The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [603]
‘Well, I’ve been trying to get up here for the past three weeks,’ said Sinclair defensively, for it was true that it was only four days since he had left Singapore, ‘but I think I know what you mean.’
There was something about this silence, went on Charlie, ignoring him: it gave the sound of your voice a distant, unreal quality. Even quite sharp sounds, like the dropping of a mess tin on the metalled road, would be blotted up immediately by the dense green walls on either side. The sound did not seem to go anywhere, that was it. There was no resonance. It gave you a baffling sensation, like speaking into a dead telephone. Only at night did you begin to hear sounds again. But so disturbing were the night sounds that the silence was almost better. Another thing, action here seemed to have no more resonance than sounds. During the daytime when you stopped moving, everything stopped, as if you were on the floor of a dead ocean. Everything had to come from you, that was what was so intolerable. His men felt the same way, he could tell by watching them. For men already exhausted this need to initiate all movement from their own resources was unendurable.
The two men were silent for a few moments. Charlie had evidently come to the end of what he had wanted to say. Although he still leaned dejectedly against the tree, he had stopped slapping himself and appeared calmer. ‘Sorry to go on like that about it,’ he said presently. ‘It’s the same for everyone, of course. Besides, it’s not much better for you blokes here in the rubber.’ It was true, Sinclair reflected, that even at the best of times there was something unnerving about a rubber plantation; wherever you stood you found yourself at the centre of a bewildering maze of identical trees which stretched out geometrically in every direction as far as the eye could see. But in Malaya the eye, as a rule, could not see very far; you seldom found a place from where you could get a prospect over the jungle or rubber which covered the country like a green lid on a saucepan.
‘D’you know Rilke’s poem about the panther?’ asked Charlie suddenly, smiling.
Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehen der Stäbe
So müd geworden … dass er nichts mehr hält …
‘Roughly translated it means: “His gaze from looking through the bars has grown so tired he can’t take in anything more.”
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
Und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.
“It seems to him as if there are a thousand bars and behind the thousand bars, no world.” That’s what I feel about all these bloody rubber trees.’
Sinclair thought of this again as, now in darkness, he strode on through the dripping ranks of trees, trying to shake off the premonition that if the Japanese attacked tonight it would be the end of the line for the Punjabis, no matter how strong the position they occupied in the defile.
As the night advanced the rain stopped and the moon began to appear, fitfully at first and then more frequently, between the clouds. From the jungle a dreadful odour of rotting vegetation crept out over the waiting Punjabis and hung there in the humid atmosphere. Now, more brilliant than ever, the moon hung like a great white lamp over the two black walls of jungle, shining so brightly that if you moved out of the covering foliage you could see your shadow clearly printed on the surface of the road. Behind them, a little way along the road, the Argylls guarding the exits from the defile into the rubber listened, skin crawling, to the steady churning of the jungle.
Charlie looked at the luminous green face of his wrist watch: it was midnight. From close at hand there came the metallic sound of some insect he had never been able to identify … it resembled the winding-up of a clockwork toy. He was dreamily contemplating this