Tide Marks by H.M. Tomlinson — Read

With our possessions assembled into six small packs roped in rubber sheets, next morning at daybreak Smith and I took train for Rantau Panjang, a village on the right bank of the Golok River, twenty miles from its mouth-this is mentioned just in case there should be any curiosity to discover exactly where we were. The Golok is the division between Malaya and Siam. At that little village the headman, on reading our mandate, found three men for us without parley. And the chief of police, who happened to be an Englishman, was so alarmed by the inadequacy of our preparations and the puerility of our plans that he forced on me also a rifle and ammunition. I understood from him that I might be required to shoot a tiger or a seladang at any moment. "But don't shoot an elephant," he admonished me, "unless you must. " I assured him that I would resist every temptation to harm a wild elephant unnecessarily. Thereupon we marched off. The policeman shook his head over us in mirthful pessimism.

It was ten in the morning; and the spaciousness of the bare and brazen prospect to which then we set our faces under that sun was a matter for firm courage. I could have played tennis with the rifle at the start. In less than an hour it was a worse evil than many tigers, for we had to cross some miles of padi fields and open land, all of it hard and rough in the dry season, with the loam of the furrows and ridges as unaccommodating as granite. We marched toward a line of blue hills, but the shelter of their woods seemed at a distance no effort could measure. Smith was ahead of me, so I could watch the dark stains begin on his khaki tunic, and spread till their boundaries merged and the back of his jacket was uniform again with sweat. When he turned to me now and then I saw he was suffering, for he was of a stout and hemispherical habit of body. Yet certainly this was better than all the motor-cars and steamers, for at least we hardly knew where we were going, and had no idea where we should be that night. A spot named Nipong was mentioned; but by looking, first at the chart, and then at Smith, I judged that Nipong was best considered as a fond dream. We came to a swamp, then managed to scramble over a small tree prone across a stream (a rifle is useless as a balancing pole), and the track became a tunnel in a forest immediately it left the far end of the fallen trunk.