Free The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives by James P. Blaylock

called the lot of us over to the window in order to have a laugh at the expense of some poor shambling madman who hunched in the rain below, holding over his head the ruins of an umbrella that might have been serviceable twenty or thirty years earlier but had seen hard use since, and which, in its fallen state, had come to resemble a ribby-looking inverted bird with about half a dozen pipe-stem legs. As far as I could see, there was no cloth on the thing at all. He had the mannerisms correct, that much I’ll give him. He seemed convinced that the fossil umbrella was doing the work. Frobisher roared and shook and said that the man should be on the stage. Then he said he had half a mind to go down and give the fellow a half crown, except that it was raining and he would get soaked. “That’s well and good in the bush,” he said, “but in the city, in civilization, well…” He shook his head. “When in Rome,” he said. And he forgot about the poor bogger in the road. All of us did, for a bit.
    “I’ve seen rain that makes this look like small beer,” Frobisher boasted, shaking his head. “That’s nothing but fizz-water to me. Drizzle. Heavy fog.”
    “It reminds me of the time we faced down that mob in Banju Wangi,” said Priestly, nodding at St. Ives, “after you two”—referring to the Professor and Hasbro—”routed the pig men. What an adventure.”
    It’s moderately likely that Priestly, who kept pretty much to himself, had little desire to tell the story of our adventures in Java, incredible though they were, which had transpired some twenty years earlier. You may have read about them, actually, for my own account was published in The Strand some six months after the story of the Chingford Tower fracas and the alien threat. But as I say, Priestly himself didn’t want to, as the Yanks say, spin any stretchers; he just wanted to shut Frobisher up. We’d heard nothing but “the bush” all afternoon. Frobisher had clearly been “out” in it—Australia, Brazil, India, Canton Province. There was bush enough in the world; that much was certain. We’d had enough of Frobisher’s bush, but of course none of us could say so. This was the club, after all, and Tubby, although coarsened a bit, as I say, was one of the lads.
    So I leapt in on top of Priestly when I saw Frobisher point his pipe stem at St. Ives. Frobisher’s pipe stem, somehow, always gave rise to fresh accounts of the ubiquitous bush. “Banju Wangi!” I half shouted. “By golly” I admit it was weak, but I needed a moment to think. And I said it loud enough to put Frobisher right off the scent.
    “Banju Wangi,” I said to Priestly. “Remember that pack of cannibals? Inky lot of blokes, what?” Priestly nodded, but didn’t offer to carry on. He was satisfied with simply recalling the rain. And there had been a spectacular rain in those Javanese days, if you can call it a rain. Which you can’t, really, no more than you would call a waterfall a faucet or the sun a gaslamp. A monsoon was what it was.
    Roundabout twenty years back, then, it fell out that Priestly and I and poor Bill Kraken had, on the strength of Dr. Birdlip’s manuscript, taken ship to Java where we met, not unexpectedly, Professor St. Ives and Hasbro, themselves returning from a spate of very dangerous and mysterious space travel. The alien threat, as I said before, had been crushed, and the five of us had found ourselves deep in cannibal-infested jungles, beating our way through toward the Bali Straits in order to cross over to Penginuman where there lay, we fervently prayed, a Dutch freighter bound for home. The rain was sluicing down. It was mid-January, smack in the middle of the northwest monsoons, and we were slogging through jungles, trailed by orangutans and asps, hacking at creepers, and slowly metamorphosing into biped sponges.
    On the banks of the Wangi River we stumbled upon a tribe of tiny Peewatin natives and traded them boxes of kitchen matches for a