A Tale of Changhi Bungalow
We had been out all day from Singapore on a wild-pig hunt. There were eight of
us, including three young officers of the Royal Artillery, besides somewhere
between seventy and a hundred native beaters. The day had been unusually hot,
even for a country whose regular record on the thermometer reads 150 degrees
in the sun.
We had tramped and shot through jungle and lallang grass, until, when night
came on, I was too tired to make the fourteen miles back across the island, and
so decided to push on a mile farther to a government “rest bungalow.” I said
good-by to my companions and the game, and accompanied only by a Hindu
guide, struck out across some ploughed lands for the jungle road that led to and
ended at Changhi.
Changhi was one of three rest bungalows, or summer resorts, if one can be
permitted to mention summer in this land of perpetual summer. They were
owned and kept open by the Singapore Government for the convenience of
travellers, and as places to which its own officials can flee from the cares of
office and the demands of society. I had stopped at Changhi Bungalow once for
some weeks when my wife and a party of friends and all our servants were with
me. It was lonely even then, with the black impenetrable jungle crowding down
on three sides, and a strip of the blinding, dazzling waters of the uncanny old
Straits of Malacca in front.
There were tigers and snakes in the jungle, and crocodiles and sharks in the
Straits, and lizards and other things in the bungalow. I thought of all this in a
disjointed kind of a way, and half wished that I had stayed with my party. Then I
noticed uneasily that some thick oily-looking clouds were blotting out the yellow
haze left by the sun over on the Johore side. A few big hot drops of rain splashed
down into my face, as I climbed wearily up the dozen cement steps of the house.