Part 12 (1/2)
I did as he bid, and soon we were squatting by the fire toasting arus on pointed sticks, the doorway closed with a wattle hurdle, and the black and gold firelight filling the hut with fantastic shadows. Then when the banana-like fruit was ready, the man fetched from a recess a loaf of bread savoured with the dust of dried and pounded fish, put the foresaid calabash of strong ale to warm, and down we sat to supper with real woodman appet.i.tes. Seldom have I enjoyed a meal so much, and when we had finished the fruit and the wheat cake my guide s.n.a.t.c.hed up the great gourd of ale, and putting it to his lips called out:
”Here's to you, stranger; here's to your country; here's to your girl, if you have one, and death to your enemies!” Then he drank deep and long, and, pa.s.sed the stuff to me.
”Here's to you, bully host, and the missus, and the children, if there are any, and more power to your elbow!”--the which gratified him greatly, though probably he had small idea of my meaning.
And right merry we were that evening. The host was a jolly good fellow, and his ale, with a pleasant savour of mint in it, was the heartiest drink I ever set lips to. We talked and laughed till the very jackals yapped in sympathy outside. And when he had told a score of wonderful wood stories as pungent of the life of these fairy forests as the aromatic scent of his bark-heaps outside, as iridescent with the colours of another world as the rainbow bubbles riding down his starlit rill, I took a turn, and told him of the commonplaces of my world so far away, whereat he laughed gloriously again. The greater the commonplace the larger his joy. The humblest story, hardly calculated to impress a griffin between watches on the main-deck, was a masterpiece of wit to that gentle savage; and when I ”took off” the tricks and foibles of some of my superiors--Heaven forgive me for such treason!--he listened with the exquisite open-mouthed delight of one who wanders in a brand-new world of mirth.
We drank and laughed over that strong beer till the little owls outside raised their voice in combined accord, and then the woodman, shaking the last remnant of his sleepy wits together, and giving a reproachful look at me for finally pa.s.sing him the gourd empty to the last drop, rose, threw a fur on a pile of dead gra.s.s at one side of the hut, and bid me sleep, ”for his brain was giddy with the wonders of the incredible and ludicrous sphere which I had lately inhabited.”
Slowly the fire died away; slowly the quivering gold and black arabesques on the walls merged in a red haze as the sticks dropped into tinder, and the great black outline of the hairy monster who had thrown himself down by the embers rose up the walls against that flush like the outline of a range of hills against a sunset glow. I listened drowsily for a s.p.a.ce to his snoring and the laughing answer of the brook outside, and then that ambrosial sleep which is the gentle attendant of hards.h.i.+p and danger touched my tired eyelids, and I, too, slept.
My friend was glum the next morning, as they who stay over-long at the supper flagon are apt to be. He had been at work an hour on his bark-heaps when I came out into the open, and it was only by a good deal of diplomacy and some material help in sorting his f.a.ggots that he was got into a better frame of mind. I could not, however, trust his mood completely, and as I did not want to end so jovial a friends.h.i.+p with a quarrel, I hurried through our breakfast of dry bread, with hard-boiled lizard eggs, and then settling my reckoning with one of the bra.s.s b.u.t.tons from my coat, which he immediately threaded, with every evidence of extreme gratification, on a string of trinkets hanging round his neck, asked him the way to Ar-hap's capital.
”Your way is easy, friend, as long as you keep to the straight path and have yonder two-humped mountain in front. To the left is the sea, and behind the hill runs the ca.n.a.l and road by which all traffic comes or goes to Ar-hap. But above all things pa.s.s not to the hills right, for no man goes there; there away the forests are thick as night, and in their perpetual shadows are the ruins of a Hither city, a haunted fairy town to which some travellers have been, but whence none ever returned alive.”
”By the great Jove, that sounds promising! I would like to see that town if my errand were not so urgent.”
But the old fellow shook his s.h.a.ggy head and turned a shade yellower.
”It is no place for decent folk,” he growled. ”I myself once pa.s.sed within a mile of its outskirts at dusk, and saw the unholy little people's lanterned processions starting for the shrine of Queen Yang, who, tradition says, killed herself and a thousand babies with her when we took this land.”
”My word, that was a holocaust! Couldn't I drop in there to lunch? It would make a fine paper for an antiquarian society.”
Again the woodman frowned. ”Do as I bid you, son. You are too young and green to go on ventures by yourself. Keep to the straight road: shun the swamps and the fairy forest, else will you never see Ar-hap.”
”And as I have very urgent and very important business with him, comrade, no doubt your advice is good. I will call on Princess Yang some other day. And now goodbye! Rougher but friendlier shelter than you have given me no man could ask for. I am downright sorry to part with you in this lonely land. If ever we meet again--” but we never did! The honest old churl clasped me into his hairy bosom three times, stuffed my wallet with dry fruit and bread, and once more repeating his directions, sent me on my lonely way.
I confess I sighed while turning into the forest, and looked back more than once at his retreating form. The loneliness of my position, the hopelessness of my venture, welled up in my heart after that good comrades.h.i.+p, and when the hut was out of sight I went forward down the green gra.s.s road, chin on chest, for twenty minutes in the deepest dejection. But, thank Heaven, I was born with a tough spirit, and possess a mind which has learned in many fights to give brave counsel to my spirit, and thus presently I shook myself together, setting my face boldly to the quest and the day's work.
It was not so clear a morning as the previous one, and a steamy wind on what at sea I should have called the starboard bow, as I pressed forward to the distant hill, had a curiously subduing effect on my thoughts, and filled the forest glades with a tremulous unreality like to nothing on our earth, and distinctly embarra.s.sing to a stranger in a strange land. Small birds in that quaint atmospheric haze looked like condors, b.u.t.terflies like giant fowl, and the simplest objects of the forest like the imaginations of a disordered dream. Behind that gauzy hallucination a fine white mist came up, and the sun spread out flat and red in the sky, while the pent-in heat became almost unendurable.
Still I plodded on, growling to myself that in Christian lat.i.tudes all the evidences would have been held to betoken a storm before night, whatever they might do here, but for the most part lost in my own gloomy speculations. That was the more pity since, in thinking the walk over now, it seems to me that I pa.s.sed many marvels, saw many glorious vistas in those nameless forests, many spreads of colour, many incidents that, could I but remember them more distinctly, would supply material for making my fortune as a descriptive traveller. But what would you? I have forgotten, and am too virtuous to draw on my imagination, as it is sometimes said other travellers have done when picturesque facts were deficient. Yes, I have forgotten all about that day, save that it was sultry hot, that I took off my coat and waistcoat to be cooler, carrying them, like the tramp I was, across my arm, and thus dishevelled pa.s.sed some time in the afternoon an encampment of forest folk, wherefrom almost all the men were gone, and the women shy and surly.
In no very social humour myself, I walked round their woodland village, and on the outskirts, by a brook, just as I was wis.h.i.+ng there were some one to eat my solitary lunch with, chanced upon a fellow busily engaged in hammering stones into weapons upon a flint anvil.
He was an ugly-looking individual at best, yet I was hard up for company, so I put my coat down, and, seating myself on a log opposite, proceeded to open my wallet, and take out the frugal stores the woodman had given me that morning.
The man was seated upon the ground holding a stone anvil between his feet, while with his hands he turned and chipped with great skill a spear-head he was making out of flint. It was about the only pastime he had, and his little yellow eyes gleamed with a craftsman's pleasure, his s.h.a.ggy round shoulders were bent over the task, the chips flew in quick particles, and the wood echoed musically as the artificer watched the thing under his hands take form and fas.h.i.+on. Presently I spoke, and the worker looked up, not too pleased at being thus interrupted.
But he was easy of propitiation, and over a handful of dried raisins communicative.
How, I asked, knowing a craftsman's craft is often nearest to his heart, how was it such things as that he chipped came to be thought of by him and his? Whereon the woodman, having spit out the raisin-stones and wiped his fingers on his fur, said in substance that the first weapon was fas.h.i.+oned when the earliest ape hurled the first stone in wrath.
”But, chum,” I said, taking up his half-finished spear and touching the razor-fine edge with admiring caution, ”from hurling the crude pebble to fas.h.i.+oning such as this is a long stride. Who first edged and pointed the primitive malice? What man with the soul of a thousand unborn fighters in him notched and sharpened your natural rock?”
Whereon the chipper grinned, and answered that, when the woodmen had found stones that would crack skulls, it came upon them presently that they would crack nuts as well. And cracking nuts between two stones one day a flint shattered, and there on the gra.s.s was the golden secret of the edge--the thing that has made man what he is.
”Yet again, good fellow,” I queried, ”even this happy chance only gives us a weapon, sharp, no doubt, and calculated to do a hundred services for any ten the original pebble could have done, but still unhandled, small in force, imperfect--now tell me, which of your amiable ancestors first put a handle to the fas.h.i.+oned flint, and how he thought of it?”
The workman had done his flake by now, and wrapping it in a bit of skin, put it carefully in his belt before turning to answer my question.
”Who made the first handle for the first flint, you of the many questions? She did--she, the Mother,” he suddenly cried, patting the earth with his brown hand, and working himself up as he spoke, ”made it in her heart for us her first-born. See, here is such as the first handled weapon that ever came out of darkness,” and he s.n.a.t.c.hed from the ground, where it had lain hidden under his fox-skin cloak, a heavy club. I saw in an instant how it was. The club had been a sapling, and the sapling's roots had grown about and circled with a splendid grip a lump of native flint. A woodman had pulled the sapling, found the flint, and fas.h.i.+oned the two in a moment of happy inspiration, the one to an axe-head and the other to a handle, as they lay Nature-welded!