The road inland wound along the Prabang river, right across the alluvial plain, and on either hand people were working their
partly-flooded enclosures with buffaloes, or setting rice-plants. Weaver-birds flew in clouds, and down by the water various kinds of duck moved in surprising quantities: storks paced gravely in the paddies. ‘I believe that was a real snipe,’ cried Jack, putting his hand to his carbine. ‘And another, by God!’ But Stephen was deeply engaged in a discussion of the sagopalms that lined the road and filled the marshier parts with his guides, two sunny Dyaks belonging to that part of the Sultan’s bodyguard detached to look after the British mission. They were armed with spears and their traditional blowpipes as well as krisses, and they were said to be quite fearless and deadly opponents; they were of course head-hunters; and they were full of information about sago and most of the creatures that passed. One of them, Sadong, was a remarkably good shot, and being an amiable, obliging soul he knocked down several of the more unusual birds for Stephen with his silent, accurate weapon, particularly after they had left the cultivated ground and had begun their long steady climb through the open forest, following the tracks made by the Chinese who brought down sandalwood, camphor and a number of the smaller trees used by cabinet-makers. Well before noon they sat under a spreading great camphor: Stephen skinned his birds and the Dyaks spitted them on twigs as an appetizer; then they ate a cold roast peacock, brewed a pot of coffee and set off in the hot, silent, shaded middle of the day. Nothing was moving; even the leeches were somnolent; but the Dyaks showed the recent tracks of two bears and the curious boar of those parts, and they pointed out a hollow tree in which the bears had obviously found honey, a tree with thirty-six kinds of orchid growing on it, some at a great height. The least spectacular was said to be useful in cases of female sterility.
On and steadily up; occasionally, when there was some exceptional thinning of the trees by lightning-stroke or whirlwind or bare rock outcropping, the volcano could be seen, coming closer and growing in height; and occasionally, in ravines or on open slopes, there were distinct traces of an ancient road, now reduced to a path where it was followed at all, but once broad, carefully planned and embanked. The Dyaks said that at its end there was a famous stand of durians, esteemed for their size, flavour and early ripening, and a heathen temple, just before the Thousand Steps.
‘I have lost a stone,’ said Jack, leading his pony up the deep-worn track.
‘You can well afford it,’ said Stephen.
On and on, up and up. Conversation drooped and eventually died quite away, Jack fairly aswim with sweat.
Then all at once the path ceased climbing and there was the durian grove on its fine stretch of flat ground: beyond it the grey wall of the crater soared up, the legendary steps catching the light, winding up and away like the Great Wall of China.
They walked slowly across the little plain under the widespaced trees, and there at the foot of the cliff, a cliff that now shut out half the sky, stood the Dyaks’ heathen temple, almost entirely ruined and buried under rampant vegetation – figs, lianas and surprisingly a dense group of tree-ferns – but with part of one tower still standing. The rows of carvings on its outward face could not easily be made out; time had obscured them of course but even more the iconoclastic zeal of Muslim converts. As far as tall ladders could reach, noses, sometimes whole heads, bosoms, hands, arms and legs had been beaten off; yet enough remained to make it clear that this had been a Hindu holy place, and Stephen was trying to remember the name of the dancing figure with six arms – the remains of six arms
– when he heard ‘Oohoo, mias, mias!’ from one Dyak and ‘Shoot, tuan, shoot!’ from the other.
He whipped round, saw Jack pulling the carbine from his saddle and the Dyaks pointing their pipes into a tall leafy durian. Following their direction he caught a fragmentary sight of a very large rufous shape high up and he called out ‘Do not shoot, Jack At the same moment Sadong launched his dart There was a violent movement above, a waving of branches, the tearing of leaves, and a heavy spiked durian shot out of the tree, passing between the Dyaks heads They fled, laughing, to a safe distance, and the orang utang fled in the other
direction, swinging from branch to branch, tree to tree, at a surprising pace. Stephen had two glimpses of him, reddish in the odd patches of sun, immensely broad-shouldered and long-armed, and then he was gone.
The Dyaks went to the tree and showed Stephen the empty remnants of fruit and the mias’ droppings. ‘There was a female here too,’ said Sadong, pointing. ‘I will see whether they have left anything at all.’ He climbed into the tree, called ‘Very few, the fiends,’ and tossed down four of the ripest.
When the durians were done Stephen took his roll from behind the saddle, slung it over his shoulder and said, ‘You must go back at once, brother, or you will be benighted in the forest. I shall have the sun much longer.’
‘God help us,’ said Jack, gazing up at the steps rising and rising for ever, ‘what a climb. Just now I thought I saw someone a quarter of the way up, but either I was mistaken or he has turned the corner.’
‘Goodbye, now, Jack. God bless. Dear Dyaks, goodbye.’
One hundred steps hollowed by a hundred generations of pilgrims, each step dreadfully high. Two hundred; already the forest was one vast green sheet spread out. And somewhere there was a full-grown male orang-utang moving about beneath the leaves. ‘I should have given five pounds to have had time to see him properly,’ he said; and then, remembering his present wealth, ‘No. Much more; very much more.’ Two hundred and fifty steps, and in a niche on the cliff side of the path the image of some god had been sadly disfigured. Three hundred, where the curve, always left-handed hitherto, became somewhat irregular, turned faster and showed not only a new stretch of country with the river shining silver a great way off but also another traveller far ahead.
A traveller wearing a shabby brown blanket, it seemed; a weary traveller, walking awkwardly, often on all fours where the steps rose steep, often resting. Three hundred and fifty. Stephen tried to remember Pope’s lines about the Monument, and the number of the tall bully’s steps. Whatever that number,
four hundred of these had defeated Muslim zeal, since here, where a projecting spill of lava allowed the path to change direction, turning through a hundred and forty degrees, there stood a shrine untouched by violence, a dim, calm figure, almost effaced by wind and rain, but still conveying serenity and detachment.
The other traveller had rested by the shrine; now they were closer together, not two hundred yards apart, and now with a mingled incredulity and bubbling delight Stephen
saw that the traveller was a mias, an orang-utang. The incredulity vanished when he had brought out his little pocket telescope, but the delight was tempered by a fear that the creature had not yet noticed him – that when it did so it would tear away. To be sure, this was no country for a great arboreal ape to make a sudden disappearance, there being nothing but bare lava and a stunted bush or two, but even so he kept his distance, watching the mias intently. He knew nothing of the ape’s powers of hearing, sight or scent; and such a chance might never come again in a thousand years.
Up and up they went, still a cable’s length apart; but slowly, for the ape was footsore and despondent. As for Stephen, by the sixth-hundred step his calves and thighs were ready to burst, and at each rise now they forced themselves upon his attention. Up and up, up and up until the ridge was no great way off at last. But before they reached it, the path took another turn; and when he too came round the corner he was on top of the ape. She was sitting on a stone, resting her feet. He scarcely knew what to do; it seemed an intrusion. ‘God be with you, ape,’ he said in Irish, which in his confusion seemed more appropriate. She turned her head and looked him full in the face; her expression was sad, weary, in no way hostile – remote. A falcon passed low overhead. They both watched it out of sight, and then she heaved herself up and went on, Stephen following. He took the most particular notice of her progression, her muscular movements, the paucity of the gluteus maximus, the odd disposition and contraction of the gastrocnemius, and on the other hand the prodigious breadth of