BY MOTOR THROUGH THE EAST COAST OF SUMATRA 



93 



top, which was up, to the 

 level of the road surface, 

 while between the top and 

 the ground on the other 

 side there was barely 

 enough space left to crawl 

 through. 



Any further sinking of 

 the car might have perma- 

 nently imprisoned us, so we 

 hastily crept out on our 

 stomachs through the sticky 

 clay-mud and viewed the 

 catastrophe. It was not en- 

 couraging. A careful sur- 

 vey of the car showed it to 

 be hopelessly buried, be- 

 yond any possibility of my 

 disinterring it unaided. 



The chain falls, in the 

 equipment box on the rear, 

 were completely out of 

 sight some four feet un- 

 derground ; but even had I 

 dug them out there was 

 nothing to which to attach 

 them, and in any case the 

 car was too thoroughly in 

 the grip of the mud to have 

 yielded to single-handed ef- 

 forts. 



With some difficulty I 

 discovered the cause of the 

 accident. A bamboo cul- 

 vert far under the road, 

 which had rotted peacefully 

 and undisturbed since it 

 had been laid, had finally 

 collapsed from our weight, 

 after being weakened by our first pas- 

 sage over it. 



To extricate the car was a task for a 

 first-class train-wrecking crew, and I felt 

 little confidence of being able to raise 

 half a dozen helpers in that country, 

 especially as I had left Joseph in Sariboe 

 Dolok and would be unable to explain 

 our predicament to any natives I might 

 meet. 



Kebon Djahe seemed the one light on 

 the situation; but night was falling rap- 

 idly, and as my speedometer cable had 

 broken in the morning and there were 

 no noticeable landmarks, I had only a 

 dim idea how far away the compound 

 might be. 



EVERY MOTHER IS HER OWN PERAMBULATOR 

 IN SUMATRA 



For my mother to be left alone at night 

 in the wilds of a country until recently 

 addicted to cannibalism, while I set out 

 on an indeterminate search for help was 

 an unpleasant prospect ; but as Kebon 

 Djahe might have been eight or ten 

 miles away — a nasty walk in the mud and 

 the dark — that seemed the only solution. 



NATIVE PRISONERS MARCH TO THE RESCUE 



For over an hour I walked, or rather 

 waded, down the road in the utter still- 

 ness of the desolate highlands. Then a 

 few barely audible shouts drifted up 

 from across the plain, and I struggled 

 through the grass in their direction to a 

 tiny paddy field on the top of a low hill. 



