Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/418

 are practically the only highways, and the jungle upon their banks is so dense, so thorny, so filled with argently detaining hands, that progress is not only very slow, but speedily saws your nerves and temper into shreds. I bade Saleh, my head boatman, follow ne, and the other Malays stay where they were until we returned to them. Then I climbed back along The steeply shelving bank to the foot of the rapid in which the remains of my raft still flapped feebly, and thence scrambled through the dense forest and underwood to a point whence a view of the next reach of the river could be attained. It took us the best part of half an hour to gain this point of van- tage; but at last, clinging with one hand to a stout sapling, I swung out to the very edge of the forest- clad hill and looked about me.

Then my heart stood still in my body, for there suddenly was revealed to me the appalling danger which we had escaped by providentially coming to grief at the point where the rapid had defeated us. Certain destruction had awaited us only some thirty yards lower downstream.

From where I clung to the hillside I could look upriver to the point where the flotsam from the raft had dropped below the line of sight, and their abrupt disappearance was now explained. The Sempam ran here through a narrow gorge, enclosed by steep hills smothered in jungle; but at the top of the reach the river fell in a shaggy white curtain down the face of a precipice, which was walled on either side by black dikes of granite, clean-cut as though hewn by a single