Moon Over the Monkey's Back, part 4

In dreams, I still revisit that mountain march, where although immutable constellations of experiential data remain bedded within my psyche, the representations of human participation reconfigure, machine-like, at random.  The constant variables are thus - treacherous fissures in the volcanic rock of the jungle floor exposing deep cavities.  Paths that fell away on one side to reveal gorges gargling hundreds of feet below.  A waterfall, roaring out of the side of a jungle clad mountain like a struck pipe.  Carnival blossoms set amongst ancient and giant ferns with barbed stems.  At night, Raddick and that damned heathen would sit chewing their betel nut, the firelight capturing slivers of the varying, intense, expressions swapped between them.  A view of a moonlit sea, its white-tops mountain peaks and wind whipped cloud stretching unrelenting beyond the horizon.  And always above us, in the swaying, laden branches, trains of monkeys jabbered like fanged fruits.  So much for consistency!                                   

Sometimes Raddick is forging ahead of our close cohort, up a sheer incline amongst titanic many fluted boughs.  Those moments would find him switching from the native tongue in which he made conversation with our native scout, to a chittering high laugh that resounded through the cathedral-high canopy.  On occasion, I noted him dissolute with depression, observing the neon pink intensity of a flower’s frond, so bright and so alien to my British—bound sensibilities it might construe a minor rip in worldly fabric.  Then, he became dressed in the weaved motley of the tribe, a crooked scimitar through his belt his high laugh shrieking through the trees.  Del Torres’ staunch peeler’s uniform, the one singular vestige of Empire, clothed at varying times, along with it’s rightful owner, Raddick, myself – and even that savage brute. 

The flying shuttle of cognition, weaving the one stream of sure-cast memory of the conscious, with the other, it’s subliminal sister - itself stamped with eternal chaos – creates an apprehension of those events that is so damnably warped.  And still, as though bidden by some hidden geometry, my mind incessantly recalculates and models, frantic no doubt to discover a less traumatizing resolution.  I confess, I have awoken from visions of myself clad in a Paiwan jacket the alien chitter of their tongue nattering from my own as I slashed through the undergrowth with a heathen blade.                                   

And there I fear we will always march, in a sloping decent of order, that native devil, a lunatic, the stout Oriental and myself, the trees heavy and writhing with cackling beasts.  It sometimes feels during - an unguarded thought - as though I tread, in memory, into the maddening dervish of his own helter-skelter temperament.              

I meant to nudge him into a more controlled course of conduct in a bid for his health, for I had no sedative if he became completely unstuck, as he was wont to do after a fevered escalation into mania.  My concerned had been almost permanently harnessed to him that day, wary of his malady becoming too acute, keen to not drop my physician’s responsibilities.                   

One morning we had breakfasted while a chill, boisterous wind whipped and rolled through the long grasses we had bedded in the night before.  The scout had yet to surface I had noted, and Del Torres was tinkering around with the pots.  I sat alongside Raddick as the fierce wind stole the taste of coffee and bacon from our mouths. 

“Peaky aint it?” Raddick chirped at me.

“Are you quite done with your bloody charades, its damnably unchristian and puts not an insignificant blot against your character.”  I looked him up and down, hoping to administer the exact dosage of admonishment.

“While yours is blotted with the shrewish nature of a house matron, Mackenzie.  Besides - the only bible you believe in was published by William Parker!.”

Trumped, I maintained an amicable silence.  We silently watched, as fathoms below, the great, starkly cut valley disappeared in giant rollers of white cloud – for that is how high our exertions had taken us – so it took upon the remarkable appearance of a vast, silent river flowing past us, casting up, through impact with the valley side, great outlandish specters to hang mutely in frozen waltzes, only to be pulled apart, with agonizing slowness, and fall back swallowed back by the broiling current.            

“What is that ghastly chum of yours up to anyway?”

“Oh - snouting about safe and sound, no doubt.”

“If you think, as your doctor, I will turn a blind eye this time, to this, this -- unbecoming behavior, you are wrong my fellow.” He let out a bellow and handed me his pipe. 

“Our very survival depends upon that fine fellow’s good graces.  Now lay off your thumb-screws a moment.”  

“I would enjoy, for one night at least, not to be preoccupied with waking up to find I am the owner of withered blackamoor toes.”

“Why I believe our good friend is this very moment ordering his brethren to lay out the welcome mat.”

“Sir?” Del Torres called our attention from the awesome scene.  “Your devil is back.”

All morning and early afternoon we plunged downwards, on treacherously small trails that had often been washed away by storms.  As soon as we left the icy chill of the mountains the humid embrace of the forests would wrap itself around us, hot and pregnant with insects.  Up a shallow stream we walked, the forest ominously silent but for the incessant whine of mosquitos and a distant, almost imperceptible, roar.  With a flash of stained teeth, the tattooed face of our scout flexed into a smile and he suddenly stepped up the bank through some close thickets, and we immediately fell upon the low thatched eaves of a tribal hamlet.  From every direction, the Paiwan stared in ferocious silence.  Fire-pits smoked amongst the huts.  Not one spoke as we meandered through the hamlet.  The scowling faces of their women were cut in half by thick blue chevrons tattooed into their cheeks and lips.  As I stepped aside to look if we were being followed three of the devils, with tattooed bottom lips and chins, stalked behind manes of black hair falling across bare chests.  In their belts were the long thick chopping blades with a spiked end, in curious sheaths that laid bare the blades inside.  Del Torres had the only service revolver in the party, although the two of us carried sturdy blackthorn walking canes with weighted handles – what little use it would do now I muttered inwardly.  Del Torres was a champion stick and dagger fighter and could have gone a few bells with x in his prime, but it wouldn’t be enough.  The hunters dogged us like wolves and the women’s faces in doorways and round fire pits snarled.  Our scout seemed to take this in good humour, shouting out to the odd savage who would turn back, and pretend to busy themselves. 

Turning up a narrow passageway in between two long huts words were thrown between the two front men, Raddick then pressed forward, and out again the other side of the settlement, I noticed with not a small portion of relief, and onwards into sparcer forestry.  It became perceivable that our previous path had a point of origin over the crest of a great crag, and it became immediately apparent that we had made our way along to another treacherous mountain flank.  It was over this, that like a sheet of falling silver hair over a hag’s creased and puckered face, a waterfall could be seen to be falling out - straight through thin air. 

Behind the waterfall was found a narrow shelf of rock -– and which it became obvious that the hideous fiend expected us to make use of.  I dared not watch the passage of water that rumbled out over our heads - into utter dizzying silence – only buffeted this way and that by strong gusts of wind.  With no little trepidation, I strapped my cane across my pack, and following the lead of Raddick and the scout, my boot step clapped on the perilous step, and - in confidence here may fully attest - it felt as though I held the spastic pulses of my own heart gritted between screaming teeth.        

“Steady boy, steady.”  I growled at Raddick whose body had shallowly jackknifed after a burst of wind had quickly relented.  A burst of, what I perceived to be, Germanic oaths was directed towards me.  The levity was cut through when his pipe, skittered on the rock and disappeared, ominously. 

“Mac, here.”  His eyes, wild with fear, locked onto mine then down to the rock face.  A wall of water curled around behind him in a bright shining arc.  My scrabbling fingers found a grip in a slight overhang, and with geriatric steps, made around the crag face and to bamboo scaffolding to the most blessed earth!  I had no other thought for the last of our party, shamefully, as the feeling returned to my jittery legs – which buckled underneath me like two jellied eels.  Raising my head, I was only barely cognizant of scores of weird statues pitted between two steep natural walls of jagged stone running up to a giant bamboo palisade.  For it was then I noticed the five native figures standing stock still; animal-bright irises staring through eye-slits in large bamboo cases.  From whence issued the deep-chested, hysterical barking of apes.