“Next morning the Tanjong Data started with Milner on board, leaving
us in that God-forsaken place face to face with the mosquitoes. Havana
mosquitoes are bad, but these chaps laid over them, striped brutes
like tigers. Then there were the Sanut tingal pala ants; these chaps
bite you and hang on with their teeth like bulldogs; if you pull them
off they leave their heads behind. A cheerful place, with nothing to
listen to but the rainy noise of the palm leaves, shaken by the wind
and the howling of Dyak songs from the village, and nothing to see but
the Bintulu coming down to the sea between banks of trees that seemed
crowding one another into the river.
“There are parts of the Bintulu where no man could make a landing on
the banks, by reason of the tangle of growth, vines and whatnots; but
at Bintulu it’s been cleared, though in those days it was bad enough
within half a mile of the town.
“Becconi wasn’t going to start for three days, so I had my work cut
out killing time and mosquitoes. I’d sit sometimes by the river
watching the gunfish by the hour. You’d see them prospecting along the
bank, and then when they’d marked down an insect sitting on a leaf,
they’d take aim and spit, letting fly a jet of water aimed sure as a
rifle bullet. Then I’d sometimes watch the Dyak girls going about, the
rummiest sight, in their brass arm rings and leg wear, and sometimes
I’d sit and talk to Tuan, for Becconi had taken him on as a servant.
“He didn’t talk English bad, and at first I tried to comfort him about
Ting, till I found out he wasn’t needing any. It wasn’t that he hadn’t
been fond of the child, but it was just that he seemed to reckon Ting
dead. Not corpsed, but dead to him and his tribe. I had some talks
with Tuan on the business then and afterward, and he told me that the
big monkeys took off Dyak children now and then and sometimes the
children were got back after they’d been living a year or two with the
monks, and that they weren’t any use; they weren’t humans any more.
Tuan, though he didn’t know anything much more than the difference
between the two ends of a blowgun, said all men had been monkeys once,
but so long ago that man had forgotten, and if a child was to go and
live in the trees with the monkeys he’d revert to the old times in a
year or two, and not twenty or fifty years would fetch him back.
“I thought he was talking through his hat, but out in India, since
then, I’ve seen the truth of what he said. You’ve heard of wolf
children? Wolves are always carrying off children; some they eat and
some they don’t, and the ones they don’t they bring up as wolves, and
the children take to it and go on all fours and, after a year or less
they’re fixed, can’t ever get back to be men. Why, they had a wolf
child in the Secundra Missionary Asylum and kept it there till it grew
up to a man over thirty. It died somewhere about ’95, and it never
learned to speak, couldn’t do more than run about on all fours and
snarl. Rum, isn’t it?
“Meanwhile Becconi was getting the lads together for his expedition,
and he wasn’t finding it an easy matter, for in those days Sea Dyaks
weren’t anxious for payment much except in human heads, and even heads
were sometimes pretty much at a discount. The head-hunting chaps have
got a bad name, but they weren’t so black as they were painted. They
weren’t always rushing about, either, hunting for heads. It was mostly
when they were in love and wanted to give a girl a present that they
went hunting, or when they had a down on a chap and wanted to do him
in. Becconi’s crowd that he managed to collect at last were head
hunters to a man, but I’d sooner trust myself alone with any one of
them than with a New York tough—a long sight.
“We started on a Saturday at dawn, crossing the Bintulu and striking
toward the Tatan River. I’ve said Becconi was after minerals and so he
was, but his main proposition was gold. Down along south of the
eastern ports he’d heard stories of a gold river somewhere in Sarawak
north of the Rejang, and he carried the idea in his head, and I
suppose that was what made him strike south from the Bintulu.
“We had with us Tuan and half a dozen of the Sea Dyaks and provisions
for a month, and we hadn’t more than crossed the river and gone a few
yards when the trees closed behind us, shutting out the sound of the
village and cutting us off from the morning sun as a closed door
might. I’ve never got used to the jungle, that’s to say the real
thing, and it’s my opinion it is not the place for a man. It’s a kind
of old glass house where the beginnings of life come from, and it’s my
opinion it has outlived its uses and would be as well done away with.
Maybe I’m prejudiced, having done near all my hunting in the open.
Anyhow, that Saturday morning I wasn’t in any too high spirits. If I
could have broke my contract and turned back I wouldn’t, though, bad
as I wanted to, because I’d taken a liking to Becconi, and I had my
misgivings as to his pulling through without a white man’s help.
“I’ve hinted he drank. We took a good stock of liquor with us, but it
went under my eye. That was one of my conditions, and I knew if he was
left alone with it the jungle would soon have done with him.
“We struck a big stretch of soggy ground where Nipah palms grew and
nothing else. I’m just going to give you a sniff of that hell place
they call the jungle in Borneo, and I can’t begin it better than by
saying we hadn’t gone more than five hundred yards from the river when
we struck this swamp. It wasn’t a true swamp, either. It was solid
enough in bits, and you’d be going along saying, ‘It’s all right now,’
when your foot would go, sucked down, and you’d pull it out with a
pound of black mud like treacle sticking to your boot. We went along
mostly clinging to the palms that grew along the solid tracts and gave
us a lead. Then, when we’d passed the swamp we found ourselves before
the Big Thorn. That’s what the Dyaks called it, a big patch of
wait-a-bit thorn we had to cut our way through, and it took us the
whole day to do that.
“Then when we camped on a bit of high ground the black ants raised
objections, and the black ants of Borneo sting like wasps.
“I give you that as a sample of twenty-four hours in the jungle. You
didn’t get swamp all the time nor wait-a-bit thorn all the time, but
you got lots of other things not much better, and it was always that
infernal glass-house damp heat and smell. It’s the smell that gets
you, not a bad smell, mind you, but just the smell of a glass
house—only more so.
“Then at the end of a week we struck a rival prospector. It was the
rummiest meeting. He was a chap by name of Havenmouth. He’d shoved
east with an expedition from Maka, crossing the Balinean River, and
he’d found the gold. But he was dying. I never did see such a
skeleton. The jungle fever or something like that had done for him,
and he said he’d been living on quinine and whisky, but that he didn’t
care as he’d found the gold. It was in a little stream to the
nor’east. He said there was dead loads of it, even though the stream
was so small.
“He said that little stream must have been washing its gold for ages
to make us rich. There he lay with his hands like a skeleton’s and his
face like a skull painted with fever, handing us out all that talk;
and then he showed us a sample of gold grains he’d taken from the
stream.
“Sure enough some of them were as big as split bullets. Then he died
with a whoop, and we buried him. But the bother was, he died before he
could give us the exact location by compass. He hadn’t got it written
down, for we searched him and his effects; he’d been carrying it in
his head. He’d given us the gold grains, though.
“Well, that was the worst present a man ever got. Havenmouth had said:
‘It isn’t more than twenty miles way back there,’ and that was the
string that tied us to the circle, for we went wandering round like
the Egyptians in the wilderness, round and round, hunting for that
darned stream for months and months. You wouldn’t believe it, unless
you’d been there, how that thing held us. I’m not overset on money,
but it held me, same as when you draw a chalk line round a hen and put
her nose to it, she’s held.
“We struck streams, all sorts of little tributaries of the Rejang and
the Tatan, and we struck mud turtles and spitting fish and water
lizards and snakes, but we struck no gold. Becconi was so full of the
business that he forgot his wanting to drink. And so it went on for
more than three months, till one day the madness lifted from us, and
we saw that we were done. We’d got to get back to Bintulu and get back
prompt, for we were near done for grub.
“I’d managed to shoot a good deal, and we had the remains of
Havenmouth’s store. Still, all the same, we’d got to get back; and
over the fire that night, when we’d come to the decision to clear out,
Becconi had his first drink for a long time. We were sitting there
smoking and talking when all of a sudden from the dark outside the
firelight comes a whistle and Tuan gives a jump where he sat. Then he
whistles between his fingers as if in answer and out of the dark comes
a chap crawling along with his hair over his eyes. He creeps up to
Tuan, and they begin to talk. Then Tuan comes to us and tells us the
news. One of the Dyaks, a fish trapper that had done a journey up the
Tatan on some business of his own had come on Kadjaman’s house.
“That’s what Tuan told us with a straight face, but we didn’t laugh,
for we knew what he meant. The orangs build houses of sorts away up in
the trees. They haven’t walls or roofs or lavatory accommodation;
they’re just platforms built between two branches and furnished with
bundles of brushwood and leaves. This fishing Dyak was a blood
relation of Tuan’s. He knew Ting, and he knew of the carrying off, and
a month before, going along through the forest by the river and
chancing to look up he saw Kadjaman’s platform away up in a tree.
“He wouldn’t have took any more notice, monkey houses being common,
only for a face looking down at him out of the leaves. He saw at once
it was Ting’s face, and he called out, thinking the child might come
down. Instead of that Ting went up the remainder of the tree like a
flash and hid on the platform.
“He marked the place and then he’d set out to hunt for Tuan and us.
He’d seen us start from Bintulu and he knew the direction we’d gone;
but how he found us after a month’s hunt—well, search me! But find us
he did.
“Tuan having got the yarn, said it was necessary for him, now that he
had the indication, to drop everything else and get his child back. He
said he couldn’t lead us any longer till he had that matter settled,
and Becconi agreed that it was only right and proper to get the child
back and said he’d wait there with the whisky while Tuan and myself
made the journey and fetched the goods. The place was only a day’s
journey from where we were. I agreed. I judged he couldn’t kill
himself with the whisky in two days and that if he did it’d maybe be a
mercy for him, and taking my gun I followed Tuan and the fisher Dyak,
striking in the direction of the Tatan.
“It was less than a day’s journey, and when we got there it wasn’t
above ten o’clock in the morning, and there, like as if a chap had
hoisted a mattress and stuck it between two of the branches, away up
in a big tree, we saw Kadjaman’s house; but there wasn’t a sign of the
owner nor of Ting. We didn’t go to knock at the door. We all sat down
in the undergrowth which hid us while giving us a view of the premises
above, and there we waited. I didn’t know what Tuan proposed to do to
get the child back, but I did know one thing, he was going to get it
back now he’d found the address. I reckoned he’d kill Kadjaman and
then climb for the child; but I was wrong as it turned out.
“I nodded off to sleep, for I was bone tired with the journey, and I’d
been dozing maybe an hour when Tuan joggled me awake. I looked up and
there was Ting crawling along a branch twenty foot up, following in
the track of a big monk that was Kadjaman’s twin brother if it wasn’t
himself. You could see at a glance that the child had joined up with
the monkey folk in the three months he’d been with them.
“But I wasn’t bothering about that, I was watching Tuan. Tuan had his
blowgun with him. It was a better weapon and twice as deadly as a
Colt’s automatic. It was death itself, for the dart was poisoned. Tuan
was standing up and leaning back with the gun to his lips. Up above,
against the sprinkling light through the leaves, Kadjaman made a
target as big as a barn door and not more than twenty-five feet off
and Tuan with that infernal gun could hit the middle of a sixpence
somewhere about the same distance. So there didn’t seem much chance
for the monkey, did there?
“Well, all of a sudden I heard the ‘phut’ of the blowgun, and right on
it Ting, up in the branches, let a squeal out of him and I saw he’d
been hit, hit right in the neck where the big vein is and where the
poison of the dart would act quickest.
“Then he came tumbling, kicking, and catching at twigs, bang into the
bushes, dead as Pharaoh’s aunt. Tuan gave the body a stir with his
foot to see if it was dead all right, and finding it so was satisfied.
He didn’t bother about Kadjaman, though he could have killed him easy
enough. He’d got his son back, anyhow, and stopped him from going
lower than he’d gone. You see he wasn’t a chap to believe in Tarzan
of the Apes or Mowgli, seeing that he knew what the jungle is and
what monkeys are, and what men can become.
“Tuan wasn’t a popsy-wopsy father by no means, but I’ve often thought
it’s chaps like Tuan, stuck by nature in the door in old days, that’s
stopped humans from backsliding into beasts—but maybe I’m wrong.”
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in
the August 7, 1921 issue of The Popular magazine.