After Midnight in Malaysia's Taman Negara

Phosphorescent Fungi! (The Midnight Forest World)

It's an hour or two past midnight and I'm standing in the rainforest without a light. The moon is absent, just a day or two away from new. The Muslim world waits for the first appearance of the waxing crescent which will signify the end of Ramadan. I wait for my irises to dilate as far as possible in what seems a total darkness...

Yesterday:

A slim, clinker-built, wooden riverboat bears us upriver away from settlements and well trodden trails. As much canoe as boat, the craft sports barely thirty centimeters of freeboard and is piloted so skillfully against the headlong rush of brown water that we remain dry, despite the standing waves and sloshing vortices of the river's rapid reaches.

At Kuala Trenggan the river bends and as we approach the jetty we cross a line where the downstream flow suddenly reverses. We enter a vast eddy that has the water by the bank churning in reverse as half the river backs up on itself: Its flux dammed by some unseen midstream obstacle. We bump gently against the slick timber steps of the jetty and our pilot Dee leaps ashore and hoists our packs from the prow of the boat. Mau and I stand to disembark and I begin to congratulate Dee on his skill.

I should have waited. Spreading my arms wide to say Look! Not a single splash!, I abruptly alter the trim of the narrow boat. If it hadn't been for Dee's instant hand on the gunwale I would've wound up very wet indeed. Instead I find myself on my ass sideways in the boat. Amber, who'd negotiated my boat-rocking like an old salt, looks down at me with a "WTF are you doing!!?" look on her face...

Kuala Trenggan is almost an hour upstream from the park headquarters at Kuala Tahan and is our jumping off point for another hour's journey to a hide in the jungle. We begin our trek dry, but don't stay that way for very long. Twenty minutes in and the trail has decided it would rather be a stream. A fairly dry stream with a clay bed which first doubles the weight of our boots and then softens to quagmire and tries to pull them from our feet. When that fails it becomes a lot more like a stream and soaks our footwear through, then morphs back to that slick and treacherous clay in an effort to get us wet by slip and fall.

As the sun begins to set, the humidity rises in the jungle until blue-white shafts of light illuminate the coalescing mists. The buttressed trees fling their serpentine roots across our path, creating terraces of shallow pools in their enfoldments. Shadows are pooling too. They deepen and throw the oblique shafts of sunlight into high relief. The temperature doesn't change. It's still as warm as noon. The triumvirate of heat, humidity and perfect calm that prevails under the forest canopy decrees that our own bodies accomplish what the riverine trail could not. Before we're halfway to our camp we're as wet as we would have been if we'd fallen from the boat.

Half an hour later we're sitting ten metres above the forest floor in Bumbun Kumbang hide while our clothes drip dry behind us. We're looking out over a clearing where mineral rich waters seep from the ground to create salt licks for the jungle wildlife. We've seen the signs. Patches of ground rooted up by wild boar and piles of dung containing palm seeds almost the size of tennis balls - elephants! There's also the possibility of tapir, pangolin, gibbons and deer. All the big cats are too rare and wary to hope for, but we're hoping anyway...

Alas - by the time the dark is full, we've seen nothing. But the forest symphony is in full swing and in that immense outpouring of sound it's possible to hear almost any wild thing you can imagine. The kettle drums of distant thunder join in as the night air fills with fireflies, quite a few of which home in on the tiny green status light on my video camera.

Suddenly there's critters everywhere. Nocturnal hunters. All built for speed and strength. Long of fang and strong of limb. Variously coloured. Some hairy, some smooth and glossy, they roam the trees in search of food, their presence first revealed by the gleams of light reflected from their eyes. Then they invade the hide. Spiders. The freakin' huge run-around kind. I evacuate (pun completely intended) the toilet when one abseils from the ceiling heading straight for my shoulder. My peripheral vision only detects it because it's almost as big as my hand...

Arachnophobia's forgotten as the sky begins to pulse with lightning and the kettle drums swell to reverberations that set the hide's supporting concrete frame a-tremble. The storm breaks upon us with a welcome rush of (slightly) cooler air, immediately followed by an archetypal tropical downpour. The rain cascades from the roof of the hide, making it seem as if we're watching from behind a waterfall. As the rain's initial intensity diminishes the lightning and thunder escalate. For the next two hours we're mesmerised by a strobing series of incandescent blue and green images accompanied by a soundtrack that integrates thunder and the billion-voiced frog chorus from the salt lick below. It's truly awesome...

The rain continues for several hours and Amber and I agree it was good that we'd arranged a boat pickup for tomorrow morning. We'd considered hiking the eleven kilometres back to Kuala Tahan, but the tributary river we'd have had to cross would be too dangerous to ford now. There would also be the matter of leeches. These are by far the most common animal we come across in the park and although we'd seen none on our walk to this place, they'd be bound to be out in force tomorrow after this rain.

It's maybe one in the morning and the storm has passed. I'm awake alone now and can't believe how well Amber manages to sleep on the wooden plank bunks of the hide. There's no mattresses and those planks are hard. So it is that I'm the sole witness of the only mammal encounter of the trip. The mammal in question scares me almost as badly as the spider did earlier...

I'm watching the sky, wondering how it could be that on a moonless night a sky full of stormclouds could be so much brighter than everything else. Bright enough for me to see the cloudbase. A steady brightness without a hint of flickering, so I assume it can't be lightning. I can't imagine starlight being strong enough to illuminate the clouds and besides, the illumination appears to be coming from below. If there was a city nearby I'd put it down to that, but there isn't. The light is also perfectly diffuse, no brighter areas, no apparent source and none of that orange cast engendered by a city's sodium lighting. I begin to entertain notions of it somehow emanating from the forest...

My contemplation's interrupted by sudden loud scratching, tearing and chewing emanating from directly beneath my seat. I very carefully rise in the darkness, step away from the bench and snap on my headtorch. I'm face to face with a tree rat. Well, almost face to face, because he's got his buried in a packet of instant noodles that someone's carelessly discarded on the floor. He's about twenty centimetres long and has the longest tail I've ever seen on a rodent. I'd guess it at almost twice his body length. I notice his tail is broken, bent in two places as if the last poor devil he'd surprised like this had grabbed him by it and hurled him out of the window.

Amber sleeps on, oblivious to the racket the rat's making. Having regained my cool naturalist's composure, I decide it's time to step outside and see what I can see back down there on the ground...

I walk away from the hide for a while, panning my light around the undergrowth and up into the trees and see nothing but the eyes of spiders. It occurs to me that walking around shining a light at everything is probably not the best way to encourage a close encounter, so I turn off the light.

I wait for my irises to dilate as far as possible in what seems a total darkness...

First I see the stars. Wherever the sky is visible through the canopy it's evident that the clouds have gone and as I scan the darkness above me I see that the flicker of lightning is again evident in the eastern sky. I begin to see the outlines of the forest silhouetted against the brightening sky.

I'm struck by the utter strangeness of my situation. It must be two in the morning and I'm standing in the middle of a 130 million year old rainforest, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. It's warm. Drips of water from the canopy above splash my upturned face and the rich and varied sounds of frog and insect fill my ears. I imagine the far off drone of brontoaurs and wonder what eyes me in the dark.

When I return my gaze to the forest floor I'm entranced by the apparition of light that dispels the darkness. Paths and pools of pearly green phosphorescence are at my feet and wend their way off into the forest. I turn full circle and see they're all around me. To my left now I can see a vertical shaft of light reaching perhaps three meters above the ground. To my right is a dead straight line on the ground, behind which rise branching lines akin to the ghosts of bushes. The voices in the forest drop suddenly for a moment and the sudden hush is like a tiger's roar. In that moment the fireflies emerge again and fill the remaining dark places between sky and earth with a blinking tracery of bright green lights.

I wonder if I'm dreaming. So much light in the darkness. I turn my circle again and the revolution reveals a series of small glowing pools that suggest a string of footprints beckoning me to follow them into the jungle. I stoop and gather a handful of the light at my feet and it feels and smells like leaf litter and earth. I feel a leaf between my fingers, let the rest fall and raise the leaf to my eyes. It glows in two patches where I can see its shape and network of veins. Until this moment I'd considered that my eyes had adjusted to the point where I was seeing starlight on the ground, but I can carry this leaf around and no shadow falls on it.

I can't resist turning on my torch to better see this leaf. The light world vanishes the instant I do so. I'm left in total darkness, only able to see the leaf in my hand and the briefest circle of illumination given by the torchlight. The leaf has two darker patches that correspond to what was glowing before my eyes a moment ago. Now there's nothing to see. It's a wet, dead, brown leaf. I look out into the one dimensional darkness around me and marvel at the depth of the realm of light that was there before I banished it with my own. I turn mine off.

I wait for my irises to dilate as far as possible in what I now know is a wonderland I'd never dreamed existed....