The Sky And The Forest Page 2

  But where there was a clearing the scene changed. If a big tree paid the penalty for its very success by being selected to be struck by lightning, or if it had died of old age, or if a forest fire had killed trees over a larger area -- and more especially where man had cut down trees for his own purposes -- light and air could penetrate to earth level; and the lowly plants had their opportunity, which they grasped with feverish abandon. The clearing became a battleground of vegetation, a free-for-all wherein every green thing competed for the sunlight; until in a short time, measured in days rather than in weeks, the earth was covered shoulder-high by a tangle of vegetation through which no man could force his way without cutting a path with axe or sword. For months, for years, the lowly plants had their way, dominating the clearing; but steadily the sapling trees forced their way through, to climb above and to pre-empt for themselves the vital light. It would be a long struggle, but as the years passed the trees would assert their mastery more and more forcibly; the undergrowth would die away, the fallen trees would rot to powder, and in the end the clearing would be indistinguishable from the rest of the forest, silent and dark.

  The abandoned clearings through which led the path to the river were some years old now in their present existence, and at their densest in consequence. The felled trees lay in a frightful tangle, and over them and about them grew the undergrowth; in the four weeks since last that path had been trodden the feverish growth had covered it completely, so that Vira and the young men had to hack and slash their way through. Sometimes the path lay along fallen tree trunks, slippery with lichens; it wound about between jagged branches whose solidity was disguised by greenery as a trap for an unwary person who might try to push through. Old Indeharu toiled and stumbled along on his stiff legs behind the advanced party, and immediately in front of Loa; his whitening head was on a level with Loa's chin. On the dark bronze of his back the sweat ran in great drops like a small cascade of those incredibly rare and precious glass beads of which the town possessed a dozen or two. The sweat-drops coursed down Indeharu's bony back until they lost themselves in his loin girdle; the latter was of bark cloth and was as wet as if it had been dipped in water, so that what with the sweat and Indeharu's exertions it bade fair to disintegrate. Loa himself, half Indeharu's age and twice his strength, felt the burden of his leopard skin cloak; in this undergrowth, with the sun blazing down upon it, the heat and the humidity were intensified, and the flies bit and annoyed with unusual vigour, while bare feet, however horny and insensitive, were inevitably scratched and cut as they were dragged through the tangled vegetation.

  Loa was conscious of all these irritations -- no one could not be -- but he endured them without debate, for debate was something he was unused to. This was the world as it had always been and as it always would be. His erring sister was wandering again, and when she wandered she had to be recalled, just as an itch had to be scratched.

  Now they were through the overgrown clearing, and into the forest, the undisturbed forest, into the twilight and the silence. Huge tree trunks emerged from the spongy leaf-mould, spaced out with almost mathematical regularity by the relentless laws of nature. They soared upwards without change or relief (save for the leafless stems of the vines) until two hundred feet overhead they burst suddenly into tranches and foliage making a thick roof through which no direct light could penetrate. Up there lived the monkeys and the birds, and the sun shone, and the rain fell. To be down here in the darkness -- for inevitably here it was too dark for any vegetation to grow -- was to be inside the crust of the world, cut off from the exterior. Yet within the forest Loa could relax and feel at home. The forest was his brother, just as the sun was his brother and the moon was his sister, and Loa had a feeling that the forest was a kindly, friendly brother. The forest suited his temperament or his physique, and he lengthened his stride until he trod on the heels of Indeharu hobbling along in front of him. Loa poked him in the ribs with the end of his battle-axe as a further reminder to quicken his step. Indeharu was very old, with stores of knowledge as a representative of an almost obliterated generation, but he was just an old man and Loa had no regard for his feelings.

  In the forest here there was no hindrance to travel save for the bogginess underfoot; the broad spaces between the tree trunks allowed of easy walking in any direction. So much so that it was the easiest thing in the world to lose oneself in the forest. Without any landmarks, without any sight of the sun, the moment a man lost his sense of direction in the forest he lost everything. He might wander for days, for weeks and months, seeing nothing but tree trunks around him and the sombre green roof overhead. There were one or two people in the town who had actually had this experience, and who had been guided home again after a vast passage of time by blind chance and great good fortune. There had been plenty of others who had gone forth on some trifling expedition and who had never returned. They had been lost in the forest. Or they had been trapped by the little men.

  This route to the river was as clearly defined as anything could be in the forest. Through the soggy leaf-mould there wound a faint depression, which a keen eye could detect as a footpath, and the trees on either side displayed frequent cuts and wounds -- Loa made a few new ones himself as he walked along, casual chops with his battle-axe that sliced into the bark of the trees, making a mark that would endure for several months until the insects altered its shape so that it did not reveal the human agency that caused it, and until the moss and lichens grew over it and concealed it again.

  The disadvantage about a well-marked path was that the little men would make use of it for their own purposes. They would place poisoned skewers of wood under the leaf-mould, on which a man might tread; if he did, then very probably he would be dead in half an hour for the little men to feast on him. And they would dig pits and place poisoned stakes in them, roofing the pits over with a frail covering disguised by leaf-mould, which would give way under the foot of either an antelope or a man. Vira and the young men ahead were scanning carefully every yard of the path, and two of them had strung their bows and fitted broad-headed arrows to the strings, ready to draw and loose at a moment's notice should a little man or a little woman, or any other game, expose itself within range.

  And now the trees suddenly began to be farther apart, the leaf-mould underfoot suddenly became firmer, and the path took a sharp upward slope. For a few moments it was a steep climb. The forest ended abruptly here, where the soil changed to naked rock on which even in that lush atmosphere nothing could grow. They were out of the forest and under the sky, and a few more strides took them to the top of the rock, looking over the vast river. Loa did not like this. He was inclined to flinch a little as he emerged from the forest. The sky was his brother, just as was the forest, but an unfriendly brother, a frightening brother. He did not like great spaces; they affected him as some people are affected by great heights. Except here on the riverbank he never looked out over great distances. The town street was less than a hundred yards long, and that was the next widest horizon he knew; in the forest the trees were close on every hand, and that was where he felt at home. Here on this pinnacle of rock the sky was enormous and incredibly distant.

  And the river! A full mile it stretched from bank to bank; the pinnacle of rock, constituting the bluff at the outside curve of a shallow beach, commanded views of five and ten miles upstream and down -- terrifying distances. Except at this outcrop of rock, the forest came to the water's very edge; indeed so great was the pressure for light and air that on the riverbanks the trees grew out almost horizontally, straining out over the water to escape from the shadow of their mightier neighbours, leading a brief precarious life until flood and erosion cut the soil from their roots and they fell into the water. One could never look at the river for long without seeing some great tree come floating down on the turbulent current, turning and rolling in torment, lifting its arms in mute appeal to the pitiless sky as it rolled.

  In the distance the river looked blue and silver, but when one
looked down into it from the bank it was muddy and brown, although the time of the real “brown water,” when the level rose a foot or two and the river took on a more definite colour, was still a month or two off. The surface of the river was never still; a storm would work it up into great rollers, and on a calm day like this, when at first sight the surface seemed almost oily, closer observation would reveal great swirls and motiveless crinklings, sinister, ugly movements as the broad water went sliding along, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, hateful and fearsome in its majesty. Loa watched Lanu pick up a fragment of rock and hurl it into the river with delight in the splash and the ring. Behaviour like that made Loa a trifle uncomfortable, for it savoured of unconventionality, but it was not quite bad enough for Loa to check Lanu -- nothing ever was.

  Indeharu was waiting for the ceremony to begin. Loa stood forward.

  “Sister,” he said, looking down the river to the distant reach whither his erring sister had strayed. “Come back from under the water. Come back into the sky. The -- the -- “

  “The nights are dark,” prompted Indeharu, as he always had to do.

  “The nights are dark, and your sons and daughters cannot fill the sky. Come back. Grow bigger, for the nights are very dark. Come back, my sister.”

  Somewhere under the surface of the river his sister was hiding; everyone knew of the liking she had for the big yellow river. A few people who had been caught by darkness away from the town and who had been forced to spend the night beside the river had told him of how she stretched her arms out over the water and how her spirit danced on its surface. Every month she wandered back to it and hid herself in its depths, and had to be recalled by her brother.

  A cloud of butterflies was flying along the river in a vast bank, reaching from the surface nearly up to the level of Loa's face, more than a hundred feet; stretching nearly half a mile across the river and a quarter of a mile down it. With the wind behind them they passed rapidly downstream, a lavender-tinted cloudbank. Flaws of wind recoiling from the bank whirled parts of it into little eddies, and the sun shining down caught the millions of wings and was reflected back in a constant succession of rosy highlights. Lanu clapped his hands at the sight of them.

  “What are they?” he asked, excitedly.

  “They come from the sky,'‘ answered Loa, heavily.

  No doubt they were beautiful, but Loa was too disturbed mentally by the vast distances to experience more than mixed emotions regarding them. His brother the sky was looking down at him from all directions, and he did not like that; it was like having an enemy at his back. Across the river the forest was dwindled to a mere strip of blue in the steamy atmosphere. It was frightening to see the forest so insignificant, the sky so big. It gave Loa no doubts regarding his own status as a god -- the first among equals, among sky and forest and river and sun -- but it disturbed him violently by its disruption of the usual state of affairs. It was not respectable, it was not usual, it chafed him and irritated him.

  “Look! Look!” said Lanu, pointing.

  Far up the river there was a dark speck to be seen. It moved upon the surface, and as it moved reflected sunshine winked from it. A boat, with the sunshine gleaming on the wet paddles. That was a phenomenon to be regarded with a dull lack of interest. There were other men in the world, Loa knew, besides the people of the town and the little men. Some of them went about on the river in canoes. In the days of Nasa, Loa's father, there had been another town near, here by the water's edge; but Nasa and his people had fallen upon it one night and killed everybody in it and had feasted lavishly in consequence for days afterwards. The men of that town had used canoes, so Indeharu said. So other men existed, and some of them used canoes on the river. And rain fell from the sky; there was no need to think farther about either matter. The young women and the young men were gazing up the river at the canoe, and talking excitedly about it, their excitement mingled with some trepidation because they knew so little about other people. But Loa knew no fear; there was no reason why he should fear anything in the world.

  “I go,” he said to Indeharu, for he wanted to free himself from the irritation of thus being exposed to the sky.

  “Loa goes back!” proclaimed Indeharu.

  Vira hustled the young men off along the path to make the way safe, and Indeharu followed them. As Loa left the high point to descend again to the forest the remainder flung themselves on their faces, their noses to the ground, for him to walk past them, but Loa hardly spared a glance for the row of glistening dark brown backs. He walked on along the path, and breathed more freely and gratefully as he left the sky behind him and entered into the steamy twilight of the forest. Before him Lanu capered along, full of the joy of living. Lanu had devised a new way of walking. Instead of taking strides with alternate feet he was trying to step twice with each foot in turn. He poised on one foot and skipped, and then poised on the other foot and skipped, his arms held high as he balanced. So they went back into the forest, Loa swinging his battle-axe and Lanu skipping in front of him.

  CHAPTER 2

  Some young men of the town hunting in the forest had captured a strange woman. They brought her back with them, and everyone assembled to look at her and to listen to her absurd speech. Delli, her ridiculous name was, she said -- in itself that was enough to make people laugh and clap their thighs. All her words were comical like that, with l’s where r’s should be, and the strangest turns of speech. Everybody in the town knew there were many ways of addressing people; one spoke differently, with different words, if one were addressing one person, or two persons, or many persons, or if the persons addressed were old or young, male or female, married or single, important or unimportant. But this woman muddled it all up, and spoke (when it was possible to disentangle her curious pronunciation) to the crowd as if it were made up of three little children. Everyone laughed uproariously at that.

  They brought her to Loa where he sat on his tripod stool with Indeharu and Vira standing behind him, and they swarmed close round her to hear the quaint things she said.

  “Who are you?” asked Loa.

  “Delli,” she said.

  That ridiculous name again! Everyone laughed.

  “Where do you come from?”

  “I come from the town.”

  That was just as ridiculous as her name. This was the town, and everyone knew it. She rolled her eyes from side to side at the crowd, a very frightened woman. She held her hand over her heart as she looked about her, naked save for a wisp of bark cloth. She was a very puzzled woman as well, quite unable to understand why the simple things she said should occasion so much merriment.

  “She was in the forest eating amoma fruits,” interposed Ura, one of the young men, explaining with the proper gestures how they came to catch her. “She did not hear us. Maketu went over that way. Huva went over there. We went silently forward through the trees. Then she saw Maketu and ran. Then she saw Huva and ran the other way, towards me. I was behind a tree, and I sprang out and I caught her. She hit me, here, on my shoulder, and she scratched with her nails. But still I held her. She could not escape from Ura.”

  “She was eating amoma fruits?” asked Loa.

  “Yes.”

  Amoma fruits were not good eating; their watery acid pulp could not deceive a healthy stomach for a moment. Children ate them during their games, but no sensible person ever did. Loa stared harder at the strange woman. The scar-tattooing on her cheeks and upper lip was of an odd pattern. She was terribly thin, like a skeleton, her bones standing out through her skin, and her breasts fallen away to empty bags although she was a young woman, not yet the mother of more than two children or so. And her body and legs and arms were covered with scratches, some of them several days old, some of them fresh, but altogether making a complete network over her. She was calmer now, but Loa's next question threw her into a worse panic than ever.

  “Why were you in the forest?” asked Loa.

  Her face distorted itself with fear.

&nb
sp; “Bang bang,” she said, and repeated herself. “Bang bang.”

  That was almost too funny to bear, to see this amusing woman shaking with fright and to hear her say “bang bang!” She goggled round at the laughing throng and took a grip of herself. When she spoke again the intensity of her emotion made her voice a hoarse whisper, but silence fell on the crowd and every word could be heard.

  “Men came,” she said. “Many men, at night. We were all asleep. Bang bang. Bang bang. Men were killed, women were killed. My man was sleeping beside me, and he woke up and took his spear. Everyone was shouting. Other men of the town came running into the house. Some were wounded. We stood by the door with spears and we would not come out although they shouted to us to come out. Houses were burning so that we could see out. Bang bang. Bang bang. Fire in the night, like red lightning. My man fell down and he was dead. Still we would not come out. Then our house burned. They were waiting for us outside the door so I would not go out when the men did. I jumped up and caught the roof beams of the house. Not all the thatch was burning so I pulled the thatch aside and climbed through the roof. I stood there and all the town was burning. Bang bang. Bang Bang. The thatch was burning beside me and so I jumped. I jumped far, very far. The old clearing was beside our house and I jumped into it, right into the bushes. I tried to run through the bushes, but I could not go far, not in the dark. I lay there and saw the flames and heard them shouting. My baby -- I think I heard her cry too.”