LEON’S NEW IDEA

After the first few readings from the Gospel of St. Luke, Sir Ralph Savage had made clear to Edmund Ross that a portion of each day was to be spent in the forest glade telling and re-telling the life of Jesus Christ. But it was only in this tranquil place that the rajah wished to listen to this narration. He told Edmund that the fusion of his English voice with the words of his Saviour and the ‘orchestra of the forest’ created in him an exquisite tranquillity of mind.

Now, however, great storms began to fall upon Borneo. The sky above the forest seemed to gather itself into a perpetual night, and let wash upon the world so vast a curtain of water that it obliterated everything moving beneath it. The gibbons hid away, cradling their young. The grasshoppers and crickets crouched motionless in havens of moss and leaves. The bats hung silent in their caves. Even the herons along the river had stepped back from the water’s edge to the darkness of the mangroves and stood hunched under puffed-up feathers, watching the water rise. The snakes roped themselves to leaf-sheltered branches and closed their eyelids, opening them only upon the sword-slashes of lightning. In the glimmers of white light, the snakes’ eyes were like jewels, unyielding and shining.

Edmund lay in his bed, glad that he was inside Sir Ralph’s great exaggeration of a house and not in some fragile hut or stilted longhouse, swaying in the wind. He felt anguished not at his own state of idleness, but rather at his cowardly savouring of this pause in his endeavours. He listened to the insect and animal world gone silent, making way for all that the storms could do. He heard trees falling. He meditated upon the realisation that everything upon the earth is at the mercy of something else. He knew that his life had paused in this place only because his collecting equipment had been taken from him and because Sir Ralph’s mind had placed him in thrall to the daily bible readings. But now, the rains had come and the rivers were swelling and he still had not found the means to replace his lost equipment. How would he ever be able to continue with his journey?

Meanwhile, the rajah’s mind was turning upon a new enterprise.

As with the Savage Road, the idea had come to him from Leon, who had begun to berate him for letting too many people under his supposed governance languish in poverty and idleness. The building of the road had brought them some relief from this, but now, apart from the cultivation of rice and vegetables and the rearing of fighting cockerels, they were falling back into a state of inertia and sadness. ‘Theirs is a great sorrow,’ said Leon. ‘They are very poor. Some will soon run amok. Maybe they kill you. Plenty rajahs killed in Borneo in past time. Because they do not think of their subjects any more.’