Part 10
“It would not interest you to describe our failures--how the man outwitted us; how, just when we thought we had him, he would slip through our fingers, partly by his own skill, his knowledge of the bush, and the excellence of his horses, but mainly, I think, by the help of sympathisers, who always gave warning of our movements and most secret plans. I will pass over all that and take you to the final scene in the drama.
“When we were not actually in the bush we were following our quarry from one country-place to another, as the information we received gave us a clue to his whereabouts. It seldom happened that we passed a night in a town, and, when not camping out, we were billeted on the people of the district, the wealthiest and most important of them being too glad to place their houses at our disposal. One evening, after a hot pursuit, feeling sure we were close upon the trail of our man, we reached a great house where a number of guests were already being entertained. In spite of our numbers we were welcomed with effusion, and, after dinner, the ladies of the party took advantage of the sudden arrival of a number of young fellows ready for anything to get up an impromptu dance. I am not a dancing man--my time has been spent in communion with Nature, in reading in the open book of Truth--therefore I left the revellers and went to bed.
“We had had a long and a hard day in the saddle, and I was weary, and must have fallen asleep almost as soon as I lay down.
“Now I must tell you what I afterwards heard from others of my party. It was a little after midnight, and the dancing was going on with great spirit, when I--this, of course, is what they tell me--suddenly appeared at a door of the ball-room in my night-dress, with a rifle in my hand, and, without hesitation, I walked through the room and out into a verandah that led towards the back of the house. My head was thrown somewhat back, my eyes were wide open and seemed fixed on some distant object, while I was evidently unconscious of my immediate surroundings.
“I fear my sudden entry into the dancing-room in such a very unconventional dress was rather a shock to some of the ladies. I am told that several screamed, and one or more of the older ones fainted; but for myself I knew none of this till afterwards. It appears that, what with astonishment at my appearance, and the necessary attentions to the ladies whose nerves were upset, a little time elapsed before any one thought of following me. Then some one fancied he heard the sound of a horse’s feet, and the men of my party pulled themselves together and made for the stables, as that was the direction I seemed to have taken.
“I was nowhere to be seen; but a stable door was open, and my horse, saddle, and bridle had gone. Then the matter began to look serious, and, as my friends saddled their horses and started to look for me, riding they hardly knew where, there were rather dismal forebodings of the probable fate of even a fully-clad man luckless enough to be lost in the Australian bush. It was a lovely starlight night with a young moon, and, under other circumstances, the ride might have been pleasant enough; but the aimlessness of the whole business was becoming painfully evident to the searchers, when the sound of a rifle-shot was distinctly heard at no great distance. The horses’ heads were turned towards the direction from which the sound came, and the troop pushed on at a brisk pace. Almost immediately, a faint column of smoke was perceived, and as the horsemen approached the spot, the embers of a dying fire shed a slight ruddy glow in the darkness. The word was passed to proceed with caution, but the party was already so close that they could see my white night-dress, as I stood with naked feet by the side of my horse, regarding, with a half-dazed expression, the smoking rifle which I held in my hand. Sixty yards off was the thin column of smoke rising from the dying fire.
“I was surrounded by my friends, who all spoke at once, and fired a perfect volley of questions at me. I said, ‘Softly, gentlemen, softly, and I will tell you all I know about it, for indeed the situation seems strange enough. As you know I went to bed. I slept and I dreamed. I suppose I was over-wrought, and my mind was full of the bushranger, for I thought I was again on his track, out in the bush, on horseback and alone. It was night, but I seemed to be riding with a purpose, or my horse knew where he was going, for by-and-by I was drawn towards a thin column of white smoke, the smoke of a wood fire, and then, as I got nearer, I caught the flickering glow of dying embers. I _felt_ the object of our search was there, and I moved forward with extreme caution, till I had got within a hundred yards, and then I distinctly saw the outlaw lying perfectly straight on the ground, his feet towards the fire, and his horse hobbled hard by. I say I saw the outlaw, but I was dreaming, and in my dream I _knew_ it was the man, though I could not see his face. I dismounted, and, leading my horse, I got to within sixty yards of the sleeper. Then, fearing that if I went nearer he might wake and escape me, I took a steady aim, pulled the trigger, and--the next instant I was wide awake standing here in my night-dress.’
“Almost before I had finished I saw men looking towards the fire, which was no dream, and we all of us now distinctly made out the form of a man, lying on his side, almost on his face, with his feet towards the embers and his head by the bush. Moreover, we could both see and hear a horse, that was evidently hobbled not very far from the sleeper. It did not take long to surround the spot where the man lay; but, as we rapidly closed in on the sleeper, he never stirred. A moment more and we were beside him. A dark stream, on which the glow from the fire seemed to shed some of its own red light, was oozing slowly from beneath the man’s chest; and, as several hands turned his face up to the stars and the pale moonlight, it was too evident that he was dead, and that his life had gone out with that crimson stream which flowed from a bullet wound in his heart.
“I did not know the man myself, but several of our party recognised him. It was the bushranger, and, as I expected, his skull was not without features of special interest to science.”
XXIV
TIGERS AND CROCODILES
When I first came, a visitor, to the Malay Peninsula, I was struck by the fact that wherever I went I heard stories of tigers. If, in the course of a day’s ride, I stopped at a village to eat my luncheon, the people who pressed round to watch me and have a chat would always tell me a tiger story of local and comparatively recent occurrence. Wherever I encamped for the night, I should be sure of at least one tale of successful attack or successful resistance, where a tiger had filled the principal rôle. When once I understood the little peculiarity, I took it as a matter of course, and at talking time I used to say, “Now tell me about the tiger: what was it he did?” It may have been accident, but it is no exaggeration to say that my question nearly always drew forth a more or less ghastly story.
Now that my visit is nearly over, it occurs to me that, though I have accumulated an almost endless series of more or less interesting tales of the “low, crouching horror with the cruel fangs,” I have not retailed any of them to you. In a certain number of cases I was myself near enough to be able to verify details, and in others I had means of proving main facts. One is almost bound to say that, because tiger-stories, which are worth repeating, are almost always listened to with incredulity, or, what is worse, with that banter which often means, in plain words, “What I have not seen myself I decline to believe.” That is the attitude of England to the Orient in the presence of a tiger-story with which the auditors can claim no connection. I said that the prevalence of these tales struck me on my first arrival. I soon became _blasé_, and for a long time I have had no curiosity on the subject; but I will tell you of two tiger incidents that I personally verified, as far as I was able, and I will make no attempt to paint in the background with local colour, in order to supply you with finished pictures.
There is an island by the western shore of the Straits of Malacca. You would never guess it to be an island, for it is simply a block of mangrove-covered mud, with one side towards the sea, and the other three sides separated from the mainland by deep but narrow lagoons of tidal water. The only inhabitants are a few wood-cutters, Malays and Chinese, who live in huts of mat or bark with palm-leaf roofs, while they are employed cutting mangroves and a hard-wood palm called _Nîbong_. The huts of the Chinese are on the ground, but the Malay dwellings are invariably raised a few feet above the damp soil, and to them entry is obtained by means of a ladder. These hovels are very carelessly built; they are of flimsy materials, only intended to last for a few months, when they are abandoned and rapidly fall to pieces. They serve their purpose. The occupants are out from dawn till afternoon, when they return to cook, eat, and sleep; and so, from day to day, till the job on which they are engaged is completed, and they can return, in the case of the Malays, to their families, while the Chinese are probably moved to another scene of similar labour.
I was obliged to tell you this; you would not understand the story otherwise.
The island covers an area of several thousand acres, but except for the few wood-cutters it was, at the time I write of, uninhabited. At one spot there was a hut containing two Chinese, near it a Malay house with eight or ten men in it, and at no great distance a large shed with nearly a score of Chinese. One dark night, about 11 P.M., the two Chinese who lived together were awakened by a noise in that part of the hut where they kept their food. One of the two got up, struck a light, and went into the back room. Immediately there was a dull thud, as of a man knocked heavily down, and the poor wretch screamed, “Help me, it is a tiger!” His comrade at once got out of his mosquito-curtain, and sprang to his friend’s assistance. Seizing him by the arm, he tried to free him from the clutches of the tiger, who already had a firm hold of the doomed man’s leg. The tug of life and death did not last long, for the tiger pulled the would-be rescuer down on his face, and, the light having been extinguished in the struggle, the man’s courage went out with it, and, in a paroxysm of fear, he climbed on to the roof. There he remained till daylight, while, close beneath him, within the narrow limits of the hut, the tiger dragged his victim hither and thither, snarling and growling, tearing the flesh and crunching the bones of the man, whose agonies were mercifully hidden. In the grey light which heralds dawn, the watcher, clinging to the roof-ridge, saw the tiger drag out of the house and into the forest the shapeless remains of his late companion. When once the sun was fairly up, the survivor slid down, and without daring to look inside the hut, made his way to the nearest Police Station, and reported what had occurred. An examination of the premises fully bore out his statement.
A week passed. The Malays, whose hut was nearest to that visited by the tiger, were careful to bar their door after hearing what had happened; but in this case the precaution proved useless. Easterns, especially those engaged in severe manual labour, sleep exceedingly heavily, and the men of this household were aroused by a smothered cry from one of their number; the noise of a heavy body falling through the thatch having passed practically unnoticed. One of the party got up, lighted a torch, and was at once knocked down by a tiger springing upon him. In a moment every man had seized his heavy chopping-knife, and the whole party fell upon the man-eater, and, by the light of the fallen torch, hit so hard and straight that the beast suddenly sprang through the roof and disappeared. It was then, for the first time, discovered that this was the means by which the tiger had effected its entrance, and it left by the hole which it had made on entering the hut. The first man attacked was dead; the second was taken to hospital, and there died of his wounds.
There was a fourth victim. I am not certain of the facts in that case, but he was severely injured and was sent to hospital, where, I believe, he recovered with the entire loss of his scalp. That filled up the cup of crime. Almost directly afterwards the murderer killed a bullock; the carcass was poisoned, and the next day the body of a tigress was found close by that of her victim. She was not very large, eight feet from nose to the tip of the tail; she was in splendid condition--teeth perfect and coat glossy--but her legs and feet were disproportionately large to the size of her body. On her head there was a deep clean cut, and one of her fore-legs was gashed, evidently by a Malay chopper. The most curious feature was that in certainly two out of the three cases the tigress, who always attacked by night, the only time when the huts were occupied, effected her entrance by springing on the roof and forcing her way through the thin palm thatching.
There is another tiger story that I can tell you in two words. It is curious, it sounds highly improbable; but, after hearing it on the spot from the two men concerned, I believe it.
Quite recently it was the fruit season here, and, as is customary, two men were watching an orchard situated on the side of a main cart-road. The orchard was not enclosed in any way, and the fruit trees on one side actually overhung the road. The road was divided from the orchard by a rather wide but quite shallow ditch, that was always dry except during rain. Fifteen or twenty feet on the inside of this ditch was a tiny lean-to under the trees. The shelter consisted of a raised floor of split bamboos, covered by a palm-thatch roof, and a narrow sort of bench, also under the roof, but level with the floor. The bench was next to the high road.
On the night of which I write, one man was sleeping on the bench, the other on the floor of the shelter. It was fine, with a young, early-setting moon; the scattered houses of a considerable village were all round, and there was nothing to fear.
I said before that natives sleep soundly, and you must believe it, or you will never credit my story. About 1 A.M. the man sleeping on the floor of the shelter heard his friend shouting for help. The voice came from the ditch by the road, and thither the man ran, shouting “What is the matter?” “Thieves!” promptly replied the other, but a moment’s conversation dispelled the idea born of his partially-awakened intelligence, and led them to the true interpretation of the riddle. The man in the ditch said then, and says now, that he was asleep, and knew nothing till he suddenly found himself thrown in the ditch, when he awoke and shouted, “Help, thieves!” But, all the same, when he tried to get up, and his friend helped him to the shelter and got a light, it was seen that he had a deep gash in the shoulder, which kept him in hospital for nearly three weeks. The light also showed the track of a tiger up to the bench, thence to the spot in the ditch where the man was lying, and straight across the high road into another orchard. One other thing it showed, and that was a patch of earth on the top of the wounded man’s head.
The friend’s theory, shared by all the neighbours, is this. He points to the exact position in which the sleeper was lying, and how a post, from ground to roof, completely protected the back of his neck, so that the tiger could not seize him as he must have wished to do. Owing to the man’s position, and the way the post of the house and the rails of the bench (for it had a sort of back) ran, the tiger had to take a very awkward grip of his prey, catching him by the shoulder, and therefore carrying him with his head almost on the ground. Three or four steps, a second or two in time, would bring him to the shallow, dry ditch. It was so shallow that he would not jump it, but the in-and-out of a tiger with a kill would be the equivalent of a jump. In he would go easily enough, but the cut slope of the ditch and the slight rise into the road on the other side just saved the man’s life, for the top of his head hit against the edge of the ditch, and, awkwardly held as he was, knocked him out of the tiger’s mouth.
Once dropped, the beast would not return to pick his prey up again, especially with one man shouting and the noise of the other coming to his assistance.
The tiger is the scourge of the land, the crocodile of the water. They seem to be complement and supplement--each of the other: the “golden terror with the ebon bars,” the very embodiment of vitality, sinew, and muscle--of life that is savage and instant to strike--and the stony-eyed, spiky-tailed monster, outwardly a lifeless, motionless log; but, once those pitiless jaws open, it is only a question of what tooth closes on the victim, whether it be “The last chance,” “Tear the shroud,” or “God save your soul.”
I was starting for some hot springs in a remote spot, far in the interior, where I was certain of finding both elephant and rhinoceros, and the second night of my journey I spent at the junction of two large streams. Strolling back from a swim in the river, the local chief told me this pathetic story of fruitless heroism.
The country hereabout is very sparsely peopled, only a few scattered huts breaking the monotony of the virgin forest, Malays and wild tribes the sole inhabitants. Every house is on the bank of a river, and beyond the produce of their rice-fields and orchards the people rely mainly on the water to supply them with food. The Malay is exceedingly cunning in devising various means for catching fish, but what he likes best is to go out in the evening, just at sundown, with a casting-net. Either he wades about by himself, or, with a boy to steer for him, he creeps along in a tiny dug-out, throws his net in the deep pools, and usually dives in after it, to free the meshes from the numerous snags on which they are sure to become entangled.
One evening, a few days before my arrival, a Malay peasant was netting in the river accompanied by his son, a boy of twelve years old. They were wading, and, while the father moved along the edge of the deeper water under the bank, the boy walked in the shallows out in the stream. The short twilight passed, and the darkness of night was gathering over the waters of the wide river, when suddenly the father was startled by a cry from the boy, and, as he turned, he shuddered to hear the one word, “crocodile,” come in an agonised scream from the poor child. Dropping his net, the man swam and stumbled through the shallowing stream to the boy’s rescue. The child was down, but making frantic, though hopelessly ineffectual struggles to free himself from the grip of a crocodile which had him by the knee and thigh. The man was naked, except for a pair of short trousers; he had no weapon whatever, yet he threw himself, without hesitation, on the saurian, and with his hands alone began a struggle with the hideous reptile for the possession of the boy. The man was on the deep-water side of his foe, determined at all costs to prevent him from drowning the child; he had seized the creature from behind, so as to save himself from its claws, and he tried to find, through darkness and water, the eye-sockets, by which alone he could hope to reach a vulnerable joint in its impenetrable harness. The father’s fury and despair guided his hands to the reptile’s eyes, and pressing his thumbs with all his might on these points of less resistance, he inflicted such pain that the creature gave a convulsive spring which threw the man backwards into the water. But the boy was released, and the saurian retired from the fight to sulk and blink over his defeat in some dark pool beneath the overhanging grasses of the river bank.
The man carried the boy on shore, and thence to his home; but the poor child was so severely injured that, with no skilled surgeon to attend him, he died after three days of suffering.
XXV
A ROSE AND A MOTH
When I came again to this enchanted mountain, above the steaming plains, the first thing I did was to wander in the garden, amid the sweet-smelling blossoms and the bees and butterflies, and feast my eyes upon the ever-new loveliness of the changeless hills, the changeful sky and sea, that crowd the prospect with a thousand pictures of infinite beauty and inspiring grandeur. Then I saw a perfect rose, a rose of divine, deep colour--betwixt rubies and red wine--of the texture of finest velvet, and I gathered it. Once, long ago, at least so it seems, you gave me the fellow of this rose, plucked from the same tree. To me this flower will always suggest you, for, beyond the association, there are certain characteristics which you share with it, “dark and true and tender,” a rare sweetness of perfume and, in the heart of the rose, a slumbering passion, the like of which will some day wake you to the joy or the sorrow of life. I have treasured that sweet-scented blossom as long as it would stay with me; and now, when the petals are falling, I see that they are the counterpart of three rose-petals that had travelled from far over sea in a letter from you. They came the bearers of their own message, and now I seem to read it. Have I been very dense, or am I only fatuous now? Why can’t they speak, these things you have touched, or do they speak and I lack understanding? At least you sent them, and that is much from you. I am grateful, and if I am a prey to vain imaginings, you will forgive me, and understand that I did not, presumptuously and with indecent haste, set about the construction of a castle that, even now, has but my wish for its unsubstantial foundation.
Last night, this morning rather, for it was between midnight and 1 A.M., I was reading that very weird story about a phantom dog. I was deeply engrossed in the weirdest part of it, when I heard a buzzing noise, and in a dark corner behind the piano I saw a pair of very strange eyes approaching and receding. They were like small coals of fire, extraordinarily brilliant, with a pinkish flame, shedding light as well as containing it. I realised that they were the eyes of what looked like a very large moth, whose wings never ceased to move with marvellous rapidity.
My chair was touching a table on which was a long vase of perfume-laden lilies, white lilies with yellow hearts, and by-and-by the moth flew to the flowers and stood, poised in air, before a lily-blossom. There were two very bright lights on the table, and the creature was within two feet of me, so I saw it plainly enough. The wings never for an instant stopped their vibration, and it was so rapid that I could not tell their form or colour. Once directly opposite the flower, the moth produced a delicate proboscis, which it inserted into the blossom, and then slowly pushed it right up the stamen, apparently in search of honey. When extended, this feeler was of quite abnormal length, at least two or three inches. What, however, surprised me was that, having withdrawn the probe (for that was what it looked like, a very fine steel or wire probe, such as dentists use), the instrument seemed to go back into the moth’s head, or wherever it came from, to be again extended to sound the depths of another blossom. There! it is past midnight, and I hear the buzzing in the next room; here it comes; and I can examine the creature again. Alas! what a disappointment: this is a horned beetle. I thought it made over-much noise for my interesting friend. Now to continue my tale.