Moh does not sleep at all the first night, but sits in the drifting smoke of the burning cocoa husks in downcast self-commiseration. We cannot quite make out why he left happy Java to come on a fool trip like this. He thinks all Americans are crazy, for they do not seem to know fear. He keeps the coffee-pot working for us and fills the lamp once when the gasolene runs low. The mantle-lamp, hanging between the tents and the forest, throws a white glare over the camp site. We are burning it for two reasons: it lights up the jungle approach to the camp and draws the myriad insects to its killing heat in swarms. Thus we shall be warned of the approach of danger and at the same time, to some extent, rid of the pests. When on guard we keep in the shadow of a board from a packing-case placed between us and the lamp, so that the light may not blind us with its glare.
The murmur of the surf seems to whisper to us of lurking dangers and the night is eery with unaccustomed sounds that come from the jungle. As the breeze stirs the fronds of the cocoas they rasp together. Now and then a falling nut thumps to the ground with startling abruptness. Each sound is magnified by our nervous expectancy, until the night becomes hideous with sounds and the grotesque shadows the ferns cast in the lamplight move weirdly to and fro like creeping savages. More than once we sit bolt upright with rifles tightly clutched as some shadow takes on a human shape or moves slowly toward us. The rising moon casts a wan half-light over the scene, for it is in its last quarter. The scene is one of indescribable beauty and never-to-be-forgotten tensity. Even the crew of the _Nautilus_ are crouched around a tiny smudge of their own, wide awake and silent. The air is surcharged with an electric expectancy; the darkness a malign mantle of doubt. How the hours drag, and how we wish for dawn?
[Illustration: Those who failed to get a package came to the dead-line and asked for one]
[Illustration: They may be friendly at one moment and turn upon one the very next]
CHAPTER VII WE ESTABLISH DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS
Shall we ever forget that sunrise and how the glow in the east chased the pregnant shadows? Never! We are not afraid, that is, afraid in the usual sense of the term. If the natives had attacked us we should have joyously risen to the occasion and put Mr. Colt to the fore to argue for us. It was the suspense we minded. Those things which we can see and gage with our full consciousness never bother us. It is the unseen and mysterious that we dread. When one does not know what to expect, nor from which direction the danger may come, it is the nerve tension, the high-keyed alertness, that saps the system of its reserve stamina and makes the goose-flesh crawl along the spine at the slightest unidentified sound. It is the intangible, the unseen, the insidious stealthy danger that creeps upon one unawares, that strikes in the dark where one is unable to strike in return, that make the night vigil nerve-racking. Genial old Imagination creates dangers that do not exist. Dawn is welcome to the watcher, always, but doubly so when one is literally between covetous devils and the deep sea.