Slowed-down Life
The dead man was standing in a little moonlit clearing in the jungle when Farris found him.
He was a small swart man in white cotton, a typical Laos tribesman of this Indo-China hinterland. He stood without support, eyes open, staring unwinkingly ahead, one foot slightly raised. And he was not breathing.
“But he can’t be dead!” Farris exclaimed. “Dead men don’t stand around in the jungle.”
He was interrupted by Piang, his guide. That cocksure little Annamese had been losing his impudent self-sufficiency ever since they had wandered off the trail. And the motionless, standing dead man had completed his demoralization.
Ever since the two of them had stumbled into this grove of silk-cotton trees and almost run into the dead man, Piang had been goggling in a scared way at the still unmoving figure. Now he burst out volubly:
“The man is hunati! Don’t touch him! We must leave here — we have strayed into a bad part of the jungle!”
Farris didn’t budge. He had been a teak-hunter for too many years to be entirely skeptical of the superstitions of Southeast Asia. But, on the other hand, he felt a certain responsibility.
“If this man isn’t really dead, then he’s in bad shape somehow and needs help,” he declared.
“No, no!” Piang insisted. “He is hunati! Let us leave here quickly!”
Pale with fright, he looked around the moonlit grove. They were on a low plateau where the jungle was monsoon-forest rather than rain-forest. The big silk-cotton and ficus trees were less choked with brush and creepers here, and they could see along dim forest aisles to gigantic distant banyans that loomed like dark lords of the silver silence.
Silence. There was too much of it to be quite natural. They could faintly hear the usual clatter of birds and monkeys from down in the lowland thickets, and the cough of a tiger echoed from the Laos foothills. But the thick forest here on the plateau was hushed.
Farris went to the motionless, staring tribesman and gently touched his thin brown wrist. For a few moments, he felt no pulse. Then he caught its throb — an incredibly slow beating.
“About one beat every two minutes,” Farris muttered. “How the devil can he keep living?”
* * *
He watched the man’s bare chest. It rose — but so slowly that his eye could hardly detect the motion. It remained expanded for minutes. Then, as slowly, it fell again.
He took his pocket-light and flashed it into the tribesman’s eyes.
There was no reaction to the light, not at first. Then, slowly, the eyelids crept down and closed, and stayed closed, and finally crept open again.
“A wink — but a hundred times slower than normal!” Farris exclaimed. “Pulse, respiration, reactions — they’re all a hundred times slower. The man has either suffered a shock, or been drugged.”
Then he noticed something that gave him a little chill.
The tribesman’s eyeball seemed to be turning with infinite slowness toward him. And the man’s raised foot was a little higher now. As though he were walking — but walking at a pace a hundred times slower than normal.
The thing was eery. There came something more eery. A sound — the sound of a small stick cracking.
Piang exhaled breath in a sound of pure fright, and pointed off into the grove. In the moonlight Farris saw.
There was another tribesman standing a hundred feet away. He, too, was motionless. But his body was bent forward in the attitude of a runner suddenly frozen. And beneath his foot, the stick had cracked.
“They worship the great ones, by the Change!” said the Annamese in a hoarse undertone. “We must not interfere!”
That decided Farris. He had, apparently, stumbled on some sort of weird jungle rite. And he had had too much experience with Asiatic natives to want to blunder into their private religious mysteries.
His business here in easternmost Indo-China was teak-hunting. It would be difficult enough back in this wild hinterland without antagonizing the tribes. These strangely dead-alive men, whatever drug or compulsion they were suffering from, could not be in danger if others were near.
“We’ll go on,” Farris said shortly.
Piang led hastily down the slope of the forested plateau. He went through the brush like a scared deer, till they hit the trail again.
“This is it — the path to the Government station,” he said, in great relief. “We must have lost it back at the ravine. I have not been this far back in Laos, many times.”
Farris asked, “Piang, what is hunati? This Change that you were talking about?”
The guide became instantly less voluble. “It is a rite of worship.” He added, with some return of his cocksureness, “These tribesmen are very ignorant. They have not been to mission school, as I have.”
“Worship of what?” Farris asked. “The great ones, you said. Who are they?”
Piang shrugged and lied readily. “I do not know. In all the great forest, there are men who can become hunati, it is said. How, I do not know.”
Farris pondered, as he tramped onward. There had been something uncanny about those tribesmen. It had been almost a suspension of animation — but not quite. Only an incredible slowing down.
What could have caused it? And what, possibly, could be the purpose of it?
“I should think,” he said, “that a tiger or snake would make short work of a man in that frozen condition.”
Piang shook his head vigorously. “No. A man who is hunati is safe — at least, from beasts. No beast would touch him.”
Farris wondered. Was that because the extreme motionlessness made the beasts ignore them? He supposed that it was some kind of fear-ridden nature-worship. Such animistic beliefs were common in this part of the world. And it was small wonder, Farris thought a little grimly. Nature, here in the tropical forest, wasn’t the smiling goddess of temperate lands. It was something, not to be loved, but to be feared.
He ought to know! He had had two days of the Laos jungle since leaving the upper Mekong, when he had expected that one would take him to the French Government botanic survey station that was his goal.
* * *
He brushed stinging winged ants from his sweating neck, and wished that they had stopped at sunset. But the map had showed them but a few miles from the Station. He had not counted on Piang losing the trail. But he should have, for it was only a wretched track that wound along the forested slope of the plateau.
The hundred-foot ficus, dyewood and silk-cotton trees smothered the moonlight. The track twisted constantly to avoid impenetrable bamboo-hells or to ford small streams, and the tangle of creepers and vines had a devilish deftness at tripping one in the dark.
Farris wondered if they had lost their way again. And he wondered not for the first time, why he had ever left America to go into teak.
“That is the Station,” said Piang suddenly, in obvious relief.
Just ahead of them on the jungled slope was a flat ledge. Light shone there, from the windows of a rambling bamboo bungalow.
Farris became conscious of all his accumulated weariness, as he went the last few yards. He wondered whether he could get a decent bed here, and what kind of chap this Berreau might be who had chosen to bury himself in such a Godforsaken post of the botanical survey.
The bamboo house was surrounded by tall, graceful dyewoods. But the moonlight showed a garden around it, enclosed by a low sappan hedge.
A voice from the dark veranda reached Farris and startled him. It startled him because it was a girl’s voice, speaking in French.
“Please, Andre! Don’t go again! It is madness!”
A man’s voice rapped harsh answer, “Lys, tais-toi! Je reviendrai —’’
Farris coughed diplomatically and then said up to the darkness of the veranda, “Monsieur Berreau?”
There was a dead silence. Then the door of the house was swung open so that light spilled out on Farris and his guide.
By the light, Farris saw a man of thirty, bareheaded, in whites — a thin, rigid figure. The girl was only a white blur in the gloom.
He climbed the steps. “I suppose you don’t get many visitors. My name is Hugh Farris. I have a letter for you, from the Bureau at Saigon.”
There was a pause. Then, “If you will come inside, M’sieu Farris—”
In the lamplit, bamboo-walled living room, Farris glanced quickly at the two.
Berreau looked to his experienced eye like a man who had stayed too long in the tropics — his blond handsomeness tarnished by a corroding climate, his eyes too feverishly restless.
“My sister, Lys,” he said, as he took the letter Farris handed.
Farris’ surprise increased. A wife, he had supposed until now. Why should a girl under thirty bury herself in this wilderness?
He wasn’t surprised that she looked unhappy. She might have been a decently pretty girl, he thought, if she didn’t have that woebegone anxious look.
“Will you have a drink?” she asked him. And then, glancing with swift anxiety at her brother, “You’ll not be going now, Andre?”
Berreau looked out at the moonlit forest, and a queer, hungry tautness showed his cheekbones in a way Farris didn’t like. But the Frenchman turned back.
“No, Lys. And drinks, please. Then tell Ahra to care for his guide.”
He read the letter swiftly, as Farris sank with a sigh into a rattan chair. He looked up from it with troubled eyes.
“So you come for teak?”
Farris nodded. “Only to spot and girdle trees. They have to stand a few years then before cutting, you know.”
Berreau said, “The Commissioner writes that I am to give you every assistance. He explains the necessity of opening up new teak cuttings.”
He slowly folded the letter. It was obvious, Farris thought, that the man did not like it, but had to make the best of orders.
“I shall do everything possible to help,” Berreau promised. “You’ll want a native crew, I suppose. I can get one for you.” Then a queer look filmed his eyes. “But there are some forests here that are impracticable for lumbering. I’ll go into that later.”
Farris, feeling every moment more exhausted by the long tramp, was grateful for the rum and soda Lys handed him.
“We have a small extra room — I think it will be comfortable,” she murmured.
He thanked her. “I could sleep on a log, I’m so tired. My muscles are as stiff as though I were hunati myself.”
Berreau’s glass dropped with a sudden crash.