Ratbird, page 2
Herbert he bring out gun. I very fear. I know him mad with bad spirit. I say him, ‘Two piece Dutch man they come here. Pretty soon they finish. Why you no sense? Come back home along me, Krishna.’
He get more mad.
* * * *
I was really disgusted with this idiot native Balbindor or whatever his name was. Here we were. At great expense to ourselves, Father and I had finally arrived on the very threshold of Bukit Tengah, the Middle Mountain, and this difficult little man and his black kid were refusing to proceed.
It just was not rational. But you don’t expect rationality from such people. These natives are riddled with superstition.
Also, I blamed him for the way the bearers had deserted us. We had quite an argument. I was trembling violently from head to foot. Most unpleasant.
I want to say this, too, about the whole incident. Balbindor treated Father and me all along as complete fools. We could grasp that he was trying to tell us we had arrived at some sort of geological shift, much like the Wallace Discontinuity east of Bali, where two tectonic plates meet and flora and fauna are different on the two opposed sides. We knew that better than he did, having researched the matter in books before the expedition, but saw no reason to be superstitious about it.
We had also observed that there were those on the other side of the divide who were watching us. Father and I were going to go in there whether or not Balbindor and his son accompanied us. We saw the necessity to make an immediate impression on the new tribe, since we would be dealing with them soon enough.
That was why I shot Balbindor on the spot. It was mainly to make a good impression on the new tribe.
Little Krishna ran off into the jungle. Perhaps the little idiot thought I was going to shoot him as well. I suppose I might have done. I was pretty steamed up.
‘Put your revolver away, you fool,’ Father said. That was all the thanks I got from him. When has he ever been grateful?
We had no idea what to do with Balbindor’s corpse. Eventually we dragged it to the waterfall and flung it in. We slept by the waterfall that night and next morning at our leisure crossed the divide into the Other Side (the silly name had stuck).
For two days we travelled through dense alien jungle. We were aware that there were men among the thickets following us, but it was the monkeys who caused us most trouble. They were no bigger than leaf monkeys, but had black caps and a line of black fur about the eyes, giving them an oddly human look. Father trapped one with the old Malayan gourd trick, and discovered it to have only four toes on each foot and four fingers on each hand. We came at last to a clearing brought about by a massive outcrop of rock. Here we rested, both of us being overcome by fevers. We could see the barbaric scenery about us, the tumbled mass of vegetation, with every tree weighted down by chains of epiphytes and climbers. Above them loomed densely clad peaks of mountains, often as not shrouded by swift-moving cloud.
These clouds took on startling devilish shapes, progressing towards us. It may have been the fever which caused this uncomfortable illusion.
Days must have passed in illness. I cannot say how strange it was, how peculiarly dead I felt, when I awoke to find myself at a distance from my father. Dreadful sensations of isolation overcame me. Moreover, I was walking about. My feet seemed not to touch the ground.
I discovered that I could not get near my father. Whenever I seemed to advance towards him, my steps deviated in some way. It was as if I suffered from an optical illusion so strong that it consumed my other senses. I could do no more than prowl about him.
Father was sitting cross-legged by the remains of a fire on which he had roasted the leg of a small deer. Its remains lay by him. He was talking to a small wizened man with long hair and a curved bone through his cheeks which made him appear tusked. The face of this man was painted white. For some reason, I felt terrified of him, yet what chiefly seemed to scare me was a minor eccentricity of garb: the man wore nothing but an elaborate scarf or band or belt of fabric about his middle. No attempt had been made to cover his genitals, which were painted white like his face.
Prowling in a circular fashion seemed all I was capable of, so I continuously circled the spot. Although I called to my father, he took no notice, appearing totally absorbed in his conversation with the white-faced man. I now noted that the latter had on each hand only three fingers and a thumb, and only four toes on each foot, in the manner of the monkeys we had come across in another existence.
I was filled with such great uneasiness and hatred that I chattered and jibbered and made myself horrible.
Again and again I attempted to advance towards my father. Only now did I realize that I loved this man to whose power I had been subject all my life. Yet he would not — or perhaps could not—take the slightest notice of me. I set up a great screaming to attract his attention. Still he would not hear.
Father, Father, I called to you all my life! Perhaps you never ever heard, so wrapped up were you in your own dreams and ambitions. Now for this last time, I beg you to attend to your poor Herbert.
I know you have your own story. Allow me mine, for pity’s sake!
* * * *
It would be true to say without exaggeration that throughout my mature life, in my quest to transform humanity, I had been in search of Mr White Face, as I thought of him. (He refused to tell his name. That would have given me power over him.) I have a firm belief in transcendental power, unlike poor Herbert.
White Face materialized out of thin air when I was drinking at a pool. There on my hands and knees, by gosh! I looked up—he was standing nearby, large as life. Naked except for the band round his belly; yet something about him marked him immediately as a singular character. (A flair for judging character is one of my more useful talents.)
A remarkable feature of White Face’s physiognomy was a pair of small tusks (six inches long) piercing the cheeks. My knowledge of anatomy suggested they were rooted in the maxilla. They gave my new acquaintance a somewhat belligerent aspect, you may be sure!
Already he has told me much. We have spent two whole days from sun-up till sun-down in rapt conversation. His thought processes are entirely different from mine. Yet we have much in common. He is the wise man of his people as I, in Europe, am of mine. Grubby little man he may be — he shits in my presence without embarrassment — yet in his thought I perceive he is fastidious. I can probably adapt some of his ideas.
Much that he says about divisions in the human psyche is reflected in pale form in the Hindu sacred books of the Upanishads (which is hardly surprising, since White Face claims that all the world’s knowledge of itself emanated from the Other Side during the ice age before last, when Other Siders went out like missionaries over the globe, reaching as far as Hindustan).
What I do find difficult to swallow — we argued long about this — is some strange belief of his that the world is immaterial and that humanity (if I have it correctly) is no more than a kind of metaphysical construct projected by nature and relying on words rather than flesh for its continued existence. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood the old boy. I’m still slightly feverish. Or he’s mad as a hatter.
Only knowledge is precious, he says. And knowledge is perpetually being lost. The world from which I come is in crisis. It is losing its instinctual knowledge. Instinctual knowledge is leaking away under the impact of continual urbanization. That I believe. It is not in conflict with my own doctrines. He thinks our world will shortly die.
Then the Other Side will recolonize the world with new plants and animals—and understanding. (His kind of understanding, of course.) He wants to convince me to become his disciple, to go forth and encourage the world-death to come swiftly. By the third day of our discussion, I begin more and more to comprehend how desirable it is that the civilization to which I belong should be utterly destroyed. Yet still I hesitate. We drink some of his potent boka and rest from intellectual debate.
I ask, How are things so different here?
For answer, he shows me a ratbird.
Some distance from the rock on which we sat in conference—conferring about the future of the world, if that doesn’t sound too pompous — an angsana stood, a large tropical tree, its branches full of birds to which I paid no attention. Birds have never been one of my major interests, I need hardly say.
Mr White Face began a kind of twittering whistle, a finger planted in each corner of his lips. Almost immediately, the birds in the angsana responded by flying out in a flock, showing what I took to be anxiety by sinking to the ground and then rapidly rising again. Each time they sank down, they clustered closely, finally expelling one of their number, who fluttered to the ground and began — as if under compulsion — to walk, or rather scuttle, towards us; whereupon the other birds fled into the shelter of their tree.
As the bird came nearer, White Face changed his tune. The bird crawled between us and lay down at our feet in an unbirdlike manner.
I saw that its anatomy was unbirdlike. Its two pink legs ended in four toes, all pointing forward with only a suggestion of balancing heel. Wings and body were covered in grey fur. And the face was that of a rodent. In some ways it resembled a flying fox, common throughout Malaysia; in some ways it resembled a rat, but its easy flight and way of walking proclaimed it a bird.
And now that I looked again at Mr White Face, I saw that beneath his paint his face had some of the configurations of a rat, with sharp little jaws and pointed nose, not at all like the inhabitants of Sarawak, a blunt-faced company, with which I was acquainted.
Obeying his instruction, I proffered my hand, open palm upwards, towards the animal. The ratbird climbed on and began to preen its fur unconcernedly.
Nobody will blame me if I say that in the circumstances I became very uneasy. It seemed to me that in Mr White Face I had stumbled upon an evolutionary path paralleling — rivalling — our accepted one; that this path sprang from a small ground mammal (possibly tusked) very different from the arboreal tarsier-like creature from which Homo sapiens has developed. I was face to face with ... Homo rodens ... Over millions of years, its physical and mental processes had continued in its own course, parallel to but alien from ours. Indeed, perhaps inimical to ours, in view of the hostility of such long standing between man and rat.
Rising to my feet, I flicked the ratbird into the air. Instead of flying off, it settled at my feet.
I found I was unable to walk about. My legs would not move. Some magic had trapped me. At this unhappy moment, I recalled that mysterious sentence,
‘Wallace and Darwin did not know it, but there are alternatives.’ The alternative had been revealed to me; with magnificent hardihood, I had ventured into the Other Side; was I to suffer the fate of the two Dutch explorers?
Mr White Face continued to sit cross-legged, gazing up at me, his tusked countenance quite inscrutable. I saw the world through glass. It was unmoving. I felt extremely provoked. Perhaps the argumentative Balbindor had been correct in saying I should not have drunk from the waterfall springing from the Other Side. It had left me in White Face’s power.
And I was uncomfortably aware of the spirit of Herbert. After the foolish lad had died of his fevers—unable to pull through illness like me with my superior physique—his spirit had been powerless to escape. It circled me now, yowling and screaming in a noxious way. I tried to ignore it. But how to escape my predicament?
I stared down at the white face of the ratman. Then, from my days as a chemist, I remembered a formula for bleach. Perhaps the magic of science would overcome this detestable witchcraft (or whatever it was that held me in thrall).
As loudly as I could, I recited the formula by which bleach is produced when chlorine reacts with sodium hydroxide solution: ‘C12 (g) + 2NaOH(aq)⁷ NaC1(aq)
+ NaC10(aq) + H2 o(1)’.
Even as I chanted, I felt power return to my muscles. The great tousled world about me began to stir with life again. I was free. Thanks to bleach and a Western education — and of course an excellent memory.
I kicked at the ratbird, which fluttered off.
‘I don’t care for your kind of hospitality,’ I told White Face.
‘Well, you have passed my test,’ he said. ‘You are no weakling and your words are strong. To each of us there are two compartments which form our inner workings. One part is blind, one part sees. Most of our ordinary lives are governed by the part that sees, which is capable of performing ordinary tasks. That part is like a living thing which emerges from an egg. But there is the other part, which is blind and never emerges from the egg. It knows only what is unknown. It acts in time of trouble. You understand?’
‘You perhaps speak in parable form of two divisions of the brain. If so, then I believe I understand you.’ (I did not think it politic to express my reservations.)
He gave a short dry laugh, exposing sharp teeth. ‘Oh, we like to believe we understand! Suppose we have never understood one single thing of the world about us and inside us? Suppose we have lived in utter darkness and only believed that darkness was light?’
‘All things may be supposed. So what then?’
He said, ‘Then on the day that light dawns, it will be to you as if a sudden incomprehensible darkness descends.’
After this horrifying statement he made a beckoning gesture and began running.
Since he made swiftly towards the forest, I had not much option but to follow. But his words had chilled me. Suppose indeed that we were hedged in by limitations of comprehension we could not comprehend? The ratbird had already shaken many of my convictions regarding life on earth and how it had evolved.
Mr White Face’s mode of progression through the forest was at odds with my previous guide, Balbindor, and his method of procedure; but then, the trees, the very trees we passed through, were different. Their bark, if bark it was, possessed a highly reflective surface, so that to move forward was to be accompanied by a multitudinous army of distortions of oneself. (In this hallucinatory company, it was impossible not to feel ill at ease. Jumpy, in a word.)
I did not understand how it was possible to find one’s way in such a jungle. White Face was presumably trusting to his second compartment, ‘the part that never hatched’, to see him along his course.
In which case, the blind thing was unexpectedly reliable. After two days of arduous travel, we came to a dark-flowing river. On the far side of it stood a village of longhouses, much like the ones we had left back on the coast, except that these were entered by round doors instead of the normal rectangular ones.
Uncomfortable as I was in White Face’s company, there was comfort in the sense of arrival. I was possessed of a lively curiosity to investigate this kampong of the Other Side— that lively curiosity which has carried me so successfully through life.
One factor still contributed to my unease. The ghost of my son pursued me yet, his translucent image being reflected from the trunk of every tree, so that it sometimes appeared ahead of me as well as on every side. Herbert waved and screamed in the dreariest manner imaginable (uncanny, yet nevertheless lightly reminiscent of his behaviour throughout his life).
‘We shall cross the river,’ White Face announced, putting two skinny fingers into the corners of his mouth and whistling to announce our presence.
‘Will Herbert cross with us?’ I asked, I trust without revealing my nervousness.
He dismissed the very idea. ‘Ghosts cannot cross moving water. Only if they are ghosts of men with wooden legs.’
After White Face had signalled to some men on the opposite bank, a narrow dugout canoe was paddled across to collect us. By the time we landed at a rickety jetty, a number of inhabitants had gathered, standing cautiously back to observe us with their heads thrust forward as if they were short-sighted.
All of them had tusks. Some tusks were large and curled, or adorned with leaves. I could not fail to see that all, men, women and children, wore nothing in the tropical heat but a band — in the case of the women this was quite ornate
-around their middles, leaving everything else uncovered. The breasts of the women were small, and no more developed than those of the men. (The women also had tusks, so that I wondered if they were used for offence or defence. Presumably the missionary position in coitus would have its dangers. One might be stabbed in medias res. )
They were in general a strange lot, with sharp beaky faces quite unlike the Malays to whom I was accustomed. In their movements was something restless. A kind of rictus was common. I saw that here was opportunity for anthropological study which, when reported abroad, could but add to my fame. I wanted to look in a mouth to see where those tusks were anchored.
White Face addressed some of the men in a fast-flowing and high-pitched language. They made respectful way for him as he led me through the village to a longhouse standing apart from the others.
‘This is my home and you are welcome,’ he said. ‘Here you may rest and recover from your fever. The spirit of your son will not harm you.’
To my dismay, I found that the bleach formula had left my mind and would not be recalled. Did this mean I was still under his spell? So it was with reluctance that I climbed the ramp leading into the longhouse with its two great tusks over the circular entrance.
