The route to Bangkok, such as it was, lay on the eastern bank of the Menam. This time we crossed the stream by the official ferry, a dug-out canoe fully thirty feet long, which held, besides ourselves and four paddlers, twenty-two natives, chiefly of the gentle sex. All day we tramped through jungle as wild as that to the westward, following the course of the river. Bamboo villages were numerous and for every hut at least a half-dozen, mangy, yellow curs added their yelping to the uproar that heralded our approach. We cooked our food where we chose and paid for it when we had eaten. The inhabitants were indolent “wild men” like those of the mountains, content to live and die in their nests of jungle rubbish, with a dirty rag about their loins. Occasionally a family ran away into the forest when we took possession of their abode. More often they remained where we found them, squatting on the floor, and watched our culinary dexterity with lack-luster eyes. Except for their breasts, there was nothing to distinguish the women from the men. Both sexes wore their dull, black hair some two inches long and dressed it in a bristling pompadour that gave them a resemblance to startled porcupines. Both had jet-black teeth. The younger children were robust little animals; the older, ungainly creatures with overgrown bellies.
Chief of the obstacles to our progress were the tributaries of the Menam Chow Pya. Sometimes they were swift and deep. Then we had only to strip and swim them, our bundles slung around our heads. What we dreaded more were the sluggish streams, through which we must wade waist deep in black, foul-smelling slush or half-acres of nauseating green slime, cesspools that seemed designed to harbor poisonous snakes. Once we despaired for a time of continuing our way. We had been halted by a stagnant rivulet more than a furlong wide, too deep to be waded, too thickly covered with stewing slime to be swum. We wandered back along it for some distance. No stream could have been less fitting a scene for romance. Yet what was our surprise to find, where the green scum was thickest, an old dug-out scow, half roofed with attap leaves, anchored to a snag equi-distant 445from either shore; and in it that same youthful priest of our mountain tramp, engrossed in the entertainment of as comely a female as one could have run to earth in the length and breadth of these Siamese wilds. We half suspected that he would resent being disturbed. At sight of the scowling face that he raised when we hallooed to him we were sure of it.
Still we could not halt where we were merely out of respect for romance. We beckoned to him to paddle ashore and set us across. He refused and snarled back at us. We picked up the stoutest clubs at hand and shook them at him. He laughed scornfully. I threw my weapon at the craft. It struck the roof and went through it. The priest sprang up with a whine, slipped his mooring, and, twisting his face into an ugly grin of feigned amiability, paddled slowly towards us. We sprang into the scow and five minutes later were plunging through the jungle beyond.
The sun was still well above the horizon when we reached Kung Chow. The Dane had told us it was twenty-two miles from Rehang. Kung Chow was no ordinary jungle village. It consisted of a bungalow of unusual magnificence, set in the center of a clearing on the bank of the Menam, with a half-circle of smaller dwellings round about and at a respectful distance from it. The main building was the residence of the “jungle king”; the smaller housed his servants and retainers.
Of this royal person we had heard much at breakfast that morning. To the commander of Rehang he was “almost a fellow countryman,” as he hailed from Sweden. For many years he had been stationed at Kung Chow as manager of a company that is exploiting the teak forests, and the style in which he lived in spite of his isolation had won him his sobriquet.
We found him sitting in state on the veranda of his palace, gazing serenely out across the clearing. The servants that hovered about him looked like ludicrous little manikins in his presence, for he would have tipped the scales at perilously near a quarter-ton. The unruffled mien with which he noted our arrival bespoke a truly regal poise. We halted at the foot of the throne and craved the boon of a drink of water. Judging from the calm wave of the hand with which the “king” ordered a vassal to fetch it, one would have supposed that white men passed his palace every hour. He watched us silently as we quenched our thirst. There was no tremor of excitement in the voice in which he asked our nationality and destination, and he inquired no further.
446“I can put a bungalow at your disposal,” he said, “if you had planned on stopping here.”
We were of half a mind to push on. It lacked an hour of sunset, and, to tell the truth, we had grown so accustomed to being received with open arms by Europeans that we were a bit disgruntled at his impassionate demeanor. In the end we swallowed our pride and thanked him for the offer. That decision turned out to be the most fortunate of all the days of our partnership.
The “king” waved a hand once more and a henchman in scarlet livery stepped forth and led us to one of the half-circle of bungalows. It was a goodly dwelling, as dwellings go, up along the Menam. Five servants were detailed to attend us. They prepared two English tub-baths and stood ready with crash towels to rub us down. The condition of our skins forced us to dispense with that service. When we had changed our garments a laundryman took charge of those we had worn. By this time, a servant had brought a phonograph from the palace and set it in action. The phonograph is not a perfected instrument; but even its tunes are soothing when one has heard nothing approaching music for weeks except the ballads sung by a crack-voiced Australian or the no less symphonic croaking of lizards.
Then came our evening banquet. For days afterwards James could not speak of that without a tremor in his voice. The supper of the night before was a free lunch in a Clark street “slop’s house” in comparison. Least of the wonders that arrived from the storehouse of his jungle majesty was a box of fifty fat Habana cigars and a dozen bottles of imported beer; ice cold in these sweltering tropics.
We had just settled down for an evening chat when a sudden violent hubbub burst forth. I dashed out upon the veranda. Around the palace fluttered half the population of Kung Chow, squawking like excited hens; and the others were tumbling out of their bungalows in their haste to add to the uproar.
The royal residence was afire. From the back of the building a shaft of black smoke wavered upward in the evening breeze. When we pushed through the panic-stricken throng, a slim blaze was licking at a corner of the back veranda. Its origin was not hard to guess. At the foot of the supporting bamboo pillar lay a sputtering kettle over a heap of charred fagots. Around it the natives were screaming, pushing, tumbling over each other; doing everything, in fact, but what the emergency called for. A dozen of them carried buckets. Twenty 447yards away was a stream. But they were as helpless as stampeded sheep.
James snatched a bucket and ran for the creek. I caught up the tilting kettle and dumped its contents of half-boiled rice on the blaze. With the Australian’s first bucketful we had the conflagration under control and it was but the work of a moment to put it out entirely. When the last ember had ceased to glow, the first native arrived with water from the stream. Behind him stretched a long line of servants with overflowing buckets. They fought with each other in their eagerness to deluge the charred corner of the veranda. Those who could not reach it dashed their water on the surrounding multitude, and the real firemen; then ran for more. We were forced to resort to violence to save ourselves from drowning.
As the last native was fleeing across the clearing, I looked up to see “his majesty” gazing down upon us. There was not a sign of excitement in the entire rotundity of his figure.
“These wild men are a useless lot of animals,” he said. “I’m glad you turned out.” Then he waddled back into his palace.
We returned to our bungalow and started the phonograph anew. Fully an hour afterward the “king” walked in upon us. He carried what looked like a great sausage, wrapped in thick, brown paper.
“I’m always glad to help a white man,” he panted, “especially when he has done me a service.”
I took the parcel in one hand and nearly lost my balance as he let it go. It weighed several pounds. By the time I had recovered my equilibrium “his majesty” was gone. I sat down and unrolled the package. It contained fifty silver tecals.
Our second day down the Menam was enlivened by one adventure. About noonday, we had cooked our food in one of the huts of a good-sized village and paid for it by no means illiberally. Outside the shack we were suddenly surrounded by six “wild men” of unusually angry and determined appearance. Five of them carried dahs, the sixth, a long, clumsy musket. While the others danced about us, waving their knives, the latter stopped three paces away, raised his gun, and took deliberate aim at my chest. The gleam in his eye suggested that he was not “bluffing.” I sprang to one side and threw the cocoanut I was carrying in one hand hard at him. It struck him on the jaw below the ear. His scream sounded like a factory whistle in the wilderness and he put off into the jungle as fast as his thin legs could carry him, his companions shrieking at his heels.
448“When you are attacked by an Oriental mob,” the Dane had said, “hurt one of them, and hurt him quick. That’s all that’s needed.”
Miles beyond, as we reposed in a tangled thicket, a crashing of underbrush brought us anxiously to our feet. We peered out through the interwoven branches. An elephant, with a mahout dozing on his head, was advancing towards us. Behind him came another and another of the bulky animals, fifteen in all, some with armed men on their backs, others bearing a small carload of baggage. We stepped out of our hiding place in time to meet the chief of the caravan, who rode between the seventh and eighth elephants on a stout-limbed pony. He was an Englishman, agent of the Bombay-Burma Lumber Company, and had spent fifteen years in wandering through the teak forests of Siam. Never before, he asserted, had he known a white man to cross the peninsula unarmed and unescorted. For a time he was convinced that we were playing a practical joke on him and had hidden our porters and guns away in the jungle. Disabused of that idea, he warned us to beware the territory beyond, asserting that he had killed two tigers and a murderous outlaw within the past week.
“I shall pitch my camp a few miles from here,” he concluded. “You had better turn back and spend the night with me. It’s all of thirty miles from Kung Chow to here, more than enough for one day.”
We declined the offer, having no desire to cover the same territory thrice. The Englishman wrote us a letter of introduction to his subagent in the next village, and, as that hamlet was some distance off, we took our leave at once.
For miles we struggled on through the tangle of vegetation without encountering a sign of the hand of man. The shadows lengthened eastward, twilight fell and thickened to darkness. To travel by night in this jungle country is utterly impossible. We paid for our attempt to do so by losing our way and sinking to our knees in a slimy swamp. When we had dragged ourselves to more solid ground, all sense of direction was gone. With raging thirst and gnawing hunger we threw ourselves down in the depths of the wilderness. The ground was soft and wet. In ten minutes we had sunk half out of sight. I pulled my “swag” loose and rolled over to another spot. It was softer and wetter than the one I had left.
“Hark!” murmured James suddenly. “Is that a dog barking? Perhaps there’s a village near.”
“An elephant, with a mahout dozing on his head, was advancing toward us”
Myself after four days in the jungle, and with the Siamese soldiers with whom we fell in now and then between Myáwadi and Rehang. I had sold my helmet
We listened intently, breathlessly. A far-off howl sounded above the droning of the jungle. Possibly some dog was baying the faint 449face of the moon. There was an equal possibility that we had heard the roar of some beast abroad in quest of prey. “Tigers abound,” the Englishman had said. So must snakes in this reptile-breeding undergrowth. A crackling of twigs close beside me sent an electric shock along my spine. I opened my mouth to call to James. He forstalled me.
“Hello!” he whispered. “Say, I’ll get a fever if I sleep in this mud. Let’s try that big tree there.”
It was a gigantic growth for the tropics. The lowest of its wide-spreading branches the Australian could reach from my shoulders. He pulled me up after him and we climbed higher. I sat down astride a great limb, tied my bundle above me, and, leaning against the trunk, sank into a doze.
I was aroused by a blow in the ribs.
“Quit it!” cried James angrily, thumping me again, “What the deuce are you tearing my clothes off for?”
I opened my mouth to protest, but was interrupted by a violent chattering in the branches above, as a band of monkeys scampered away at sound of our voices. They soon returned. For half the night those jabbering, clawing little brutes kept us awake and ended by driving us from the tree entirely. We spent the hours of darkness left, on the ground at its foot, indifferent alike to snakes and tigers.
When daylight came we found the river again within a few hundred yards of our resting place. A good hour afterward we stumbled, more asleep than awake, into a village on the northern bank of a large tributary of the Menam. It was Klong Sua Mak, the home of the lumberman’s subagent; but our letter of introduction served us no purpose, for we could not find the addressee. It did not matter much. The place had so far advanced in civilization as to possess a shop where food was sold. In it we made up for our fast of the night before.
The meal was barely over when we were again in the midst of a village riot. It was all the fault of the natives. We offered them money to row us across the tributary, but they turned scornfully away. When we stepped into one of the dug-outs drawn up on the bank, they charged down upon us, waving their dahs. It was no such burlesque of a fight as that of the day before. But for a pike pole in the boat we might not have continued our wanderings beyond Klong Sua Mak. At the crisis of the conflict a howling fellow, swinging a 450great knife, bounded suddenly into the craft. James caught him by an arm and a leg. A glistening brown body flashed high in the air; there sounded one long-drawn shriek; and the bold patriot sank in the murky water some distance behind us. When he came again to the surface, unarmed, we had pushed off from the shore.
“Damn niggers!” growled the Australian, catching up a paddle. “Serve ’em right if we kept their bloody old hollow log and went down to Bangkok in her. What say we do?” he cried, “My feet are nothing but two blisters.”
For answer I swung the craft half round and we glided out into the Menam. A boat load of natives put out behind us, but instead of following in our wake they paddled across the river and down the opposite bank. We stretched out in the bottom of the dug-out and, drifting with the current, let them outstrip us. Far down the stream they turned in at a grove above which rose a white building. I dozed a moment and then sat up suddenly with a shout. The boat load had pushed off again, and behind them came a second canoe bearing six khaki-clad soldiers, armed with muskets. The white building was a military post, and a part of the redoubtable Siamese army was on our trail.
“Swing her ashore,” cried James, grasping his paddle. “No naval battles in mine.”
The dug-out grounded on the sloping bank. Between the jungle and the water’s edge was a narrow open space. Adjusting our “swag,” we set off down the bank at any easy pace. The “wild men” beached their boats near the abandoned dug-out and dashed after us, shouting angrily. A few paces away the soldiers drew up a line and leveled five muskets at us. The sergeant shouted an order commandingly. An icy chill ran up and down my spinal column, but we marched on with even stride. Knowing what we did of the Siamese soldier, we were convinced that the little brown fellows would not dare shoot down a white man in cold blood. Nor was our judgment at fault. When we had advanced a few yards the squad ran after us and drew up once more in firing line. The sergeant bellowed in stentorian tones; but the guns hung fire.
Seven times this man?uvre was repeated. We were already a half-mile from the landing place. Suddenly, a villager snatched a musket from a soldier and, running close up on our heels, took deliberate aim. His appearance stamped him as the bold, bad man of that region. My flesh crawled in anticipation of the sting of a bullet. I caught myself wondering in what part of my body it would be lodged. But the fellow vented his anger in shrieking and aiming; he dared not pull the trigger.
Bangkok is a city of many canals
451Finding us indifferent to all threats, the sergeant changed his tactics. The scene became ludicrous. One by one the barefooted troopers slipped up behind us and snatched at our packs and jackets. When we turned on them they fell back wild eyed. Their persistence grew annoying.
“Tip me off when the next one tries it,” said James.
Out of a corner of an eye I watched a soldier steal up on my companion and reach for his depleted “swag.”
“Now!” I shouted.
The Australian whirled and caught the trooper’s musket in both hands. The fellow let go of it with a scream, and the whole following band, sergeant, soldiers, villagers, and bold, bad man turned tail and fled.
Miles beyond we met two lone soldiers perambulating northward, and, knowing that they were sure to stop at the post of our recent adversaries, we forced the musket upon them and plodded on clear of conscience.
Once more we were benighted in the jungle and again the ground was soggy and the trees alive with monkeys. On the following day, for all our sleepiness and blistered feet, we tramped a full thirty miles and spent that night in an odoriferous bamboo hut, much against the owner’s will—and our own.
Forty-eight hours after our escape from the soldiers we reached Pakhampo, an important village numbering several Europeans among its inhabitants. With one of these we took dinner. His house floated on a bamboo raft in a tributary of the Menam, his servants were “wild men” of his own training, and his wife a native. Unfeminine as is the female of Siam, with her black teeth and her bristling pompadour, half the white residents of the kingdom, many of them men of education and personality, are thus mated.
A German syndicate has undertaken the construction of the first railway of Siam. We struck out along the top of the unfinished grade in the early afternoon, and, no longer hampered by entangling undergrowth, set such a pace as we had not before in weeks. Long after dark we reached the residence of a German superintendent of construction, who gave us leave to sleep in an adjoining hut, in which were stored several tons of dynamite. An hour’s tramp next morning 452brought us to “rail head” and the work train. Hundreds of Chinese coolies, in mud-bespattered trousers and leaf hats three feet in diameter, swarmed upon the flat cars as they were unloaded. With them we jolted away through the sun-scorched jungle.
Ten miles south the train took a siding and stopped before a stone quarry around which had sprung up a helter-skelter Chinese village. A deluge drove us into a shop where samshoo, food, and coolie clothing were sold, and we whiled away a gloomy morning in discussing the characters of the proprietors, whose chief pastime, when they were not quarreling over their cards, was to toss back and forth about the room a dozen boxes of dynamite. At noon they set out on these same boxes a generous dinner of spitted pork, jerked duck, and rice wine; and invited us to join them. We did so, being hungry, yet anticipating a sad depletion of our funds when the quarter-hour of Gargantua came. All through the meal the Chinamen were most attentive. When it was ended they rolled us cigarettes in wooden wrappers, such as they smoked incessantly even while eating.
“Suppose they’ll want the whole bloody fortune now,” sighed James, as I drew out money to pay them. To our unbounded surprise, however, they refused to accept a copper.
“What the devil do you suppose their game is?” gasped the Australian. “Something foxy, or I’m a dingo. Never saw a pig-tail look a bob in the face before without grabbing for it.”
The dean of the shopkeepers, a shifty-eyed old fellow with a straggly grey cue, swung suddenly round upon us.
“Belly fine duck,” he grinned.
Our faces froze with astonishment.
“Dinner all light?” he went on, “Belly good man, me. No takee dollies for chow. Many Chinyman takee plenty. You fink allee same me. No damn fear. One time me live Flisco by white man allee same you, six year. Givee plen............