Into the Heart of Borneo by Redmond O'Hanlon

Author:Redmond O'Hanlon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141935904
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

Comforting myself with the thought that any discriminating python, given the chance, would avoid the unpleasant tickle of hair in the throat and go for a trouble-free first-time gulp, a bald initial bolus, I nevertheless wished that we were more than two feet above the python pavement—thirty-two feet say, would have done, or full python length plus two.

• ELEVEN •

I awoke in the dark, itching horribly. I switched on my torch and searched the interior of my mosquito net: nothing. And there were no tears in the fabric. It was an all-over itch, a kind of nettle-rash and cat-flea bite combined. I turned the torchlight on my bare arm. It was pepper-dusted with moving dots. The palm leaves were swarming with tiny black bugs.

Deciding that they could hardly be lice specially adapted for attachment to the fine hairs of Homo sapiens, I stripped off fast, covered myself in a slimy mixture of Anthisan (anti-itch) and Autan (anti-louse) and squelched back into my dry clothes.

James began to move. There was a sighing and a swearing from inside his mosquito net.

“Itching?” I asked. “Pox?”

James's bald head emerged from his net and wandered eight inches into the night, white as a gymnure.

“Something,” he announced, thoughtfully, “has been taking a snackette on my bum.”

I handed him the tubes of Autan and Anthisan and fetched our hammocks from the Bergens. We spread them over the palm leaves, tying their edges firmly to the bottom of the mosquito nets.

James, waiting for the itch to grow tolerable, sat on the edge of the pole-floor of the hut and smoked a cigarette. The Iban seemed to be fast asleep, untroubled. We helped ourselves to another mug of arak each, and I lit my pipe.

“I hate the way you suck that thing,” said James. “You look like a schoolmaster, or a rural dean.”

“It's comforting,” I said, “it empties the head.”

“It would empty the room, if we were in one,” said James.

“What sort of room would you like to be in?”

“A library. A huge library of my own—in a huge house with a huge kitchen in a house I have my eye on near Stanton Harcourt; a house with enough rooms to contain all my extended family and lots of friends and still provide inviolable personal space if you needed it.”

“And you could have a huge garden with acres of enormous broccoli plants. And brussel sprouts. And enough space to double-dig all day if you wanted to. You could dig a fifty-yard trench and put the finest rotted pig turds in it and grow champion runner-beans and win prizes.”

“No, Redmond,” said James, stubbing out his cigarette with his shoe on the jungle humus where the fragments shone for a moment, like glow-worm ends. “I would have a garden of landscaped lawns. And banks. And beds full of rare flowers. It would all be planned.”

“You've got to have vegetables.”

“I might allow a herb garden. But it would have to be a very particular herb garden, with square plots marked off with stone borders.

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