Descending a mountain of trees whose fat leaves swarmed as thickly as beetles, I felt myself again lost and alone; I staggered feverish among broad-topped trees and narrow grasping claws. I wondered to what extent I too was but an animal. Once on a night plane voyage from Mauritius I'd been stricken with loneliness and let my fingers touch the thigh of the pregnant woman beside me. Her flesh was soft and burning hot through her silken dress of white flowers upon blackness. Her face was young, dark, full. She opened her eyes and silently shook her head. I withdrew my hand, ashamed, tortured by my own nature.
It was, of course, only my self-consciousness which had created the torture. Had I been a true animal, I would simply have ravished her, doing what I had been made to do, like the young brother beside me, who twitched his nose, sniffed and bared his teeth. His dirty fingernails were like long claws. — To him and his elder brother, of course, I must certainly have been a pale white dull-eyed beast, stumbling and sweating, unspeaking, the draft-horse of my destiny among these grand trees with many trunks that grabbled downwards into root-galleries. We were animals together, wading across the streams. In our adjacent prisons of aloneness we bore the touch of wet pale leaf-hands with points, gracious fingers the color of Ceylon tea, fingernails growing downward, piled hand on hand as if for some game; we were patient and unresisting like animals when our raw feet bled.
Now we'd passed both places where my horse had thrown me. We were coming down through fog and pale green trees, wading streams, approaching the smell of woodsmoke amidst high and cool plantains. I was sick — oh, very sick; and my legs threatened not to carry me. Icy droplets of sweat sizzled on the griddle of my forehead, and my feet ached. If you have ever been footsore, I mean really footsore, as if all the cushioning had been squeezed out of your shoes, and when you sit to rest, your feet burn where they touch the ground, as if the world had become a hell of flaming spikes; if you lift them, they swell to aching with weary blood, then you will know how I felt by the ninth hour, clambering up an embankment of spear-shaped plants. The elder brother was not in sight; we'd failed to glimpse him for three hours. He'd taken all the food and water. I looked at the younger brother's muddy blistered feet and asked him: Are you OK?
Never mind, he said.
He possessed the nobility of the animals. He suffered without remark. I myself suffered quietly because I could barely speak.
We came to a plant with a twenty-foot stalk from which gargantuan leaves hung down. The younger brother drew his lips down against his teeth. Sniffing and twitching his nose, he licked the plant's green skin. Then he straightened and continued on his way, never glancing at me. It seemed very natural to me then. He did it because he was an animal and he had the knowledge. I was but a golem with a fever that melted my flesh away and exhausted me to the roots of my eyeballs. Once I dropped my stick. It was a wonder to me how after I'd so painfully dragged it close, the younger brother, seeing my weakness, instantaneously whisked it upright and stood it next to my body for me to take. Yes, he was a superior animal.
When we arrived at the safehouse in Thailand at last, the elder brother was waiting. In my fever the banana trees around me seemed to get bigger and bigger. I was desperately thirsty, and thought that the two brothers must want something to drink, too. There was a refrigerator case full of beer and filtered water and other things. I gestured to them to choose what they wanted. They each picked a bottle of liquid speed and drank it straight down.
I got a taxi-bus to Mae Hong Song and they rode with me. I had told them that they were welcome to stay in the hotel room with D. and me if they wished it. But twenty minutes into the ride they tapped on the window and the bus stopped. We were at a crossroads. One road led south to Mae Hong Song, and the other road led back across the border to Burma. They jumped out, and the last I saw of them they were running at full speed toward the horizon.
