sun was
beginning to creep down the sky that we at length
reached a place where it seemed possible again to
make use of rafts with some prospect of success.
We set to work in sullen silence, and an hour later
we set off downstream, looking eagerly for a village
as each bend was rounded, and accepting the recurrent disappointments with such philosophy as we
could muster.
The night shut down upon us once more, but we
did not call a halt. We had no knowledge concern-
ing the distance that still separated us from the
nearest human habitation and we were running a
race against hunger-an opponent that never grants
an armistice. We were already so spent that we
dared not rest lest we should lack the force and
courage to renew our efforts, and the pangs we were
suffering for none of us had now tasted food for
five and thirty hours-were goads that pricked us
onward. Therefore, we fumbled and groped our way
down the Sempam with the dogged, spiritless per-
sistency of the desperate. Our discomfort was com-
pleted by the fact that we had got ourselves smoth-
cred in jungle ticks, crablike monsters that fix
their claws into selected nerve centres, whence
they can only be withdrawn at the cost of acute
pain.
At about half-past eight we saw a point of light
ahead of us and a few minutes later we were eagerly
devouring all the available cooked rice in the little
village of Chĕrok.
“The falls of this river are very difficult, Tuan.”
said a village elder to me, as I sat smoking and talk-
ing to the people of the place, after I had crammed
myself with fat, new rice. “They are very difficult,
and no man may pass up or down those which are
of the largest size. Moreover, even we, who are
children of the river, may not approach the lesser rapids until fitting offerings have been made by us
to the spirits which have in them their abiding
place. Strangers who, being smitten by madness,
nake free of this river thrust their heads into a noose
whence it is not easy to draw back.
“The great fall, which is full twelve fathoms in
height, is named the Fall of the Kine-cleft Bank,
for it is a narrow pass such as giant kine might make
at the spot where they were wont to go down to
water. The next fall is named the Fall of Dew, for
by reason of its spray the rocks and trees around it
are perpetually drenched as it were by dew; and the
last of all is the Fish Trap, for from out of its grip
not even a fisli can escape.
“Ah, Túan, it is not well thus to tempt the Spirits
of the Sempam, for they are very vengeful, and if
they had killed you a great shame would have been
put upon our people. Our Spirits are orang mêrd-
hêka free folk-who care not at all for rája or
overlord, and have no respect even for while men,
Tuan, before whom the rajus themselves must give
way, if all that men tell us be true. And this, too,
Tuan, the Sempam hath taught you in hunger and
in travail, it will bear no chains!”
And the old fellow chuckled, well pleased by his
jest and proud of the prowess of his native stream.
Fresh from my view of the falls and still aching from
the rough handling which I had received at the
hands of the river, my thought echoed the old man’s
vaunt. The wild freedom of the Sempam was what
impressed me-the freedom of some savage creature, instinct with unrestrained vitality and a fierce, splen-
did liberty.
Nine years later, by which time unregenerate
Pahang had become a solid portion of the British
Protectorate, and I, as resident, had been appointed
to preside over its affairs, I visited the Sempam
Falls again.
I was driven to them from the foot of the moun-
tains in a smart dog cart by the manager of a mine,
and I spent the night in a well-appointed bungalow
after dining at a table which fairly groaned under the
good viands that it bore.
From end to end of the falls a made road skirted
the right bank of the river for a distance of about a
mile. In the valley, below the bungalow, stood a
square power station with a hideous roof of cor-
rugated iron. From it, running upward upon a sort
of staircase of wooden sleepers, a line of black pipes
three feet in diameter climbed a succession of steep
hillsides to the skyline half a mile away. This line
of pipes communicated with a solid eoncrete reser-
voir, which in its turn was fed by a large, square,
wooden flume, which burrowed through the hills like
a tar-smeared snake, and rose upon a gentle incline to
the head of the Fall of the Kine-cleft Bank. Here
the Sempam had been dammed across from bank to
bank by a solid wall of eoncrete. Such of its waters
as were not for the moment needed by the tyrannous
white men were suffered to flow down the old chan-
nel; but the rest of the river was eribbed and confined by the wooden walls of the flume, was stalled like a
tame ox within the four walls of the reservoir, was
forced, protesting but obedient, into the unsightly
piping, and at the power station, three hundred feet
below, was compelled to yield up its angry strength
to the service of man, its master, in order to work
and light the gold mines at Raub, seven miles away.
I listened as the engineer in charge told me, with
the air of a lecturer upon anatomy, how many gal-
lons of water per minute went to the pulsing of that
once free river; how much of its strength was taken
for the electrical works, how much left to the dimin-
ished waters of the torrent.
The scene, as I stood looking down at it, was won-
derfully little changed from what it had been that day
long ago when I, first of all my kind, had gazed in
fascination at those boisterous falls. On the left
bank, where I had clung, the jungle still ran riot to
the skyline. An outcrop of white limestone, which
I remembered having noted, stood out prominently
as of old, a glaring landmark, bare of vegetation on
the flank of one of the higher hills at the foot of the
falls. Through the deeply cleft walls of granite the
river still danced and leaped wildly, though with
sadly diminished volume, and with a voice that was
like a mere whisper compared with the roar and
Thunder of other days. Except when my eyes rested
upon the works of man upon the right bank, all was
as beautiful as in the past. But the supreme free-
dom of the river, the quality which for me had had so
overmastering, so compelling a fascination, had vanished utterly. The valley was no longer one of
nature’s inviolate and secret places, and the river
was no more the strong, unfettered, vainglorious
monster of my memory. It was in chains, a thrall
to man, and to me it seemed to bear its gyves with a
subdued and chastened sadness at once bitter and
heartbroken.
The next morning I left the Falls of the Kine-cleft
Bank and rode fifty miles to the residency of Kuala
Lipis. My way took me through country which had
once been wild, where now the great trunk road
strung village to village, like onions on a string, and
the whole line of my ride was marked by newly oc-
cupied plantations, and by signs of the commercial
progress and material development which white
men and their civilization bring in their train. Then
as I neared my home and turned my thoughts to the
piles of official correspondence which I knew must be
awaiting my return; caught sight of the hurrying
telegraph peons, and remembered how at the end of
that infernal wire there sat men whose business it
was to impede me with instructions concerning
matters which they imperfectly compreltended; as
I heard the pat, pat of the tennis balls on the court
within the dismantled stockade and saw the golfers.
driving off from a neighbouring tee-suddenly the
thought came to me of what my life in that district
had wont to be less than a decade earlier. And
then, though all the changes around me had been
things for which I had worked and striven with all
my heart and soul, somehow it seemed to me for the moment that it was not only the river that had lost
its vitality and its freedom. Together we had
shared the wild life which we had known and loved
in the past; together in the present we went soberly,
working in chains.
Nguồn: Wikisource English — The Further Side of Silence/In Chains. Văn bản được nhập và định dạng lại; CC BY-SA 4.0, có thể áp dụng điều khoản bổ sung của tác phẩm.