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Title: Tide marks
        being some records of a journey to the beaches of the Moluccas and the forest of Malaya in 1923

Author: H. M. Tomlinson

Release date: December 6, 2024 [eBook #74847]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harper & brothers

Credits: Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TIDE MARKS ***






TIDE MARKS

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

[Illustration: “_All Was Quiet Again, Except for the Flames_”

(_See p. 80_)]




                                TIDE MARKS

                     BEING SOME RECORDS OF A JOURNEY
                      TO THE BEACHES OF THE MOLUCCAS
                     AND THE FOREST OF MALAYA IN 1923

                                   _By_
                             H. M. Tomlinson
                    AUTHOR OF “THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE”

                  _With Illustrations from Drawings by_
                                 KERR EBY

                              [Illustration]

                       Harper & Brothers Publishers
                       New York and London MCMXXIV

                                TIDE MARKS
                             Copyright, 1924
                           By Harper & Brothers
                         Printed in the U. S. A.
                                   K-Y




TO RICHARD DURNING HOLT




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  “All Was Quiet Again, Except for the Flames”               _Frontispiece_

  A Group of Chinese Firemen                               _Facing p._  22

  Port Said Is More West than East                             ”        42

  Old and New on the Suez Canal                                ”        62

  This Sea Was Plainly the Setting for Legend and Fable        ”        84

  He Had Skimmed About Singapore in a Jinrickshaw All the
    Morning                                                    ”       100

  The Road Was Empty, Except for a Bullock Cart                ”       122

  “One of ’Em Looked at Me as He Came Aboard”                  ”       140

  He Sits in Front of His Shop in Macassar                     ”       160

  The Malays Sit on Their Decks, Cooking Breakfast             ”       180

  Gathered from the Submarine Gardens of the Tropics           ”       200

  Macassar Is a Convenient Meeting Place for Traders           ”       220

  The Fighters Stood with Horns Interlocked, Waiting
    for Each Other to Move                                     ”       232

  He Began to Treat His Foothold Too Punctiliously             ”       252

  The Heavy Shadows Were Hardly Disturbed by a Little
    Oil Lamp                                                   ”       264

  It Was a Larger House than the Rest, with an Unusual
    Length of Irregular Ladder to Its Veranda                  ”       282




TIDE MARKS




Tide Marks

[Illustration]




CHAPTER I


From his high window he could see where the Thames, once upon a time, was
crossed by Charing Cross Bridge. But not on that winter afternoon. The
bridge was a shadow in a murk. It did not cross the Thames. There was no
Thames. It was suspended in a void which it did not span; there was no
reason to cross, because the other side had gone. The bridge ended midway
in space. It was but a spectral relic, the ghost of something already
half forgotten above a dim gulf into which London was dissolving in the
twilight and silence at the end of an epoch. For the twilight did not
seem merely of a day at the end of another year, but the useless residue,
in which no more could be accomplished, of a period of human history,
long and remarkable, that had all but closed.

He wondered whether he would ever cross that bridge again, outward bound.
What, a broken bridge? And is there any escape from your own time, even
though its end seems so close that you feel you could take one step and
be over in the new era? No. There is nothing to do but to put up with the
disappearance of the everlasting hills and safe landmarks, and grope
about in this fog at the latter end of things, like everybody else.
The bridge that day went but halfway across. Once it carried men over
to France. It was not wanted for that now. The rocket which he heard
burst above it to announce the long-desired arrival of a lovely dove was
welcomed four years ago; and the dove either did not stay long or else it
had turned into a crow.

A postman burst in with a parcel, and went, leaving the door open.
Another book! He cut the string, in his right as guardian of literature
in that newspaper office. The volume disclosed had a colored wrapper
with the seductive picture of a perfect little lady smiling so fatuously
that St. Anthony would have laughed miserably at the temptation. Again
a novel! He dropped it on the heap behind him—a detritus of beautiful
fiction piled in a slope against the wall, a deposit of a variety of
glad eyes and simpers. What a market for green gooseberries this world
must be! That deposit slithered over a wider area whenever the energetic
editor in the next room was trampling to and fro in another attack on the
Prime Minister. Then some of it had to be kicked back. But kicking never
made that deposit of literature better or different, any more than it did
the Premier. Only the cleansing junk-shop man with his periodical cart
for the removal of refuse ever did that. And the same trouble sprouted
again next day. Trouble generally does. A literary editor, he thought,
might be better employed peddling bootlaces, for all the traffic he has
with literature; yet it was plain that if he began to edit bootlaces
instead, then most likely people would take to wearing buttoned boots, or
even jemimas. For, in spite of the Sermon on the Mount, crystal-gazing,
spiritualism, Plato, wireless telegraphy, Buddha, and Old Moore’s
Almanac, there is no telling what the world will be doing next. The
barbarian of ancient Europe who trusted to his reading of the entrails of
a fowl when looking for the hidden truth was quite as reasonable as the
editor in the next room frowning at the signs of the times through his
spectacles. Moreover, at the moment, the editor was not doing even that.
He was on a journey to interview the proprietor, to learn whether he
should continue to hold up a lamp in a dark and naughty world, or blow it
out. Oil costs money.

The open door let in a draught, and with the draught blew in a figure
which might have been a poet, but was certainly not an advertising agent.
It was a bundle of clothes which looked as though it had been abandoned
under the seat of a railway carriage and had crawled out because nobody
had troubled to remove it. But its face was still new. It had diffident
eyes and a grayish beard. Most likely it was another poet. The lines of
that thin face had come of contemplating the glory of the world, and had
been deepened by lack of bread. The figure hesitated, knowing that it
ought to have remained where it had been thrown. It did not speak. It
took off a matured cloth cap and offered for sale some Christmas cards.
It had a difficulty in getting them out of its pocket, because one sleeve
of its jacket was limp, being empty. But the literary editor was patient;
for this visitor had a rare and attractive virtue. He was modest; more
modest even than the veiled ladies who brought secret information from
Poland, or an editor with a new idea. He seemed uncertain of his rights,
unlike the publisher who had called because his important work had been
overlooked, and the politician who was cruelly wronged because the reward
he had earned in bolting his principles had gone elsewhere. What had
purified this human wreck? He seemed to be unaware of what in justice
should be done to him, and was in enjoyable relief from the reviewer who
could have handled the job so much better than the fool who did, the
inventor of the machine for converting offal into prime cuts, and the
superior mystic who knew it long before Einstein. In what school had he
learned to be a gentleman?

The man of letters examined the Christmas cards, and read on most
of them, “Love One Another.” This spiritual injunction was made
authoritative with realistic sprays of mistletoe.

“Where,” asked the literary editor, rising and pointing to the place
where his visitor’s right arm used to be—“where did you stop your packet?”

The visitor became very embarrassed. “Well,” he said, in doubt—“well, if
you were a nice lady, I’d say it was cut off by a German on the Somme,
if you understand me. But it was an army mule at Arras. It bit me. And
heroes ain’t bitten by their own mules. Not in war, sir. Not for home
consumption, as you might say.”

“But there must be accidents in war.”

The visitor rubbed his nose briskly with a dark white handkerchief. “No,
sir. Believe me, no. I saw a pal o’ mine drowned in a mud hole, but he
had to be killed in action, being a gunner, for his friends’ sake, like.
In war, heroes are either shot through the heart at the moment of victory
or else they gets their arms in slings. Don’t you believe nothing else.”

“You’ve come to the wrong office. Everybody here knows that mules are
ugly brutes, and never rise to Christian feelings even when war ennobles
them.”

“Not at all, if I may say so. You don’t understand, sir. If I tell people
that our mules kicked the enemy, that’s all right. But if I tell ’em one
of our gun mules bit me, why, I don’t know but what they’d think the
artful patriotic swine saw through me, if you know what I mean. Got to be
careful. Besides, that’s nothing now.”

“What, nothing to lose your arm?”

The shabby figure stared over the literary table to the shadow of the
bridge beyond. He spoke with the quiet confidence of a man whose rich
uncle had unexpectedly left a fortune to him. “Nothing at all, sir. I’ve
found God. I’ve found God.” Then he looked at the journalist. “Do you
believe in God? You don’t begin to live until you do.”

The journalist rose in alarm. Not in all his life had another fellow
creature asked him whether he believed in God. In that office it was
assumed that the name of God should never be used except rhetorically.

“Of all the swindling rogues! You talk to me like that, after telling me
you’d have lied, if I’d been an old woman!”

“Sorry, sir, but you were not an old lady, so I give it to you straight.
I give people what they can take, just to make the world go around, you
understand. What does it matter? People who can’t see the light—well,
you can’t blame ’em.”

“So you think there’s a chance I may see it? I wish I knew how to tell
whether you are only another hypocrite or not. Here, I’m living in
darkness, too, but I’ll buy your stock of cards if you’ll tell me whether
you’d have mentioned God to me if I’d been a nice old lady. What about
it?”

“Not a word about God to the old lady, sir. Not a word. On my oath. And
for the same reason. She wouldn’t have known what I meant. She wouldn’t
understand that a hero nearly lost his life in a righteous war through
the bite of an allied bastard, if you understand me, sir, but if I said
I’d found God she’d take it for granted I was all right, like herself.
Why get her mixed up, the old dear?”

“So you’re all right, are you?” said the envious man of letters,
mournfully, who had no God to whom he could give a name. He pointed to
the vision of the dissolution of London in the murk. “How do you feel
about being at the fag end of everything in that?”

The peddler looked puzzled. “Me? Do you mean the fog? What’s that to do
with me?” He had accepted a coin, and now he eyed it on his palm and
graciously spat upon it before putting it in his pocket. He sidled to the
door, and from there he said: “Gov’nor, I’ll tell you something. Do you
know what we’re told?...” But the oracle was not revealed, for the fellow
turned as though he knew of an interrupter outside, closed the door
respectfully, and was gone.

The eye of the bookman wandered to the bridge again. Where did it go to
now? That was a rum fellow who had just gone. Had he really seen a light
which could shine clear through the fog and confusion of the earth? But
what was the good of trying to see such a light because another man said
it was there? Besides, to distinguish between shell shock and God wanted
a bit of doing nowadays. Damn that bridge! Why wasn’t it blotted out
altogether? What was the good of half of it? It used to go to France. Now
it projected over a bottomless gulf of time, and was lost midway. It was
broken. Where were the fellows who once crossed it? Now they could never
get back. It ought not to be looked at. One’s thoughts got on to it, fell
into the emptiness beyond, and were lost. Yet it was hard to keep the
eyes from it. The printer’s proofs were the same dust and ashes as ever.
No light or humor in them except the places where the compositor had
happily blundered. And there the blessed relic still floated in the outer
fog, an instant road for vagrant thoughts. And odd visitors, like poets
with messages from a world not this or from no world at all, or like
the armless man with his seasonable message to love one another, kept
blowing in with the cold draught when the careless door was ajar. Perhaps
a ghostly traffic moved on that spectral relic. That bridge should be
either abolished or adventured upon again. What was the good of sitting
and staring at it, while fiction not fit for dogs accumulated against the
wall behind? Life was standing still.

At that very instant some of the fiction shot fanwise abruptly over the
floor. Was the editor back in the next room? Literary editors might be at
the dead end of things, but was life? He went to interview his chief.

But the great man—all editors are that, naturally—was not at his desk. He
stood at the window, looking out, though not as if he saw anything there
worth having. He turned to his assistant, and began to unwind his muffler.

“Well?”

“Not at all,” said the editor, cheerfully, “by no means. We blow out the
lamp of our vestal, and the chaste darling is to be sold as a slave.”

They stood regarding each other.

“What about us?”

The editor smiled and poked his finger at the bridge in the fog. “We get
a move on. Out into the snow, my child, out into the snow.”




CHAPTER II


The letter, there could be no doubt, was addressed to me. This fact,
apparently so doubtful, I was careful to verify at once. And so far
as English can be plain it told me to go to the Moluccas. Nor was its
purpose merely abusive and figurative, as would be the letter of a
friend. The letter was typewritten on a commercial form; it was direct
and curt; it gave telephone and reference numbers in case I wished to
answer back. The letter advised me to pack up, and the place it told
me to go to lies—as anyone may see who uses a magnifying glass—between
Celebes and New Guinea. But it would take more than a business letter,
however formal, to compel us into a belief that we are to travel to a
place with a name which can be spelled out only with a strong glass.
You experiment with such news on your friends. They will not contradict
you; they will be too polite. They will merely stare for an instant, and
perhaps nod as though they saw good reason for hoping that you would soon
get over this little trouble. Curious things happen to people after war,
of course, but time works wonders. That was how they took it from me. It
was no good trying to persuade them that this sudden revelation which
had come to me by post, this wild dream disguised as a business letter
(in exactly the silly way of a dream), suggested anything more than the
need of rest and quiet in a room with primrose walls and windows opening
south.

Of course. What else could a man expect of the straightforward, practical
minds of his friends? In my best moments I myself laughed at the letter.
Though I admit that I played with the pleasing dream the letter had
aroused. I used the lens on the chart secretly. I stopped work now and
then to think it over. I asked one or two sailors whether they knew the
Moluccas; but they appeared to wish to avoid such a subject, as though
this sort of talk was childish. Nevertheless, it became plain that so
extraordinary a portent as that letter could not be treated lightly.
Sometimes, when alone—for it was natural that I did not wish the puerile
act to be witnessed in such earnest days of reconstruction as these—I
took down the _Malay Archipelago_. Then I found, despite the urgency of
our times, it was natural to drop at once on the very place where Wallace
becomes, for a man of science, almost lyrical from his boat over the
sea meadows of Amboina. And yet that chanting prose passage appeared to
settle it. By artificial light in an English winter it was ridiculous.
When we know the world to be what it is, who is going to find faith in an
open boat afloat in a transparency where sponges and corals are on the
floor, and fishes as bright as parrots dart among fronds in the sunlight
far below the keel?

It was no good. Ternate and Banda faded away toward the days of Henry the
Navigator. The Portuguese, English, Dutch, and Spanish navigators of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries knew how to find them; but not one of
my friends who, for whatever privileged reason, might advise me to go
to Hades or anywhere, could also readily separate the Moluccas from the
Pleiades. The Spice Islands are forgotten. So I was unable to take that
business instruction seriously. Wallace, with his outburst over his sea
meadows, canceled the letter for me. The mirage dissolved, in the way of
dreams that are fair—dissolved reluctantly, like one’s faith in a Golden
Age—vanished! What to us in Europe are islands poised in a visionary
sea, a sea vast and mute, Paradise set in Eternity? Well, we know what
they are. Beauty of that kind is merely a stock of sensational stuff,
which is safe and easy for the use of hearty novelists and short-story
writers who require, to make their books move at all, pirates, trepang,
beach-combers, copra, head-hunters, schooners full of rice, and similar
matter which easily takes coal-tar dyes in the rapid output of bright and
lusty fudge. Otherwise they do not exist. Nor did the conquest of space,
as it is called, by flying and wireless telegraphy, give me any heart.
Those wonders of human progress brought such islands no nearer to me than
they were to Plymouth in Drake’s time. Do we imagine we are gods, and
may order the world to be re-created superiorly to a geometrical design
of petrol tanks and telephone stations? We forget that gods would never
do anything of the kind. The gods may be, and perhaps are, anything we
choose to make them, but they should be allowed more sense than that. Are
we able, with all our aids to progress, to conjure apparitions like those
sea meadows any nearer to us? They are where they were, if ever they
were anywhere. They are in the same world as the Hesperides. We see them
only in idleness, as we see mankind at peace, and the star again over
Bethlehem. No flying machine will ever reach the Hesperides. You will
never, even in the quiet of midnight when hopefully listening in, hear
a whisper from that seclusion. How it is some lucky men become assured,
and sometimes quite suddenly and without the aid of wireless, the
encyclopedias, or any help of ours, of such islands, of such sanctuary
from the deadening uproar of error and folly, and so are immune from
fogs of every kind, the lessons of the war, the gravest of political
disclosures, revolutions, signs of the times, mysticism, and anything the
public seems urgently to want, is a wonder to me; but there are such men,
and I wish I knew whether they are really mad, or whether their bright
serenity is only madness when compared with our practical cynicism and
our sane motives of enlightened self-interest.

Yet even we ourselves at times—and there is no serene brightness of
madness about us—are startled now and then by a hint of easy escape, as
though an unknown door somewhere had opened on light and music which we
do not know. Where did that come from? The door closes before we can be
sure so curious a light and strange a sound were more than our own hope
deceiving itself. And dreary experience has taught us that it is wasting
time to look for that door. Either it does not exist or we cannot find
it. So that letter was a release, though in a way far inferior to the
momentary escape of celestial music. It pretended there was a door.
I could fancy a decision had been made in my favor in that invisible
sphere where our circumstances are devised, those little incidents which
move us this way and that without our ever knowing why. And other
hints continued to drop through my letter box, all at the same angle of
incidence. The last one was more than a hint. It named a ship, a place of
embarkation, and a day. The day was not far off, either.

This began to make me feel acutely nervous. There could be hardly a doubt
that I myself was designated. But could I really accept this mysterious
decree? I could not, and I did not. Man never accepts his fate. He has
a faith, which nothing ever shakes, that his habits are stronger than
destiny. He believes that from the fortress of his daily routine, within
which he feels secure, the urgent messengers from the gods will recoil,
baffled. Nevertheless, I felt certain by now that one of those dangerous
messengers had assaulted my citadel again, so I arranged about me a few
mascots, for luck. If that messenger forced his way in, then I was ready
for him.

A final imperative knock came at last. No doubt about it. It was on the
very day, I noticed, which fate had indicated. Others in that room stood
up at the sound, and looked at me. I could see they knew for whom the
messenger had come. Apparently the hour had struck. My routine had fallen
down. It was a cab-driver who had knocked. And not till I saw some of my
mascots, which were traveling bags, already on his chariot, did I look
back at my porch and understand that that cab was to take me over the
first stage to the Moluccas. Was I exalted at that moment? I shall not
say. But what the deuce, I said to myself, as I climbed into the cab, do
the blessed sponges of the Pacific matter to me? Have the presiding gods,
I silently exclaimed, ever heard me complain about my pleasing suburb?
What have I done? But the cabman had a face like the shutter of an empty
house. He was clearly in the conspiracy to get me out of it. He drove on.




CHAPTER III


The lethargy of soul is proof against all the facts we do not care to
look at. No immortal soldier ever accepted the nature of his destiny in
France till the moment when he saw his pal drop. And therefore I still
thought there was a chance that this cab was a misdirection. I had been
mistaken for another man. But promptly to the minute I was left at
Euston. Still, Euston was real enough to be not at all ominous. There can
be nothing in all this world less fay than the London and North Western
Railway and its officials. There is little in them to make anyone suspect
the subtle and transforming art of what is faery. So I fell asleep in
moderate confidence, and the wheels went around.

I don’t know how long they had been revolving, with many a jolt and bump
through the night, but I woke with a conviction of the need that day to
give attention to those old volumes in the cupboard ... if the mice were
really nesting there, as I was told.... Where was I? Odd! I could see
through a window the dark waste of a railway siding. By the look of it
this was the dead end of all railway tracks. Beyond this no man could go.
The dawn had barely glanced at it, because, I suppose, it was not going
to spoil good sunshine on such a place as that. It was littered with old
newspapers with dates that would be in the week before last. Nothing else
could be seen, except a wall the color of soot, which was high enough to
screen us from all that was lovely and of good report. Now, I thought,
my misdirection has been discovered. Here I am, shoved into a celestial
pigeonhole for lost souls, till there is time to find my right label and
post me back to my old volumes. It was then that a familiar appeared, in
a gold-braided uniform, and whispered craftily that this was Birkenhead.
How I got there I don’t know.

Outside it was drizzling. I was dubious about that, for I have noticed
that an ominous sign that I have been uprooted and am drifting again is
that I am in a strange place and that it is raining there.

A man came out of a dank wall and begged for the privilege of carrying
my two heavy bags. He could only have been evolved by the progressive
lines of a highly complex civilization. His mouth was a little open,
and perhaps it had not been shut since his last meal, some days before.
It was open and waiting for the next, and to save time in coughing. As
he was the only visible agent in the strange scheme which had got me to
Birkenhead, I invited him to try the luggage. At the word, he took off
the belt of his trousers. Why his trousers remained in their place is
known only to the powers which were getting me to the Moluccas because,
so far as I could see, the man had no stomach; which was lucky for
him, as it turned out, because he explained that his average fortune
was seven shillings a week, and that, take it by and large, Ypres was
as good as the commercial facilities of that fine port. We halved the
weight, and trudged off. I saw no signs anywhere of the Far East. All the
streets were alike; yet this fellow with me, who never looked up, but
stared at the pavement and breathed hard, seemed to have prior advice
as to what to do with me. He knew; for, turning a corner, I saw above
dingy roofs a tall funnel of a ship. It was the color of a genuine sky,
though its top was black, like the sky we had. From the mainmast head
of that hidden steamer the blue peter was flying. “Your ship,” coughed
the wraith shambling beside me. I was sure he knew. The whole affair was
foreordained.

Carefully observe what happened next! That ship had a name out of the
Iliad. I had never seen her before. The way to her was cumbered with
packages marked for Singapore, and places beyond which we forget after
we leave school. Nor could I make out what she was like, from the quay.
She was a mass in which white boats were mixed, and a length of black
wall, a blue smokestack, two men looking down from a rail, a flag, some
round windows with brass rims, a shout or two, a roar that stopped
when some cases checked in midair and swung on a pack-thread; a height
topped by brown derricks and ventilators. She could not be seen. There
was no beginning to her and no end. I went through a door in the upper
works of the structure, expecting to be thrown out. That place was
nothing to do with me. I could see and smell that. But a man whose smile
indicated that he had known me all my life met me in a passage, knew my
name, and invited me to follow him. What else could I do? I followed in
resignation. He took me to a room. It had been prepared for me. He went
to a drawer and handed me some letters whose senders clearly knew where
next I would be found. “If you want anything,” he said, “touch that
button”; and vanished.

Thereupon I surrendered. I sat on the couch and wondered who I was, why
all this had happened, how long it would last, what I should do about it,
and whether any man since the world began ever knew for certain why and
by what means his affairs were shaped for him. I found no answer to this,
though the ship hooted once in an insistent way. I took no notice of
that till, looking through my round window, I noticed that the shed just
outside—a shed which, after all, represented England—was stealing away
from me. The shed disappeared. Nothing could be seen then but two ropes,
and they were blithely dancing a hornpipe over some hidden joy.

I went outside to see what made them so gay. But the sky was still
drizzling. Those dancing ropes were aware of something hidden from me,
and I determined to find it. Our ship, which I have reported was a hero
of the Iliad, was athwart a great rectangle of water and in the midst of
her peers. They stood about her—and here I will declare that though a
ship is named after a warrior in a bronze helmet I am not going to call
her him—she was, then, in the midst of her peers: Shires, Clans, White
Stars, Halls, and her family Blue Funnels. It seemed to me she knew her
family tradition and her worth. There was such a stateliness about her,
so easy a dignity, and her commands were so peremptory and haughty, that
it was clear she had the idea that nothing afloat could deny her house
flag.

By the Bar Lightship some steamers we passed were making a fuss about the
weather. But our Trojan took no notice of it. I will even confess that
off the Isle of Man roast pork was conspicuous on the lunch card, and
that I knew of no reason why it should not be. With the dark obstinacy
of its northern character the spring pursued us south. The northwest
wind was bleak and sullen. The sun hid his face. We were alone in the
Western ocean on the second day. We had the wind and the desolation
to ourselves, except for a dozen lesser black-back gulls which were
following us because, perhaps, those waters were the same as all the
seas of the north, and so it did not matter to them where they were. The
surge mourned aloud, sometimes rising to a concluding and despairing
diapason. The blue jeans of the sailors busy on the exposed parts of the
ship quivered violently in the perishing cold. Once, I remembered, some
dauntless men pulled galleys westward through the Pillars for the first
time, and then turned northward toward the top of the world. How did
they find in that ocean the spirit to maintain a determined course? I do
not know. They must have been good men, and hard sailors. I will never
believe that the thought of more and easier shekels kept them facing the
gloom of those sweeping ranges of water and the bitter heartless wind.
It is a lie that men are never moved except by the hope of gain. It is
a miserable lie of the money-changers, and it is time to kick their
tables outside once more. Why, fellows even as stout as those earliest
navigators must have seen in dismay that their gods to whom they had
sacrificed would be helpless in seas that were beyond all known things,
where they could guess they had entered the realm of the powers of
darkness, and that the warmth of human and friendly hearts would go to
leeward with the spindrift, and hope could be abandoned. It was while
I was seeing this so plainly that a youth in uniform caught hold of
a stanchion and flung himself into the wind toward me. He handed me a
familiar yellow telegram. It was from home, praying a good voyage for us.
The sightless message had just been picked out of that gale and that sky.
I glanced beyond the telegraph messenger, and wondered if he had left his
bicycle round the corner.

The English spring gave up the hunt just beyond Finisterre. The sun, glad
of the chance, came out to look at us, and made a habit of a magnificent
appearance each day at the due hour. We found another wind. It allowed me
to loaf on the exposed forecastle head, watch the flying fish glance away
from the noisy snow of our bow wash, and listen to the lookout, standing
at the stem, answer the bridge when its bell gave the ship’s hour.
But Ternate seemed no nearer than it did at Birkenhead. It was still
an incredible fable, a jest by an old traveler which he tries on the
foolish. All the East I had seen so far was no more than three Chinamen
squatting on their hams on our after deck, chanting together while one
punched a hole in a paint keg and the others admired it; that, and a
smell of curry. Anyhow, it was a strong smell of curry.

One morning the lookout signaled land. It was a thin shadow over the port
bow. There was no other cloud in the sky. That shadow grew in height,
darkened, and closed in on us. Then the shadow of Africa approached our
other beam. Toward evening we passed between the Pillars. We may have
been no nearer to the Moluccas, but we had escaped from the darkness of
the north. That was certain at sunset, when we might have sailed off
the waters of earth and were elevated to a sea where there were no
soundings, and logs would be profane. We were not alone there. A felucca
was in the vacancy between us and the phantom of a high coast. Our own
yellow masts were columns of light. The foam at the bows was flushed with
hues never seen in water. And ahead of us, that sea we were to enter was
the smooth expanse of an unknown and lustrous element. It was brighter
than the sky. From the lower wall of a vault of saffron a purple veil
dropped to the rim of a vast mirror. I do not know what was hidden by
that veil. It was a dusky curtain circling the brightness and its folds
rested on the mirror. Down on a hatch below me some of our fellows
started a gramophone with a fox trot.




CHAPTER IV


We had seen the shadow of Crete in the north, and the next noon our ship
was somewhere off the Nile. Despite its antiquity the sky was still in
its first bloom, and the sea was its perfect reflection. It was easy to
feel older than the sky and the sea, for our ship was solitary in the
very waters where, out of the traffic in ideas and commodities between
Knossos and Memphis, had grown the Athens of Pericles, and Rome and
Paris, London and New York. If there is anything to be said of that awful
thought, perhaps it would never do to say it here. It may be altogether
too late in the day to brood with fond and kindling eye upon the cradle
of that particular deep which rocked our childhood into the beginnings of
Chicago and Manchester. Let us say nothing about it.

The next sunrise it was the skipper himself who called me. This was a
genuinely surprising event. His white figure was even startling, for to
me then he had become a senior master mariner in a service so august as
our blue funnel, the house flag of which is, I suspect, east of Suez,
more potent than the emblems of not a few proud states. The honor was
unusual enough to cause me to strike my forehead against the opened port
as I sat up respectfully. Our master has been at sea for forty years, so
his appearance of weariness and of ironic understanding may mean that
his experience of men has been extensive, or it may mean nothing. “We
are entering Egypt,” was all he said, while his lean hands rested on
the edge of the bunk; he then turned away as if he supposed this sort of
thing would never end. But possibly he had been up all night.

[Illustration: _A Group of Chinese Firemen_]

There was an apparition of a city over the sea ahead of us. It was so
delicate that the primrose of sunrise, deepened in inclosed and quiet
waters, might in that place have conspired to produce a mirage of one’s
bright expectations. That was the gate to all that romantic folk with a
meaning eager but scarcely articulate call the Orient. Yet which of us
is not romantic when we see it for the first time? I watched that gate
heighten and become material as our ship insensibly approached it, till
I could read on the seaward brow of this entrance to romance the famous
legends, “Topman’s Tea” and “Macgregor’s Whisky.” Port Said, you soon
discover, is just like that.

If it is anything at all it is more West than East. A somber flotilla
of barges manned by a multitude of dark fiends was waiting for us, and
our ship hardly had way off her before she became Tophet with coal
dust, unholy activity, and frightful jubilation. It is the privilege of
civilized men to give their appetites and repulsions the sanction of
reason with its logic, and therefore I did not accept Port Said because I
did not like it. It is certainly not the Orient, and I hoped it was not
even its gate. Its address and its manners are as abrupt and threatening
as is the Stock Exchange to a timid stranger who has misadventured within
its sacred precincts. I went ashore, but soon returned to the ship, for
I fancied that our Chinamen might be closer to a simple heart than the
oblique calculation of that port.

For what are the significant things in travel? Let travelers candidly
own up. He is a wise traveler who has few doubts about that, and such a
man would be silent, of course, being wise. Who would believe him if he
spoke? There was, for example, the French mail steamer close to us at
Port Said, homeward bound. Her saloon passengers, the ultimate Parisian
reflection of the grandeur that was Rome, surveyed in aloof elegance and
in static hauteur the barbaric coarseness of Port Said. But for a chance
hint I would most certainly have saluted, as is the Anglo-Saxon habit,
the refinement and pride of the folk on the Frenchman’s promenade deck as
the very luster—which is so hard to attain—of Western civilization’s most
exquisite stuff. But my glance drew away to the Frenchman’s forward deck,
and there I saw something which tumbled down my hitherto unquestioned
convictions about those qualities which make, as we should put it, the
right folk. That deck was loaded with passengers from Cambodia and
Cochin China, people of quite another culture—or of no culture. They did
not seem to be travelers by deliberation or decision, like ourselves.
It was easy to guess they had merely obeyed, like little children, the
stern directing finger of fate. They showed no curiosity in us, or in
Port Said. They were as still, and as watchful or as indifferent, as
delightful images. They stayed where they had been placed. Yet if the
French ladies were beautiful, then what shall we say of those little
figures? By what means, by what habitual, tranquil, and happy thoughts,
did they attain without wish or effort to a countenance which made the
refinement and haughty demeanor of the first-class passengers above them
identical with the barbaric challenge and insolence of Port Said? It did
not surprise me that for our exhibition of Western enterprise and energy
those children of another clime had but shy and mild astonishment. One of
them, who might have been an attractive piece of craftsmanship in ivory
and ebony, did give to the busy and heated scene the faintest of smiles.
A doubt as to what made him smile blurred for me later the enduring
testimony to Western skill and activity in the Suez Canal, and even the
still more remarkable evidence of our energy at Kantara, a wilderness
of abandoned railways and earthworks, with square miles of abandoned
airdromes and rusting and sand-blown wreckage, where Anglo-Saxon genius
for scientific organization, and British wealth, had built the camp and
engines for the last conquest of the Holy Land. It is most disquieting to
get a hint that the established way of life of one’s kin may be foolish
after all, and that there are other ways.

Why should a Cambodian smile have so haunted me that my hope and
endurance in travel were not rewarded with the satisfaction I had a right
to expect, when witnessing the marvels in foreign lands created there
by the superior culture of my dominant race? Did I go to sea for that?
Nothing like it. And next morning, when I looked out from my cabin port,
there still was the mere canal. Beyond it was the desert, and over that
gray and vacant plain was an announcement of the coming sun. The sky was
empty, like the desert. Nothing unusual was expected, evidently. But
it was only with the first half-awakened glance that I guessed it was
the common sun which was to come. In another instant I was aware that
that hushed and obscure land was humbly awaiting its lord. The majestic
presence suddenly blazed, and ascended to overlook his dominion. A
terrifying spectacle! It would have frightened even a poet in the mood to
hail the beneficence of one of man’s earliest gods. The glances of that
celestial incandescence were as direct as white blades.

In the south, to which we were headed, a high range of Africa’s stark
limestone crags stood over a burnished sea. The sun looked straight at
them. And just above them, parted from their yellow metallic sheen by
a narrow band of sky, was the full globe of the declining moon; and
the moon herself was no more distant and no more spectral than earth’s
bright rocks beneath her. It was not surprising that that scene was
motionless and constant. There was no wind, there was no air, or all
would have vanished like a vision of what has departed. Those luminous
bergs shone like copper. Their markings were as clear and fine as the
far landscape of a newly risen harvest moon. Suez was not far away,
and its lilac shadows were as unearthly as the desert. But there was
substance alongside our ship. Some villas were immediately below, arbored
in tamarisk and cassia. A few trees in that green mass were in crimson
flower. I could smell the burning ashore of aromatic wood. A child in
a cerise gown stood under a tree, but she was so still that, like the
polished water, like the hills of brass and the city built of tinted
shades, she might have been the deceit of an enchantment.

A tugboat rounded a point, shattered the glass of the sea, and the child,
released from the spell, moved from under the tree. Men in our ship were
shouting. Mail bags for Singapore, Hongkong, Shanghai, and other places
as well defined were thrown aboard. Life began to circulate. These men
gave no attention to dead hills and the tyrant in the heavens. I am
prepared to believe they would have been incredulous concerning any town
about there built of lilac shadows. Our ship rounded away into the Gulf
of Suez, the northern corner of the Red Sea.




CHAPTER V


We are aware—though we hardly dare to whisper our knowledge—that even
our street at home will, at rare times, give us the sensational idea
that we really do not know it. Can it exist in a dimension beyond our
common experience? We think we glimpse it occasionally on another plane.
This sense, luckily, is but fleeting. We could not support a continued
apprehension of a state of being so remarkable. We come down to our
beans and bacon, and are even glad to answer the bell to that and the
coffee. Well, it is more remarkable of the Gulf of Suez that it permits
no certain return to common sense. The coast of Africa, and its Asian
opposite, remained within a few miles of our ship all day, as pellucid
as things in a vacuum, but as unapproachable as what is abstract and
unworldly—the memory of a dead land, though as plain as the noonday
sun. There can be no shores in other seas anything like the coast of
that gulf. The panorama of heights silently opened and went astern,
monotonous, brilliant, and fascinating. In all those long miles there
was not a tree, not a shrub, not a cloud, not a habitation. The sky was
silver, the sea was pewter, and the high bergs were of graven gold or
bronze. The chart informed us of Moses’ well, and of Badiat Ettih, or
the Wilderness of the Wanderings, and Mount Sinai. “Moses, sir,” said
the bo’sun to me, “he had enough rock for his tablets, but that was
a hot job he had getting them down.” But since those early days and
tribulations the land has been left to mankind but as a reminder of
things gone. Nobody to-day ever lands on those beaches, on those arid
islands. How could they? That we could see the contortions of the exposed
strata, and the dark stains thrown by the sun from yellow bowlders
on immaculate sands, was nothing. We see, in the same way, the clear
magnification of another planet through a glass, but that is as near as
we can get to it. There were numerous small islands between us and the
shore. They were always glowing satellites of bare ore, without surf,
fixed in a sea of lava, and blanched by the direct and ceaseless blaze in
the heavens. Unshielded by air and cloud from that fire, they perished
long ago.

Our smoke rose straight over the ship’s funnel, then curled forward,
showering grits. If the hand was placed carelessly on a piece of
exposed metal work one knew it. Our bo’sun, who has no expression but a
disapproving stare, who never sleeps, who has the frame of a gorilla, and
whose long hairy arms, bowed inward and pendent as he walks the deck, are
clearly made for balance and dreadful prehensility, admitted to me that
it was “warm.” Yes. The sprightly fourth engineer appeared from below as
I loafed along an alleyway which had the fierce radiation of a nether
corridor, and he drooped on the engine-room grating with the air of a
fainting girl; he did not call it warm, but that is what he meant.

Night came, and the cabin had to be faced. The hour was made as late as
possible, but it came. Reading was not easy. It would not have been easy
then for a young novelist to enjoy the press cuttings assuring him of
those original features of his work which distinguished it from that
of Thomas Hardy. But the cabin made it no easier to do nothing, for
how can one lie sleepless in a bunk and merely look at time standing
still because the thermometer has frightened it? Beside me was a book
the skipper had lent to me, with a hearty commendation of its merits.
“Facts,” he had said to me significantly, looking at me very hard.
“Facts, my dear sir!”

So it looked. It looked like nothing but facts. Who wants them? What are
they for? And the coarse red cover of the book betrayed its assurance
in its uncontaminated usefulness. A copy of it will never be found in
any boudoir. (This is probably the first reference to it by a critic.) I
lifted the weighty thing, took another look at my watch—no hope!—summoned
so much of my will as had not melted, and began.

When I awoke the sun was pouring heat again. The decks were being
drenched. But my cabin light was burning foolishly and the book was
beside me. If already you know something of that special sort of
literature which is published exclusively for use in the chart houses of
ships, you will understand. And you will know, too, where R. L. Stevenson
got much of the actuality which in places lights the ships and islands
of _The Wrecker_ and _The Ebb Tide_ into startling distinction. The
pilotage directions for the Pacific were volumes into which Stevenson
must have often pushed off, like a happy boy in a boat, to lose himself
in that bright wilderness. Yes, and if only the writers of other kinds of
books but knew their work as well, could keep as close to the matter in
hand, and could show their knowledge, or admit their want of it, with
the brief candor and unconscious modesty of the compilers of the works
published for mariners by a Mr. Potter, of the Minories, London! I hope
that some day I may be able to enter Mr. Potter’s shop, where books are
published in so unlikely a place as Aldgate, which is Whitechapel way,
and press Mr. Potter’s hand in silent gratitude, for I am sure there is
no phenomenon in nature, not even an exhibition of human gratitude, which
would astonish him, or move him indeed to anything more than a perfectly
just comment in words not exceeding two syllables each.

I will make no secret of the book which put away the heat for me, and
abolished time—for I do not remember looking at the time after 1.30
A.M., when I was still far from sleep, and had been reading steadily for
hours. Yet this book no more resembled a best-seller than a chronometer
resembles the lovely object out of a prize packet. Its name is _The Red
Sea and Gulf of Aden Pilot_—the seventh edition, we may gladly learn of
so respectable an exhibition of prose. Its price, I noticed, proved that
the truth—or as near to the truth as one should expect to attain—is no
more, is really no more, than the price of more doubtful commodities.
And let us remember that it is all very well for wise pilots in other
and darker seas to assume they may teach young voyagers the right ways
in the deceptive and fog-bound coasts of philosophy. Philosophy? That is
easy. We may make our charts, then, according to inspiration or desire.
But when it comes to advising a mariner where he may venture with a
valuable ship, according to her draught, then it is essential that
words should be chosen with care, and the student warned to note with
unusual caution every qualitative parenthesis. There can be no casual and
friendly agreement to differ about the truth when the question concerned
is a coral reef in five fathoms and a ship drawing thirty feet. One must
be able to assure a sailor either that his ship can do it, or he must
be told that he may not try. Yet with what confidence each of us will
venture to pilot others in the more dangerous, the more alluring, and the
supremely frustrating elements of morality and æsthetics!

My bed book made no attempt to beguile me. It opened with the simple
statement that its purpose was to give “Directions for the navigation of
the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Suez, and the central track for steam vessels
through the Red Sea, Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, and the Gulf of Aden; also
descriptions of the Gulf of Akaba, the African and Arabian shores of
the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the southeastern coast of Arabia to
Ras-al-Hadd, the coast of Africa from Siyan to Ras Asir, including the
Gulf of Tajura, then to Ras Hafun, Abd-al-Kuri, the Brothers, and Socotra
Island.”

And Socotra Island! We know the South Pole better than that island,
although from prehistoric times every maker of specifics has depended
on Socotran aloes. After this simple avowal the book informs its reader
that “all its bearings are true, and in degrees measured clockwise from
0° to 360°.” Dare we ever ask for more than that? Here was a book which
actually declared that its bearings were true and were not magnetic. No
work could be more frank. It relied entirely on its reader being a man
of honor, of common sense, of skill in his craft, and of a desire so
simple that his only care was the safety of the lives and the property
of others. Yet such is the force of habit, which sends us to a book to
look, not for the life we know, but for the glory of its falsification,
that at first I was inclined to put the captain’s volume aside and trust
to boredom and the whirring of the electric fan to send me to sleep. But
something prevented that.

Here I was, in these very waters; and their uninhabited islands, beaches,
and reefs, which had been passing us all that day, were altogether too
insistent. These Arabian and African gulfs have more coral to the square
mile than any other seas in the world, so, although their shores, during
all a day’s run, may be rainless and dead, the waters are more alive
than the most fertile of earth’s fields. Sometimes, when listlessly
gazing overside, one was shocked by the sight of a monstrous shape dim
in the fathoms. And one evening when the very waves, as though subdued
by the heat, moved languidly in hyaline mounds, several black fins began
to score their polish. A few dark bodies then partly emerged, gliding
and progressing in long, leisurely arcs. As soon as those dolphins saw
us they woke up. They began leaping eagerly toward us in the direction
of our bows, as though the sight of our ship had overjoyed them. They
behaved deliriously, like excited children released from school at
that moment. Now, we were used to a small family of these creatures so
greeting us. They would amuse themselves for ten minutes by revolving
round one another immediately before the ship’s stem, weaving intricate
evolutions in the clear water so close to our iron nose that one looked
for them to be sheared apart. They were so plain that it was easy to
see the crescent-shaped valve of the nose, or blowhole, open whenever a
head cleared the water. But the exhibition this evening was phenomenal.
Thousands of them—yes, thousands, for I will imitate the _Pilot_—as
though they had had word of us, appeared at once, throwing themselves in
parabolas toward us, and when alongside breaching straight up, perhaps
because their usual curved leap did not take them high enough, and they
intended at all costs to get a view of our amusing deck. The level sun
signaled from the varnish of their bodies. One of these little whales
moved for some time below me, turning up an eye now and then in the way
of a swimmer who converses with his friend in the boat. He rolled over
lazily, went down, and dissolved in the mystery under us. When I looked
up the sea was vacant. Dolphins might never have been created.

This sea was so plainly the setting for legend and fable. Crusoe and
Sinbad both would be at home here. I should guess, however, from what we
saw of the coast and the islands, that this was more the world of Sinbad
than of any level-headed adventurer. Djinns might be looked for in those
desolate gorges into which we had glimpses. It would be wrong to pretend
that the _Pilot_ ever mentioned such things by name, but now and then I
suspected in the text fair substitutes for such infernal and maleficent
powers. The _Pilot_ would check the reader going easily through its pages
with an unexpected caution: “The coast from Ras Mingi northwards to Ras
Jibeh, a distance of 330 miles, is mainly inhabited by the Jemeba tribe,
who generally have a bad character.”

But the faithful _Pilot_ would allow no harsh judgment on the Jemebas. We
ourselves might develop a similar bearing toward visitors who appeared
to be unduly prosperous if we were as poor as the Jemebas, had no boats,
and had to “depend on inflated sheepskins” for our “fishing operations.”
Of certain channels we were advised not to attempt them “unless the sun
is astern of the ship and a good lookout is kept.” The reefs in this sea
do not behave like reefs. They are numberless, but they are rarely marked
by so much as a ripple; and that, I can vouch, is true. Their fatal
presence may be revealed on a lucky day by a change in the color of the
water. For those seamen who are not fortunate when watching for the water
to change color the _Pilot_ gives advice on what may happen when boats
must be beached and help sought. The beach “was formerly inhabited, and
remains of dwellings are still to be seen.”




CHAPTER VI


I was leaning on the rail of the bridge with the master, watching the
brown scum, peculiar to the Red Sea, pass alongside with its not really
pleasant smell, for it hints that the very deep itself is stagnant and
decomposing; and I was foolish enough to tell him that to me the bearings
of his excellent book of sailing directions were not only true, but
magnetic. He half turned to me sharply, considered this remark and myself
for a moment, and then made the noise of impatience in his throat. It was
at the hour when we were passing into the Red Sea proper. The Ashrafi
Islands were abeam, with Shadwán Island, the greatest of the group, the
very picture in little of what this earth will be when its ichor will all
have evaporated. Behind the barrier of outer islands is a labyrinth of
reefs and coral patches where the signs of danger may be mistaken for the
usual mirage, or an innocent and fortuitous shadow may have the obvious
face of a genuine reef and thus scare a ship away on a safer course till
she runs full upon the real and unannounced rocks. I mentioned to our
captain that his book occasionally whispered of a few inexplicable tents
to be seen on these uninhabited islands.

“Oh, tents! That’s right. A man I know got aground here,” he said, “and
in half an hour his ship was surrounded by little boats. He never saw the
coming of them. There they were. A year or two before the war a steamer
got aground here one night, and at daybreak she was boarded by a big mob.
The crew were stripped of their clothes. The Arabs were in a hurry to get
the chief engineer’s ring, so they cut his finger off. Then they tried to
shift a copper steam pipe. Steam was still on, and they took an ax to it.
The engineer told me it did his finger a lot of good when the Arabs got
down to the steam. The pressure was all right.”

Even a deep-water channel of the Red Sea may commit the crime which some
think worse than murder—the betrayal and mockery of a confiding trust,
of a simple faith in the pledged word, of repose in the moral order of
things. A steamer, the _Avocet_, where the chart, the Admiralty chart,
and Mr. Potter’s _Pilot_ allowed her master to rest on the comforting
knowledge of deep water, struck a rock. “Naturally the Court of Enquiry,”
commented my captain, bitterly, “as much as told that man he was a liar
about that rock.” Our own master exhibited the sort of displeasure which
good craftsmen reserve for theorists and experts—the learned men who
would debate such a subject as the Red Sea in the Law Courts of London.
But even then he did not begrudge them a fair word. “But they didn’t
suspend his certificate.” They sent a gunboat from Aden to search for the
rock. The gunboat cruised and dragged for it for three weeks, but the
rock had gone. “Got tired,” suggested my captain, “of waiting for another
ship, I suppose. Went down below for a rest. The gunboat said there was
no rock. And there you are, sir. That proved the _Avocet’s_ skipper was a
liar. Couldn’t be plainer. Ten months later another ship found it, though
she wasn’t looking for it. It don’t do for a sailor to say a thing isn’t
there because he can’t see it and has never heard of it before. Give it a
margin.”

The Red Sea, I suppose, will never be a popular resort. No pleasure, as
it is commonly defined, may be found where the shade temperature may
rise to 110°, where rain rarely falls, where there is either no wind or
a malicious stern wind, where the inclosing shores have no rivers, but
only beaches of radiant sand and precipices of glowing metal, and where
you are not likely to meet any folk except an occasional tribe with a
bad reputation and so poor that it goes fishing on inflated sheepskins.
At the lower end of that sea there are a few ports, used mainly by the
pilgrims to the holy places Mecca and Medina. And indeed the _Pilot_ does
not attempt any attractive testimony. Even of such a choice subject as a
small island secluded within an unfrequented gulf it is but terse, even
exasperatingly brief. It will merely report of it that it “produces no
vegetables, except two or three date palms and a few pumpkins. There are
a few jackals, gazelles, and wild asses here. Cephalopods are abundant in
the surrounding waters, and sperm whales are common.”

But is not that enough? Could you get that at Monte Carlo? What more
could a traveler wish for as he looks overside at such a coast? What more
does he deserve in a world which has become patterned with airdromes
and oil tanks? These coasts are no more placable and are little better
known than they were to the early navigators. There are large and even
populous islands which great ships must pass almost every day that are
still as they were when the insatiable curiosity of Marco Polo drew him
to so many first views of the earth’s entertaining wonders. For there
on our starboard beam, immense on a sea which moved in smooth mounds so
languidly that the surface of the waters might have been filmed with
silk, rose the battlements of Socotra. I think the last we heard from
that island was dated 1848. Yet, the _Pilot_ informs us, “it is said to
enjoy a remarkably temperate and cool climate.” Its capital, Tamrida,
is less frequently visited by Christians than Mecca. It should be worth
a visit, if one had the heart for it. The town is “pleasantly situated”
and its people are mixed of Arab, Indian, Negro, and Portuguese blood.
The natives have an unwritten language peculiar to themselves. But we are
kept out of so attractive an island because, for one thing, though it is
a British possession, both monsoons appear unfeeling about that important
fact concerning a land which has no harbors and no safe holding-ground
for ships; in addition there is the “unfavorable character of its
natives.” Is it then surprising that the literature made by tourists in
these seas is mainly devoted to arabesques of places like Port Said?
A day in Socotra would be worth a year with the Pyramids. And, as it
happened, the southwest monsoon was waiting for us. When we had cleared
the easterly point of the island it caught us, filled our decks, smashed
the crockery, and at night set the mast-heads describing arcs amid the
stars.




CHAPTER VII


_June 5._—To look down a lane in our village you might suppose that
literature was about as likely there as the harpsichord. The narrow
pathway (when two of us meet in it we must go sideways) is of wood, and
it has white walls and a roof of steel. There are doors all along its
length, and it ends at a ladder descending to the afterdeck. The doors
are generally open in a friendly way, as though we had no doubt about our
neighbors. Some of these doors give on comfortable little sanctuaries in
white and mahogany, with blue and orange bunk curtains, electric lamps,
and settles on which—should you call on a friend when he is off duty—you
may hear enough to keep your own improving knowledge modest and dumb.

There are sections of surprising warmth in that steel passage. You
feel no astonishment, therefore, when you come to other doors which do
not admit to mahogany and bright curtains, but to the noises and dark
business of the pit; you may see, down below, little figures most intent
on whatever duties have to be performed about eternal fires and boilers.

Therefore literature? No, nor flower boxes. Besides, this ship and its
men are as good as some books, and better than others. In the early
days of the voyage I felt no desire to read. Yet one night the initial
interest in the novelty of my new home wavered. There was no sound but
the creaking of a piece of unseen gear and the monody of the waters.
There was nothing to do, and the last word had been said. That was the
time when a book would have helped. But I knew it would be useless to
look for aid to the kind of books which go to sea. I recalled other
voyages and their chance volumes. Easy reading! Yet to take to sea what
has the comical name of “light literature,” because that is the stuff
to read there, is an insult to one’s circumstances, where ignorance
and light-mindedness are ever in jeopardy and may be severely handled.
Anyhow, I do know that the sea converts that kind of confectionery into
sodden, dismal, and unappetizing stuff.

There was nothing for it but patience. Mine had been rather a hurried
departure, and, except a few geographical and other reference works, I
had nothing with me but a Malay grammar, and so far the grammar had too
easily repulsed my polite and insinuating advances upon it. Our ship is
an extensive and busy place, managed in a way which shows an exclusive
attention for the job, and so I did not betray my interest in literature
till one day I saw a cadet with a likely volume. It turned out to be the
Iliad, in Derby’s translation. I was so impressed that I mentioned this
curious adventure to the captain.

He thought nothing of it. “Our ship has plenty of books—part of our
gear. Come with me.” He showed me a bookcase for the boys—I had passed
the place where it stood scores of times and would never have guessed so
much was secreted there. Excepting for some transient volumes of fiction,
changed whenever the ship is home again, the books in that case would
have shown a country parsonage to have an horizon strangely beyond the
parochial confines.

There was the Odyssey, the _Oxford Book of English Verse_, Milton,
Wordsworth, Tennyson, _Know Your Own Ship_, Lubbock’s _China Clippers_,
Green’s _Short History_, a history of China, Japanese and Malay grammars,
volumes on engineering and navigation. Ball’s _Wonders of the Heavens_,
the Oxford Dictionary, Wallace’s _Malay Archipelago_, books on sea
birds, books on marine zoölogy, books enough to keep one hunting along
their backs for something else unexpected and good. And in this very
place where I had imagined that I was cut off from letters, the captain,
casually at breakfast one morning, gave a frank judgment on a recent
novel, and his reasons for his opinion were so sparkling and original
that I saw at once what is the matter with the professional reviewing of
books. In the place where I had guessed that letters were nothing, the
significance of the popular reading is such that it would break the heart
of a sensational novelist to see it, and might drive him to seek his meat
in the more useful mysteries of crochet work.

[Illustration: _Port Said Is More West Than East_

(_See p. 23_)]

_June 6._—The southwest monsoon has broken. The heat and languor of
the Red Sea are being washed from us by the Gulf of Arabia. The decks
have been wet and lively to-day. The ship is rolled by quick and abrupt
waves heaping along our starboard side. The waters recoil from our bulk,
and the sun shining through their translucent summits gives the tumult
brief pyramids of beryl. There are acres of noisy snow, and clouds of
apple-green foundered deep within inclines of dark glass. Spectra are
constant over the forward deck, where the spray towers between us and
the sun, and drives inboard. After a nasty lurch I hear more crockery
smash below. One of the other two passengers, the young Scots farmer who
has left his Ayrshire oats to see whether rubber trees are better, and
who had fancied at the first trial that he was a proved sailor, now seems
to miss the placidity of his cows. He groans. At first I was a little
doubtful about myself, but bluffed the Gulf of Arabia into supposing that
it was a mistake to take me for a longshoreman; yet for a mysterious
reason, so uncertain is the soul and its uninvited thoughts, I have had
“Tipperary” running through my head all this day—music, one would think,
which had nothing to do with monsoons; and thoughts of Paris, and the
look of the English soldiers of the Mons retreat I met long ago. Why? How
are we made? For here I am, with nothing to remind me of Crépy-en-Valois,
climbing companion ladders where ascent and descent are checked at times
by an invisible force, which holds me firm to the reality of a ship at
sea. And yet “Tipperary,” that fond and foolish air, will not leave me. I
wish I had the clew to this. After sunset, in a brief wild light, it was
a test of the firmness of the mind to be on deck. The clouds, the sea,
the horizon, were a great world displaced. The universe with its stars
swayed giddily at bonds that threatened to burst at any moment, and away
then we should have gone into space. It is darksome to see very heaven
itself behaving as though it were working loose from its eternal laws. An
anarchic firmament?

_June 7._—Bracing myself last night in my cot, from which the ship
tried to eject me, I read Kidd’s _Science of Power_. The captain had
commended it to me, saying it was one of the best books he had ever
read. Now, would it have been possible before 1914 for a book which
describes the theory of mankind’s inborn and unalterable nature as
blasphemous nonsense, and condemns civilization based on force, to win
so handsome a tribute from such a tough character as our skipper? Kidd
declares that it is the psychic condition of a people which matters, and
that their outlook on life can be changed in a generation. He says the
collective emotion can be charged for war or for peace. That our captain,
who had his share of war, should have been moved by such an idea, need
not surprise us to-day. Kidd’s theory is proved by our skipper’s own
eagerness in this new hope. But the prophets and all the artists who have
never served in the House of Rimmon have always held that faith, and have
worked in its light. Otherwise they would have cursed God and then have
cleared out of this world by a short cut. All the material manifestations
of our civilization, which are thought to be from everlasting to
everlasting, are nothing but the reflections of our commonest thoughts,
and may be changed like lantern slides. The better world will be here
as soon as we really want it. It depends on how we look at things. I
recall a school anniversary, and a brigadier as the central light to
shine on assembled youth. He advised the boys to take no notice of the
talk about the brotherhood of man; man always had been a fighting animal;
war was a fine training for our most manly qualities; with God’s help we
had to prepare for the next war, which was sure to come; all this peace
nonsense was eye-wash. It was plain that brigadier felt he was the very
man to scrawl upon the virgin minds of children, as indeed our applause
assured him he was. But suppose we pose the problem of the education of
boys on the same plane of intelligence, though from another angle. Let
us imagine the governors of that school had invited a painted lady to
address the boys, and that she had assured them that they should laugh
at this nonsense of the virtue of man, for man is a lecherous animal and
concupiscence brings out all his lusty qualities, and therefore they
should prepare for riotous nights because all the talk of honor and a
fastidious mind is just eye-wash. What would careful parents think of
that? But would the outrage be worse than the brigadier’s?

We have four cadets, and they make the best-looking group of our
company. They move about lightly in shorts and singlets as though they
were enjoying life in a delightful world. I stand where I can see them
unobserved. They reconcile me to great statesmen, brigadiers, Bottomley,
and the strong silent men. It is dreadful to think that soon they may
lose their jolly life and become serious lumber in the councils of the
world, and very highly respected.

_June 8._—Rain came like the collapse of the sky at six o’clock this
morning. Numerous waterfalls roared from the upper works as the ship
rolled. The weather cleared at breakfast time, and immense clouds walled
the sea, vague and still, and inclosed us in a glittering clammy heat.
Perhaps it was the heat that did it, but certainly the ship’s master
revealed himself in another character. Our captain has the bearing and
the look of a scholarly cleric. He is an elderly man, with a lean,
grave face, though his gray eyes, when they meet yours, have a playful
interrogatory irony. Luckily he is clean shaven, so that I may admire
a mouth and chin which would become a prelate. His thin nose points
downward in gentle deprecation. A few men, under the bo’sun, were at
some job this morning on the captain’s bridge, where we have our few
staterooms. The bo’sun is a short fellow, with the build of a higher
anthropoid. If he began to strangle me I should not resist. I should
commend my soul to God. I have not seen him bend iron bars in those paws
of his, but I am sure that if a straight bar ever displeases him he will
put a crook in it. And he knows his job. He is always waddling about
rapidly, glancing right and left with scowling dissatisfaction. There he
was this morning on our bridge, where I was enjoying early morning at sea
in the tropics while trying to keep clear of the men at work. Our captain
stood near me, indifferent to my existence, and apparently oblivious even
of the ship and its place in the sun. The bo’sun, growling in his throat,
and lifting in indication a brown and hairy paw, was keeping the men
active and silent. I don’t know what happened. But the captain turned;
he regarded for several seconds in silent disfavor the bo’sun, the men,
and their job; then there was a sudden blast from him which made all the
figures of those seamen appear to wilt and bend as in a cruel wind. The
captain did not raise his voice, but with that deep and sonorous tone
which in the peroration from a pulpit shakes the secret fastnesses of
wicked souls he stated how things looked to him in similes and with other
decorations that increased the heat and my perspiration till I looked
around for the nearest ladder out of it.

_June 9._—I met the chief engineer in an alleyway of the main deck. We
stopped to yarn, for we have become no more intimate yet than is possible
across the mess-room table. One of his Chinese firemen squeezed past us
as we were talking, and the chief’s eyes followed him. Then he chuckled.
“I found that man below last week with a bit of spun yarn round his
throat. He was pretending suicide, and kept up the joke to amuse me. The
Chink said, ‘Me all same Jesus Clist.’ I told him he was wrong. Christ
did not commit suicide. Christ was topside man, not a devil. That Chink
was quite surprised. He shook his head. I could see he did not believe
me. Nothing that I explained to him convinced him that Jesus was not a
devil. ‘Clist no devil? Velly good.’” The fellow smiled bitterly and
shook his head at the joke. It took me some minutes to get at his idea,
and from what I could make out that Chink thought it was incredible we
should go to any trouble about a good man. Good spirits would do us no
harm. People only kow-tow to devils they are afraid of.

_June 10._—We are nearing the Laccadives. A dragonfly passed over the
ship on the wind. The wind is southwest, and the nearest land in that
direction is Africa, over one thousand miles away. Some day a sailor who
has a taste for natural history will give us the records of his voyages,
and his notes may surprise the ornithologists, at least. Our men caught
a merlin in the Red Sea, which was quite friendly, and took its own time
to depart when it was released. Another day, while in the same waters, I
was looking at a group of Chinese, firemen sprawled on the after hatch
and was wondering where in England a chance group of workers could be
found to match those models, when a ray of colored light flashed over
them and focused on a davit. It was an unfamiliar bird, and I began to
stalk it with binoculars while it changed its perches about the poop,
till it was made out to be a bee-eater. Then I found the chief mate was
behind me, intent also with his binoculars. We had some bickering about
it. He said the bird was a roller; but I told him he should stick to his
chipping hammer and leave the birds to better men. He said he would soon
show me who was the better man, and escorted me the length of the ship
to his cabin, where he produced a bird book, which was a log of several
long voyages to the Far East. Like so many sailors to-day he is versed in
several matters which we landsmen think are certainly not the business
of sailors at all. He has been keeping a log of the land birds which he
has recognized at sea, and his record suggested what an excellent book a
sailor, who is also a naturalist, may write for us some day.

This sailor had observed for himself, what naturalists know well enough,
that the gulls are not sea birds at all in the sense that are albatrosses
and petrels, and the frigate and bo’sun birds of the tropics. When you
see gulls, then land is near, though dirty weather may hide it. The
herring gulls, kittiwakes, and black-backs never follow a ship to blue
water. When, outward bound, land dissolves astern, then they, too,
leave you. You may meet their fellows again off Ushant or Finisterre
if your ship passes not too far from the land; but should you be well
to the westward, then the ship’s next visitors will be land birds when
approaching Gibraltar.

Several pairs of noddies kept about the ship at the lower end of the Red
Sea, and not because of anything we could give them except our society.
They did not beg astern, like hungry gulls, for scraps, but wheeled about
the bows, or maneuvered close abeam like swallows at play. As a fact, I
think they were tired and wanted to rest. Once or twice they alighted on
our bulwarks and went through some astonishing aërial acrobatics while
their tiny webbed feet sought the awkward perch.

After sundown one actually tried to alight on my head, while I stood in
the dusk on the captain’s bridge watching its evolutions. It swerved
and stooped so unexpectedly that I ducked, as one used to at the sound
of a shell going over. But soon it alighted behind me, and it made no
more fuss about being picked up than though it were a rag. It was only a
little sick, but got over that, and settled down on the palm of my hand.
A group of shipmates were overworking a gramophone below on a hatch,
where lamps made the deck bright. Down went the noddy and I to them. Our
visitor cocked an eye at the gramophone and took quiet stock of the men
who came round to stroke it. It accepted us all as quietly as though it
had known us for years, and this was the usual routine. It heard its mate
later, or else our musical records were not to its taste, for it shook
itself disconsolately, waddled a little, and projected itself into the
night.

Last night the surgeon brought to my cabin another visitor. It was a
petrel, about the size of a blackbird, and of a uniform dark chocolate
color. We judged it was uncommon, and there was a brief hint of
chloroform, which was immediately dismissed, for our captain might have
objected to any modern version of the Ancient Mariner’s crime on his
ship, even in the name of science. We enjoyed our guest in life till it
was pleased to leave us.[1]

_June 11._—The south end of Ceylon was in sight twenty miles distant on
the port bow at 2 P.M. I did not notice any spicy breeze, but the water
had changed to an olive green. The coast was dim as we drew abreast of
Dondra Head, but the white stalk of its beacon was distinct and the
pulsing light of the combers. We seem to have been at sea for an age. The
exposed forecastle with its rusty gear, where I feel most at home, has
become friendly and comforting. You are secluded there. You are elevated
from the sea and outside the ship. The great red links of the cable, the
ochraceous stains on the plates, the squat black winches like crouched
and faithful familiars, the rush and gurgle of fountains in the hawse
pipes when the ship’s head dips, the glow of the deck and the rails, like
the grateful warmth of a living body, and the ancient smell, as if you
could sniff the antiquity of the sea and the sweat of a deathless ship on
a voyage beyond the counting of mere days, give me a deeper conviction
of immortality than all the eager arguments from welcome surmises. I am
in eternity. There is no time. There is no death. This is not only the
Indian Ocean. Those leisurely white caps diminishing to infinity, the
serene heaven, the silence except for the sonority of the waters, are
Bideford Bay, too, on a summer long past, and the Gulf Stream on a voyage
which ended I forget when, and what Magellan saw in the Pacific, and is
the Channel on our first passage across, and they are the lure and hope
of all the voyagers who ever stood at a ship’s head and looked to the
unknown. They are all the seas under the sun, and I am not myself, but
the yearning eyes of Man. To-day, when so disembodied and universal,
leaning on the rail over the stem, both the confident interrogation and
the answer to the mystery of the world, a little flying fish appeared in
the heaving glass beneath me, was bewildered by our approaching mass, and
got up too late. He emerged from a wave at the wrong angle, and the water
and draught flung him against our iron.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Later, Mr. Moulton, of the Raffles Museum at Singapore, showed me a
rarity, one of the six specimens taken of Swinhoe’s fork-tailed petrel.
Our little friend of the Indian Ocean was at once recognized and named,
and his visit to our liner added something new to our knowledge of his
kind, for it was unknown that he was likely to be found so far to the
westward.




CHAPTER VIII


The voyage down the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean was hot and long
enough for me to forget where I was going and why I was there. I let the
idea of The Islands blow to leeward. I had no use for it. I saw I might
as well expect to reach the Hesperides. As a legend, The Islands were
more thin and indistinct, more remote, less verifiable, than when my
steamer, against the cruel hostility of an English spring, backed into
the Mersey and stood out to sea. The legend each day retired farther,
like good fortune when pursued. That delicate line of the horizon was
inviolable. It could not be passed. For Magellan and Drake it was all
very well to pursue such ideas. Their ships were different. Mine was
a high confusion of white boats, black ventilators with blue throats,
indeterminate shapes, ladders coming out of nothing and leading nowhere,
a cerulean factory stack, and yellow derrick standards holding out stiff
arms above a black central structure which appeared to have no beginning
and no end. My ship was too big and complicated for me to be reassured by
the scientific design which held it together.

And there was the master of our ship. He had grown gray in the East. He
knew China and Japan, Java, Sumatra, and Macassar. But he shook his head
over Tidore and Timore Laut, as though I were talking to him of a Perfect
System or of lost Atlantis. He admitted he had heard of such places. But
naturally! We all have heard, as Raleigh once heard, of the City of Gold.
Yet where is it? Should we waste the time of a practical seaman on his
own navigating bridge with idle talk of it? Raleigh, as we know, found
his city. And what was it? Monkeys and trees. My questions to the captain
about The Islands, I can see now, were like an eager display of little
green apples to a seaman of long experience. My last question he did not
even answer. He could not answer it. A cloud, which had quickly made
midnight of the morning ahead of us, burst over the ship. She vanished
in hissing smoke. My voice was drowned in the roar of waterspouts and
the blaring of the siren. Presently she began to take shape again, and
through the thinning downpour we could see the figure of the lookout at
her head. She fell also most curiously silent as the black squall passed
astern with a white foot to its curtain. The captain began to answer me
when my last question was twenty minutes old. He took off his oilskins.
“You talk,” he said, “as if you were on the Underground Railway. Those
Islands”—he waved his arm eastward where there was still only a haze—“you
couldn’t see them in a lifetime. Not in two lives. Some are great
countries, and some are three cocoanuts, and the ocean is full of them.
They are like stars in the sky. There’s thousands of them. Now just look
at that!”

The now translucent murk of the storm over our starboard bow remained
opaque in one place. Part of the weather there had a pyramidal form and
was darker. The weather lifted, but this obscurity remained on the sea.
The sun colored and shaped it as we drew near and what had appeared to
be a denser mass of the storm was revealed as a forest falling straight
out of a cloud to the surf. The summit of the forest was in the sky, and
the combers of the Indian Ocean swung into caverns overshadowed by trees
at its base. “That is the first of them,” said the captain. “There’s Pulo
Way.”

I at once abandoned all my stock of notions about the Malay Archipelago.
It was useless. I had only that morning found on the chart, for the first
time, the island of Way. It was an idle speck lost beside the magnitude
of Sumatra. One might have expected to pass Way without seeing it, or
perhaps suppose it was a barrel adrift. Yet for twenty minutes we were
steaming beside this oceanic dot whose summit was in heaven. Deep ravines
and valleys unfolded in it. The wall of its jungle stood along its water
line, or just at the back of an occasional strip of golden beach. I could
see but one house, and that was near the eastern end of it, among some
cocoanuts. Perhaps it was the illusion of a house. But there was no sign
of humanity. Perhaps Way, too, was a mirage. It had suddenly appeared
on the empty ocean, born out of a storm. Now it was passing astern,
silent and unreal, apparently no more approachable, this first of the
Malay Islands, than any other of those bright dreams which we cherish
when young, but which pass, and are lost. To starboard all day among the
changing continents of cloud one towering shape of dark vapor persisted.
Our skipper said that that was a mountain top in Sumatra; but you know
what sailors are. Once a nipa palm drifted close to us. It looked much
more substantial than Pulo Way, or than any distant Sumatran summit.

At dinner that night the open rounds of our saloon ports were disks of
fathomless violet. When I looked up from the yellow glow of the table
lamp to those dim circles I thought we were being steadily watched by
the enigmatic eyes of a mystery, lovely but awful, and so lost much of
the talk. The captain and the chief engineer were in solemn dispute. It
is in such adventitious trifles, casual and valueless, that one gets the
best things in travel. Now and then the violet changed to a vivid and
quivering green light. But there was no thunder. The mystery did not
speak.

We came to the coffee. Our captain, taking up his white cap from his
bench, a sign that he has had enough of us, leaned back and severely
reprimanded the chief. The chief, who is a young man, happens to be an
insoluble agnostic. He is quietly and obstinately confident in his denial
of everything but experience. Our elderly captain has voyaged long enough
to learn, I suppose, that though what men call hard facts must be treated
with respect and caution, yet one can never be quite sure. “Look at my
charts, my Admiralty charts, covered all over with experience. Do I trust
them? No, sir. I reckon they haven’t got everything down on the charts.”
You should know that we were discussing whether, when a man dies, he
then chiefly lives, or whether, as the engineer put it, “he goes to the
bottom, through the ash chute.”

Our captain said he didn’t know. But he was just as sure that no
thumb-polluted, condemned, dog-eared, fuliginous pocket book of formulas
used by engineers had got it down in plain figures; or some words of a
similar import. “I don’t know. You don’t. Nobody knows.”

The engineer looked at the misty electric fan and made bread pills.
His face suggested he had heard all this from his youth up; that he
knew baffled controversialists invariably escaped from the last corner
in such cloudy and sentimental muslin, like an angry woman who is in
the wrong, but is pretty. Our chief would no more accept a Christian
statement than he would believe the proffered pearl of a Levantine
peddler was of great price. But he is a polite young man. He rarely does
more than smile faintly at the case you put, as he would at the pearl. He
refers you instead to Darwin, or Huxley, or Andrew Lang, or the _Golden
Bough_. He has read widely within his favorite province. He goes over
every statement separately, with a fine gauge, to see whether it will
fit accurately into his system. If it does not, then away it goes. The
captain had risen slowly over us, lean, tall, and sardonic, and with no
sign that he was suppressing himself except that I discovered I was now
more interested in his hard gray eyes than in the violet eyes of the
tropic night. The chief at this moment referred the captain to one of
those Victorian iconoclasts whose books load cupboards and chests in his
own cabin. The captain instantly recommended him to a more Rabelaisian
diet. In this contest of characters it was curious to note the difference
between the well-read logician and the man of a literary temperament.
The captain has not read the _Golden Bough_, and, I suppose, never will.
But his candid simplicity, nevertheless, had foreknowledge of much that
the engineer had to tell him, and was unsatisfied. He still insisted on
the need and even the common sense of—as he called it—“a margin to play
with.” “After all, what do you clever fellows know? God himself is hidden
in what you don’t know. There’s plenty of room. Nobody can tell how much
there is beyond the half dozen pebbles you’ve picked up on the beach.”

“Nobody,” said the chief—“nobody has ever come back to tell us, anyhow.
They go, and they don’t come back to us.”

“Well, why the hell should they?” demanded the tall figure at the
door, turning its head over its shoulder. “Why should they? Who would
understand ’em if they did? Would you? What they would tell you would be
outside your experience and all wrong, of course.”

The chief fingered his napkin ring, stared into vacancy, as if talking to
such a man, especially when the man was the ship’s captain, was useless,
and he would waste no more time. Lightning glimmered at the ports. The
steward upset a plate of fruit. While his eye watched a rolling orange
the captain continued: “There’s more sense in some comic songs than in a
lot of your deductions from experience. What have you experienced? About
enough to warn a nipper against playing with fire.” Then he disappeared
in the alleyway. The chief said nothing. With well-disciplined weariness
he adjusted his napkin ring to a design in the tablecloth. He then looked
at me fixedly—but I gave no sign of partisanship—and finished his coffee.

On deck there was only a vibration, and irrelevant sections of our
security that were revealed faintly golden in darkness. Our captain
stood by himself, a white wraith at the end of the bridge; and even in
his ghostliness I could see he was not in need of further communication
from any foolish shipmate. But his cheroot smelled friendly. The young
officers and engineers of the deck below were clasping one another
luxuriously while waltzing to the gramophone. Some of them had abandoned
all the dress they did not want. The mask of a Chinaman appeared in the
night near me, detached and bodiless, regarded me for an instant with
profound melancholy, and then dissolved. I went below to my own seclusion.

A long voyage is chiefly weather and gossip. It gives a traveler the
impression of being irrelevant and aimless. The men keep busy about
the ship because there is nothing else to do. A sullen word, the least
significant of unfriendly gestures, are noted with the reproach that is
fixed on an adverse set of the current; it is so gratuitously alien in
its opposition. Travel is delightful in the morning, with a young sun
giving the sparkling sense that all is new and for the first time, and
that shadows are, after all, but a sport of happy light. By the afternoon
that freshness has gone, and one suspects the ship is uselessly rocking
without progress, fixed in the clutch of some sleeping but eternal power
which has forgotten, or does not know, that men do not live forever. One
would then destroy Time, the tyrant, and with his own scythe, if suddenly
he turned into an alleyway bearing his damnable glass. And when, after
dinner, there is no longer any excuse for staying in the saloon, when it
is three bells, and the boys have got tired of giving the gramophone on
the hatch jazz stuff to rotate, and you can see the spark by the rail
amidships where the chief’s pipe accompanies him while he gazes into
the night and contemplates finality and futility—then, then, one has to
face the ghosts from other times and of vanished scenes which gather in
one’s cabin at that hour, confident that it is their place also, and that
the man they know is sure to come. And he comes. Hail, the ghosts of the
middle watch! You never signed the articles. You were not seen coming
aboard. You never appear on deck. The voyage has nothing to do with you.
Only one man knows that you haunt us. But are you the reality, or is the
ship?




CHAPTER IX


We are in the Strait of Malacca. I have a fine confused romantic feeling
this morning, like that of a child just before the curtain rises on the
“Forty Thieves.” My memory is a splendid muddle of the long drama which
opened when Vasco da Gama rounded Good Hope, reached Calicut, and found
the way to Cathay; and of d’Albuquerque, St. Francis Xavier, Camoens,
sultans, massacres, sieges, Drake, Cornelius de Houtman, Sir Stamford
Raffles, and the various East India companies, some honorable and some
foreign. According to the _Malay Annals_, Malacca must have been a
sleepless city. The Malays themselves, without the expert assistance of
the Portuguese, knew how to find amusement. There was the prince who
played at Malacca with the son of the prime minister till the prince
stabbed his playmate, who had knocked off the royal hat. It was a serious
matter in Malacca to knock off a superior hat, or to have a beautiful
daughter whom you would not sell to the Sultan. One sultan, finding a
rival at the house of his own pretty lady, bestowed a quid of betel on
one of his young men. The youngster knew. He krised the rival. The head
of the house of the murdered man took a violent interest in this, so the
Sultan, in the cause of peace, sent the obedient young assassin to his
discontented subordinate chief, naturally expecting a pardon to follow
such an act of unnecessary courtesy; but the chief split the murderer’s
head with an elephant goad. “The court was thronged with foreign
adventurers ... mahouts with Indian names, Afghan bravos, Tamil merchants
ready to bribe even the Prime Minister.” Could d’Albuquerque improve on
that? Certainly not; though he did his best.

What, then, could I be expected to make of it, with the purple
silhouettes of the Dindings a few miles to port against the clearing sky
of morning? It is better, with such annals to go upon, to leave the fine
confused feeling of high romance where it is, for all the noble muddle
of the world is romantic; we have amassed enough to last us to the end.
Jarra island was ahead, an inky cone against a wall of thunder. The sea
was livid. Our men were busy rigging gear to the derricks; we are nearing
port, and I must pack up to-day. Yet those _Annals_ so accorded with that
lustrous sea and ominous sky inclosed by the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra,
as though the scenery were left when the actors departed, that I felt we
were only just a little too late for the play, and remained on deck from
sunrise to sunset in case a late caravel should pass; but all had gone,
and we were alone. When the sun went and my vigil was over, he left with
us a glow that was so like day that I thought it might last till he came
again. But chiefly that radiance was absorbed in the level apple-green
water of soundings that expanded toward Sumatra as far as where a loom
of storm was a high cobalt barrier. Ahead of us, toward Malacca, there
was a haze, suffused with a light of rose in which the islands were lower
embers. After all, sultans and Portuguese adventurers, even with the aid
of Camoens, were insignificant beneath the tremendous drama of that sky
of the tropics when night invaded day.

Before the next day broke in the Strait of Malacca it looked as though
the east was now barred from us by the enormous battalions of tempest.
They were camped about the horizon, a sleeping but ghastly host, waiting
for day to announce the assault and for the wind to lead them. The sea
was stilled, as though appalled by the look of the sky. But no wind came
with the sun. The dark impending threat did not break on us. Its smoke
and waiting thunder became a purple wall on which the sooty streamers
were changed to orange and pearl. Here we were, approaching Singapore.

We might have reached the peaceful end of the sea, or perhaps its
tranquil beginning, for that delicate surface might never have been
broken by any violence. It was inclosed by a circle of islands, some of
them high and solid, with deep reflections in the glass, and others but
black tracings of minute trees afloat, growing miraculously upright out
of the tenuous horizon. A launch turned a point and projected itself at
us. Two black lines diverged from its stem widely over a pallid tide. At
its head stood the statue of a Malay in a _sarong_, holding a boat hook,
and the statue became alive as the launch disappeared under our side
where a Jacob’s ladder was hanging. And next, a pair of hairy freckled
hands appeared at our bulwarks, and pulled up a man in a suit and helmet
incredibly white. He had a sandy beard. He looked up at our bridge and
nodded to it while brushing his hands together to rid them of our ship’s
grit, an act which had the air of a polite visitor’s absent-minded
disapproval. He went by a group of us, this pilot, as though he had been
meeting us like this every morning for years, and was rather tired of it,
these hot days, but hoped we were all right. We came alongside a quay.
The _Trojan_ touched land in tentative and friendly way, as though to
assure herself that she was really there.

[Illustration: _Old and New on the Suez Canal_

(_See p. 28_)]

To leave the sea and to land at Singapore is as serious a matter as
taking a man out of a long seclusion and releasing him from a closed
vehicle in Piccadilly Circus. Molten light poured over the swift
kaleidoscopic movements of a street where the first thing I saw was a
large cart drawn by a small white bull with an excusable hump; his eyes
were full of flies. The sun had struck down the long ears of the animal.
But no sooner did I note the flies than the bull vanished, or became a
Chinaman running silently in front of an austere European lady who was
perched high on a pair of noiseless wheels. Then a Chinaman began to run
silently in front of me, while I sat behind him much too high on a pair
of noiseless wheels, watching the dark patch of sweat expand on the back
of his shirt; anyhow, I must suppose it was I who sat there. We nearly
knocked over a yellow lady in black-satin trousers and a blue jacket
who was smoking a cigarette. Next, so far as I remember, there were a
great many masters of ships and perhaps as many cocktails. We came to a
spacious black-and-white palace with a myriad propellers revolving on
its ceiling—no wonder I was dizzy—and a string quartette regulated our
hunger with dance music while a regiment of immaculate Celestial acolytes
accurately guessed our wants. I remember, that night, a confusion of
narrow alleys, where hanging lanterns disclosed endless and aimless
torrents of brown bodies. There were the rank smells of abundant life in
heat and ferment, and cries and voices without meaning. Above grotesque
cornices were the shapes of monstrous leaves blacking out areas of stars.
All this, when I found a bedroom, I tried to resolve into an orderly
pattern; but there can be no ordering of the upburst and overflow of life
at its source. I gave it up, and watched instead some lizards running
after one another upside down on the white ceiling, while they made a
noise like intermittent loud hissing.




CHAPTER X


He had skimmed about Singapore in a jinrickshaw all the morning. He
wanted to find Mr. Kow Watt Loon. That Chinaman was as elusive as the
glamour of the East. And he was not used to ’rickshaws. He was sure he
looked a lazy fool when being dragged about in the heat on a high perch
and a pair of silent wheels by a sweating fellow creature. It had been
nearly a week before he could summon the courage to travel in a little
cart drawn by another man. It made him feel like the hated subject of a
revolutionary cartoonist’s satire.

He could not find Mr. Kow Watt Loon, who kept a pawnshop somewhere in
Singapore, so he had been told, where Kelanton _sarongs_ of silk were
to be found occasionally, rare krises, and silverware from the Linga
Islands. Not that Mr. Loon would be sure to sell those things if his
shop were found and if he had them, for he was reported to be suspicious
and morose; an embarrassing shopkeeper who would forget all his English
and decline to sell to you if he misliked your appearance. But Mr. Loon
could not be found; and a city near the equator is much more extensive,
relatively, than a city with a wholesome climate. Singapore’s streets in
their heavy and slumbering heat seemed to his despairing eye prolonged to
an impossible distance. Oh, Heaven! Where was this Mr. Loon?

This coolie was the third experiment that morning with a ’rickshaw.
Young Bennett from London, in his quest of the romance of the East,
watched below him the old man’s back muscles playing under the glistening
drab skin. He ought to tell the old fellow to walk—to stop. It was
too hot for this game. Besides, the coolie didn’t know where to go,
though he pretended he did; no doubt he was merely running about. They
always did that. The first, picked up near Raffles Place, was a bronze
giant, a wonderful youngster, whose hat was a round straw thatch with
a pinnacle. As soon as he was spoken to he made cheerful noises of
understanding, lifted his shafts in confident play, took a strange side
turning promptly (how lucky—this fellow knew!), loped off swiftly, and
they were completely lost in ten minutes, though Bennett did not know
that at the time. His coolie loped along swiftly but leisurely. That
running figure and its style would have inspired the poets of old Athens,
but in the romantic East it was only a blob of life. The sun and the
easy gait infected the passenger with a haughty languor. The coolie’s
pale-blue cotton shorts and shirt became dark and limp with sweat; but
the fellow ran on, deliberately, unerringly, taking unlikely byways into
queer seclusions where brown life poured in noisy streams. Evidently this
fellow knew where to go.... But did he? Or did he just run on? Where the
devil were they? _Brente!_ Stop! As cheerful as ever, sweating but fresh,
that coolie did not appear to know where he was, and evidently his glad
smile would be unchanged even in death. He was an imbecile.

The second coolie, who had stopped to be entertained by the language
thrown at the first, was a lean and elderly man, and big veins corded
his arms in a mesh. His torso was bare. He ran his ’rickshaw elsewhere,
occasionally looking back over his shoulder doubtfully at his fare. He
was shy of any street in which he saw the khaki uniform of a Malay or
a Sikh. That journey came to nothing in a strange market place in the
middle of a horrible smell. The coolie walked to a curb; there he gently
rested his shafts, turned and shook his head dolefully, and held out his
hand for largess.

Another hour wasted! It was blazing noon, and a row of Chinamen were
squatting in the shade, eating slops from basins with two sticks. They
did not even look up. The naked children at play did not appear to see
him. Nobody in Singapore knew anything, and did not care what happened
to anybody. He had never seen this part of the city before. Was it
Singapore? It might have been the grotesque country of a dream, all these
people inimical shadows who did not even glance at their victim, and
he the only live man, caught in an enchantment, lost and imprisoned in
an illusion where the face of things had a meaning which he could not
guess, though it was important for him. The man from London wiped the
perspiration from his hands and looked round. A high wall was opposite,
with a gateway, and crouched on the top of the wall, on either side of
the opening, were two big bulls in pink stone. In the shadow on the
pavement beneath were heaps of colored rags, fast asleep. Was that a
temple to Siva? It was then that the third ’rickshaw man entered the
dream, stopped and looked at Bennett as though he knew at once the man
for whom he was seeking, and drew near seductively. This figure of evil,
its face pock-marked, had only a rag about its loins and his ’rickshaw
was a self-supporting wreck. Well, it would serve to escape from those
pink bulls and that unmoving smell. By luck, too, they might pass into a
part of the city he recognized, and then he would be released from the
spell and wake up. But he went farther, and saw nothing that he knew. He
was abandoned under some cocoanuts, and outside the city, by the look of
it.

The road was empty, except for a bullock cart at a standstill. A haze of
little flies quivered about the sleepy heads of the two animals, and the
shadows under their bellies were black. The dark folk, Klings and Malays,
who padded by occasionally, were probably in another world. They were
certainly not in his. He could not speak with them. The heat was so still
and heavy that he felt he could not move in it, especially as he did not
know which way to take.

“Can I help you? Are you looking for anyone about here, sir?” The voice
was so like Oxford that it exorcized the spectral East completely; for a
moment it steadied his bewilderment in the midst of what was quick, but
was alien and enigmatic. He was too surprised to answer at once, but in
the shade of those palms stared at a young fellow who was so attractively
dressed in neat and unctuous white, with a flourishing black silk bow
to a collar not in the least stained, though the heat was many hours
old, that Bennett felt mean and soiled in the regard of that friendly
curiosity. Bennett explained. He was lost. He had been unable to make the
’rickshaw men understand. What he wanted now was the Europe Hotel.

“Some distance, the Europe. This is the Ayer Laut Estate. Sorry, but
our cars are out. Would you come with me? Then we can telephone to your
hotel.”

They went off through somber avenues of sleeping trees. Their trunks were
scored with pale scars and under the wounds were stuck small glass cups.
His companion said nothing, but strode briskly forward. The crepuscular
aisles were deserted, though Bennett noticed that he and his companion
were not alone in that silent and shadowy plantation. But what were the
figures he could see in the distance he did not know. They might have
been Dryads, those slender and motionless forms in robes of scarlet,
orange, and emerald, who were intent on some ritual among the trees. They
were retired into the twilight quiet of the aisles, and seemed unaware
of the intruding Englishmen. But Bennett was startled by one of those
figures. It had been hidden by the gray column of a tree near the path.
As he went by it raised its head, with its piled black hair and a gold
comb diminishing its dark and delicate face, which had a gold stud in the
bold curve of a nostril. Her drowsy eyes looked at him, but he remembered
only the spot of gold in her nose, and the astonishing orange of the silk
wound round her lithe figure.

They came to a house in a shrubbery of crotons, and ascended a flight of
wooden steps to a veranda. A Malay was there, crouched in the portico;
but he might have been inanimate. His gaze was fixed beyond them. And
the house was deserted. Their footsteps made an embarrassing din on
the boards. Bennett with his brisk friend, who seemed to know exactly
what to do, went to an upper room, open to the air on three sides, and
overlooking everywhere the green roof of the plantation.

The skin of a tiger was on the floor. Its head grinned toward the door in
shabby and fatuous defiance. Dusty native weapons were disorderly on the
wooden partition at the back. There was a picture of Salisbury Cathedral
hanging next to a photograph of a dead elephant with a man nursing a gun
sitting on its head.

“Wait a minute,” said the young fellow in white, and went to the most
noticeable object in the dingy and neglected apartment, a bright
telephone instrument. He leaned against the wall in superior and casual
attention with the receiver to his ear. While waiting like that, suddenly
and brusquely he spoke to Bennett.

“I say, sorry, what’s your name?” Then he turned in a tired way to the
instrument, murmured softly and allusively to the wall for a few seconds,
and came away. “That’s all right. The car will be here presently. I must
go. But you wait here. Whisky and soda on that sideboard. Make yourself
at home”; and he was gone.

Bennett sat down. Singapore was an unexpected sort of place. He felt
imprisoned now in the silence. Nothing moved. There was no sound but
once, when a wasp as big as a bird bolted in heavily, blundered and
hummed among the wooden rafters, and went again so straight and suddenly
that Bennett thought something in the overhead shadows had flung it out.
He began to feel bitter about that romance of the East. Sometimes it
seemed lost in a brooding quiet, or else it stirred into episodic and
irrelevant activity directed to God knew what. He put his sun helmet
on the floor, wiped his brow, and regretted the childish folly which
had sent him to look for what perhaps did not exist on earth. What did
people mean by romance? What was it? How could it be found in ’rickshaws
and rubber plantations? He could not get the hang of Singapore. Ships,
temples to all the gods, cocoanuts, and men and women of so many
different colors that they could not talk to one another. And who was
that fellow who had just gone out? How did he come into the picture?
It was a life which went on outside his own, and he could not follow
it. Didn’t even know that fellow’s name. He might have been created
among those trees just to let a Londoner know that the East, though it
pretended never to observe him, yet wanted him to understand that he was
making a fool of himself in a place not his. He might as well have some
of that drink.

The siphon made so immense a noise that he thought the invisible watchers
must hear it and send another messenger to mock him politely. He began to
drink gratefully.

“Mix me one,” grumbled a deep voice.

He almost dropped the glass, and looked round in a little panic. He could
not see anybody. A lounge chair with its back to him stood by the veranda
at the far end of the room. He went to it. An old man, with a mass of
riotous white hair and a white beard stained brown about the lips,
reclined there at full length. His eyes were shut. His open shirt showed
gray hair on his ribs.

“Did you speak?” asked Bennett.

“Of course,” said the man, without opening his eyes. “You heard me. I
want a drink.”

Bennett brought it. The old man sat up sideways in his chair with
surprising swiftness, opened his eyes at the glass in sullen criticism,
and emptied it at once. He sat looking at the tumbler thoughtfully,
while Bennett stood by, hoping that the car would arrive soon. Then the
bearded figure looked up at him and surveyed him with dark disapproving
eyes.

“Who are you?”

Bennett felt very modest. “Oh—nobody—just out from London. I found this
estate by chance—got lost, you know. A good friend here, whose name I
don’t know, has telephoned for a car.”

“Well, Mr. Nobody, sit down. No. Get me another drink. Put more whisky in
it.”

Bennett was meekly obedient.

“Now you can sit down. Go on. Sit down.”

Bennett felt that the heat of the day was much worse as he took a near
chair. The stranger flung up his glass again with the suggestion that the
liquid must fall into a hollow, held the tumbler away from him, turned it
about reflectively, put it on the floor, and lay back, closing his eyes.
He sighed. His feet were bare, except for a pair of crimson slippers
which hung loosely from his toes. Bennett listened through five minutes
of tense silence for sounds of an approaching car. The figure reclining
on the chair then opened its querulous eyes, raised its head, and spoke.

“My name’s Hopkins. Ever heard of me, Mr. Nobody?”

“No, sir. I’m afraid not. I’m only just out, you see.”

Mr. Hopkins chuckled in his beard. “Then don’t stop unless you want to.”

“Never heard of me,” mumbled Mr. Hopkins, several times. “Never heard of
me.”

This old fellow, thought Bennett, is not in his right mind, and here
I am, told to wait till somebody comes for me, though I’m not sure
that they know I’m here. How can I keep this graybeard amused? He’s a
truculent old ruffian. Bennett looked out over the treetops in the sun.
The crowns of some palms were individual above the mass of green. They
were lifeless. A bird or something was calling, “Raup, Raup.” What could
he talk about to an old reprobate like that?

“What ship did you come out in?” asked Mr. Hopkins, playing with the end
of his beard.

“The _Trojan_.” The young man relapsed at once into a bankrupt memory.

Hopkins stared at him fixedly, as though waiting. “Well, is that all? But
I suppose it is. You came out, and here you are. That’s how it’s done.
Not in my time, though. Not when I was alive.”

“Have you been here long, sir?”

“Me? I’ve been here too long. Seen too much for some of them. I’m old
Hopkins—but what’s the good of talking to you? You just came, and here
you are.” Mr. Hopkins rubbed his bare ribs plaintively. “The ships I
knew couldn’t just come and go.” He leaned forward with one of his
sly chuckles, and looked round furtively while secretly enjoying a
recollection. “I was in the _Nellie Bligh_.” He nodded his head at
Bennett, and watched for the full effect of his news.

Bennett smiled awkwardly, but nodded back to his companion
appreciatively. It was better to keep him in a good humor.

“Yes. You don’t know what ships are like, not you fellers. Nor men. No
Billy Ringbolts now.” Mr. Hopkins began to shake in silent laughter over
something that had occurred to him.

“Oh, I don’t know, Mr. Hopkins. I’ve heard about the clippers, and
Whampoa, and Java Head. But I never saw a sailing ship during all the
voyage out. Not one. And yet I know the East India Dock Road, too.”

Mr. Hopkins looked startled for a moment. “Poplar,” he mumbled. “You say
you know the Dock Road! And not a sailing ship.” His beard about his
mouth continued to move, as though he were talking to himself.

“The _Nellie Bligh_ came out from Poplar,” mused Mr. Hopkins. “So did I.
But not in her. She found me in Java because—well, because I was there.”
The old man looked very artful and amused.

“She picked me up at Sourabaya. She was in the coolie trade to the Chinca
Islands then, and her skipper was a Chilean. She was going to China to
take in coolies. Ever heard of the trade? You were paid for what you
delivered. So it was no good taking in just enough to fill the ship. Some
died.”

Bennett smiled politely at this little joke. “Some died, did they?”

“The _Nellie_,” went on Mr. Hopkins, “was not the ship to choose if you
knew of a better. I didn’t. She was all Dago, but there are worse things.
We got up to China—are you listening?—I say we got out all right. She
found her own way, though she nearly finished up on Borneo. The wind fell
and she was set inshore on a current.... What a damn noise those big
wasps make! There’s another just come in.... Did you hear of a man named
Smollet in London? I’m told he’s often in the papers, very important, and
gives a lot to the missionaries. So he ought. Buying off his dad below,
I suppose. His dad was in the coolie trade. I know. I didn’t do so bad,
myself. But the missionaries get nothing out of me. I wouldn’t worry over
a few Chinks more or less. They’re not human. We took in three hundred
on the _Nellie_. One of ’em looked at me as he came aboard. After that I
went to have a look at the hatch gratings—I wanted to see whether they
were sound and handy.”

Mr. Hopkins sank back languorously on his long chair, closed his eyes,
and lapsed into silence. His long bony hands were folded limply on his
bare chest. Somewhere outside, a bell sunk in the depths of the foliage
began to toll. The silly story was finished, Bennett thought. There was
a smell which reminded him of incense. Mr. Hopkins’s cane chair creaked.
Where was that car, to get him out of this?

The old man began to drawl again. He spoke with his eyes shut, as though
wearily confessing his sins. He looked like a dying man, too, Bennett
thought, for his white beard hung from cheek bones that were projecting
eaves, and the skin of his long hooked nose was so white over the sharp
bridge that a touch might have broken it. His eyes were pits, with white
bushes overhanging their shadows. One of his slippers fell to the boards.
“It was lucky we sighted the Pelew Islands. Our old man might have passed
muster for a sailor with a fair wind and plenty of room. If ever he knew
where he was he must have guessed it. But he was the admiral of the
Pacific in good weather. Three days after we sighted the Pelews, near
eight bells in the morning, the _Nellie_ was doing so well that I wasn’t
so sorry as I had been that I’d left Java when I had to. I’d forgotten
we had any Chinamen aboard. Just as eight bells was being struck there
was a howl below, like a man knifed. Then I heard a rush and I looked
down. The Chinks were swarming for the deck. They hung on the ladder like
bees and were armed with boards they’d stripped from below. The first of
’em was scrambling over the coaming close to me. I lifted him clean by
his pigtail and dropped him on the others.” The old man smiled in his
sleep. “We made those hatch gratings fast, somehow. We got the Chinks
booked. Wolves would have looked prettier. Their faces were turned up
and they were howling at us. Then a pistol went off. That Dago in his
gold lace had come at last. He was trembling and whimpering, and firing
pistols into those faces. It made the noise worse. The Chinks began to
leap and scream.” Mr. Hopkins paused and rubbed the hair about his mouth
slowly.

“As one jumped a shot caught fire to his shirt, and it was funny to see
the way he tore the burning rag off his arm. But it wasn’t so funny when
I saw that chap pushing through the crowd, blowing on the rag to keep it
alight. I half guessed his game and grabbed a pistol for a go at him. He
dropped, but another Chink snatched the burning rag from his hand and got
away with it.” Mr. Hopkins opened his eyes in a smile. “Wanted to light
his pipe, eh?”

A motor horn sounded in the grounds. Then a Malay appeared. “Tuan
Bennett. Motor pergi Europe.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hopkins,” said young Bennett, rising slowly, for he
feared it might be polite to wait for the end of the story, supposing
it were not ended. “Good-morning.” Mr. Hopkins did not speak. He was
staring into the rafters.

The quick journey to the hotel gave Bennett the impression that it had
been in hiding just round the corner all the time. What he had seen
and heard that day might have been the recollections, unreasonable,
unrelated, and prolonged to no end, which are jumbled in the mind when
one wakes up and sees in surprise the familiar objects of the plain
morning. “Another day wasted,” thought Bennett. “I don’t spend one more
hour of it looking for romance. I doubt whether the East has got any.
All gone before I got here.” He thought he would bathe, and then sit
on the veranda; waste the rest of the day looking at the world till
dinnertime. He sat in that corridor, a long shady vista of wicker chairs
and marble-topped tables, where men and women of his own kind, as much
apart from the East as he was himself, gossiped idly as though waiting
for the hour when they could escape. Apologetic Chinamen in white
uniforms were gliding about like ghosts, ministering to weary guests.
The broad thoroughfare outside moved in silent eddies of jinrickshaws
and motor-cars. Bennett was amused by a Chinaman in goggles so fat that
he filled the perch of his ’rickshaw, sitting there with his short legs
wide apart and a child like a solemn idol on one knee. The little coolie
who drew them was trotting along limply with his mouth wide open. A group
of Klings stalked by, figures with long black hair and smooth faces,
each in a stiff cocoon of frail colored cloth. Were they men or women? A
gigantic Sikh domineered with the traffic at the corner. Across the road,
fringing the turf of the esplanade, flat-topped trees were in crimson
bloom, a line of gigantic flambeaux. Through their columns he could
see the roadstead, a plain of burnished pewter to which were fixed the
black shapes of a few ships, a barque, some sampans, coasting steamers
like toys, high-pooped junks, all distinct and remarkable, even when
they were far out toward the indigo islands beyond. The sun was setting.
Immense purple clouds piled from the horizon like the vapors of a planet
which had burst, smoke too heavy for any wind to disperse and shot with
the glow of exposed internal fires. They were high enough to kindle the
sky. The sky was burning. Lightning was exploding in the summits of
the clouds. The ships and the sea were suddenly caught, too, and the
surprised faces of the watchers on that veranda reflected the glow of a
vast catastrophe. The fires died. The islands congealed to cold iron. The
only light was the quivering opalescence of the storm in high clouds. A
group of Chinamen went by, shadows carrying lanterns, beating a tom-tom
and shrilling on curdling instruments.

Bennett, almost fearful without knowing why, looked round at the guests
assembling. They reassured him. The electric fans were spinning above
them. They were drinking cocktails. He thought he would go and dress, but
then saw a man signaling to him, and recognized his nameless young friend
of the morning. Beside him was a lady whose little head, in a shadow,
seemed lively and detached above a rosy cloud of gauzy silk upon which
fell the light of a glow-lamp. Bennett went over. Another man was at that
table, but Bennett did not look at him.

“Well, you got your car all right?”

“Yes. You helped me out of that trouble nicely.”

His friend laughed, and turned to the lady to explain the fun of it.
“Found him on our plantation, near the Kling compound, looking for the
Europe.” Bennett smiled shyly, and the lady glanced at him with tired
and faintly insolent eyes. “Why ever was he doing that?” she asked,
indifferently, looking away across the room.

Bennett said, with an attempt at humor, that he was looking for the
romance of the Orient. The lady did not appear to hear him. She began
a conversation in a low tone with her companion. Bennett was about to
leave, with an excuse, when he felt his arm nudged, and saw Mr. Hopkins
beside him in the next chair, severe and correct in evening dress, his
white beard and hair scrupulously groomed. “Hullo, Mr. Nobody!” he
rumbled. “Strictly proper and comfortable here, cocktails and all. Have
one.” He plunged a bell, and when the Chinese apparition appeared, merely
looked at it. The apparition vanished, but almost at once returned with
two little glasses containing a golden liquor in which were scarlet
cherries on match sticks.

“I didn’t finish that story. You were in a hurry to get away, but you
can’t go now.” Mr. Hopkins pushed over a cocktail, holding away a finger
on which was a remarkable topaz. “Men who just come out, and here
they are! But you can tell Poplar about the _Nellie Bligh_, when you
get back. They may wonder where she went. And you can say I said so.
Hopkins—there’s been lots of Hopkinses, perhaps even in my family.” The
old fellow had an interval of private mirth. The young man opposite, and
the lady in rosy silk, were conversing in oblivious animation. “Wasn’t
that Chinaman just getting away with a burning rag when you ran out? I
couldn’t stop him. And the Dago, who was a fool, thought we had finished
with the mutiny. But he soon knew better. He knew when he saw some smoke
coming up by the fore hatch. Of course, Chinks are almost reasonable
creatures. Almost reasonable, Mr. Nobody. We couldn’t let them roast,
could we? Of course not. Not if we wanted to put the fire out. Our Dago
had the puzzle of his life before him. The Chinks were below us again,
clamoring to be let out and pointing back at the fire. They thought
they’d got the right argument that time. And that Dago was going to do
it, too, and save his ship, I suppose, with hundreds of murderous maniacs
round him. Not when I was there, though. Not when I had a gun. Let ’em
roast. There’s lots of Chinks, but only one Mr. Hopkins, and the Pelews
were only three days back. I don’t think, Mr. Nobody, you’ve ever seen
anything like it. But by the time we had the boats provisioned and away
all was quiet again, except for the flames. We made the Pelews. Anyhow,
my boat did. I never heard what became of the other two.”

The lady in rose laughed prettily. Bennett, shocked, stared at her
instantly, but she was not looking at Mr. Hopkins. The other pair had a
joke between them.

“Well, come along, you two. Dinner!” Mr. Hopkins rose, a tall patriarch,
a venerable image of disillusioned wisdom. The young man rose, too, and
moved his chair to allow the lady a path to the dining room. He turned
with a polite smile to Bennett. “Let me hear when you’ve found any
romance in the East. But don’t come looking for it on our plantation. We
haven’t got any there.”




CHAPTER XI


One morning I escaped from the heat and the bewildering life of Singapore
into a shaded office. Its windows opened south and east to a glowing
panorama of ships, clouds, and islands. The long traffic of that office
with the Orient had settled into a tradition of intent ease which seemed
the same as cool leisure. A mounted telescope projected from an open
window toward the anchorage. A man stood there with straddled legs,
watching a ship coming in. He left the telescope and came to me, and
talked familiarly, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief, of America,
England, China, and Japan; he spoke even of Java. But when I mentioned
such places as Lombok, Flones, Flores, and Gilolo, he picked up a massive
shell which was keeping a pile of papers in one place and examined it
as though he hoped to divine from it what I wanted to know. The shell
did not help him. Only one thing became certain: the Moluccas were as
far from Singapore as that city is from New York. It was easier to get
to New York. I discovered at Singapore that to talk there of Timor and
Halmaheira was as profitless as asking a policeman at Charing Cross the
way to the Faroes. It would be tactless and inconsiderate to embarrass
the friendly fellow with such a question.

I was shown, through the office telescope, a Dutch steamer at anchor in
the roads. She was bound, so I gathered, for Java and the outer blue.
She would be away for months, and she might go, according to fate and
local cocoanuts, to some of the islands I had named. Why not board her
and see what happened? There is much to be said, when traveling, for
keeping a mind as open and doubtful as to where you are going as that
of a great diplomatist when negotiating a peace treaty; and more still
for not caring. I boarded that Dutchman, the _Savoe_, went into an empty
cabin, and waited. Her windlass began at once to labor with the anchor,
as though she had been waiting for me. The picture of distant Singapore
began to revolve across my cabin port. That settled it. Now it was
certain I should have to take whatever came.

There was an instant in this transition from one world to another when
I was alarmed by the notion—it was on the second day out and I had just
waked up—that I was the sport of a bedevilment and was being mocked. My
dream of the clanging of furnace doors and of a roaring in dark tunnels
changed to a Chinese boy in a bright light, who stood silently beside me
with tea and a pleasing but crafty smile. Where the deuce was this? The
roaring continued; the deck was being holystoned above. Beyond my cabin
port-light the world was one I had never seen before.

For the first time since that fateful year when Europe developed a mania
for frantic speed, aërial torpedoes, delirious bankruptcy, and stentorian
broadcasting, I could feel a distinct lessening of humanity’s vibrations.
My own pulse showed signs of becoming normal. We were threading the Rhio
and Linga islands, and the Dutch captain put his head in the cabin to
inform me that we were crossing the line. I knew it, by instinct. But
which line did he mean? Anyone could guess that we were in another place.
Certainly we had already crossed some line or other. You could read that
in both the sea and the sky. They were greatly changed. It was surprising
they tolerated our steamer at all; but perhaps we had blundered
unobserved across this line. The light of that morning might have been
shining undimmed since things began. There was something terrifying in
its exalted and innocent splendor. Even the islands were but tinted
vapors, and whether they were in the sea or in the air it was not easy to
say. The isle of Banka, great as were its mountains, certainly was not in
the sea. The sea was material. It was a floor of turquoise toward Banka.
But that island had light beneath it. It was translated above the plain
of turquoise, and I imagined that under the bulk of its hills and under
the thin peninsula of miniature black trees which was prolonged from the
foot of a mountain over the sea, unsupported, fragile, and miraculous,
I could peer far into profound nothing. But Banka must have been land,
a great island, for over it was a dense and involved region of genuine
cloud, bright enough to be no more than the congealed and undiffused
sunlight of ages.

[Illustration: _This Sea Was Plainly the Setting for Legend and Fable_

(_See p. 34_)]

Now I know quite well, for I have seen ships before and understand their
purpose, that amid all that unearthly light and color my Dutch captain
was going to look for copra, gums, rattans, nutmegs, mace, cloves, and
cinnamon. He looked like the man to find them, too. He was small, but
hard, heavy, and quick. His eyes were pale blue, but I guessed his temper
was quite another dye, and not in the least pale. He was not the sort of
man to whom one might romantically suggest that those islands had nothing
in them but beauty, and nothing under them but immaterial hues—not,
anyhow, while there was so much evidence of wicked reefs almost alongside
the empty ship which he hoped to load with copra and such, at the current
rates, before he turned about.

Yet at times during a long voyage with him I was inclined to suspect that
even he did not know where he was. By what could he judge? For myself,
I lost count of the days in a tranquil immensity of light. We would
swelter at an anchorage, taking in from an islet Heaven only knows what
except mosquitoes which could bite through indiarubber. My cabin having
become filled with flies like devils, and moths like jewels, the _Savoe_
would leave again suddenly and for no apparent reason. But what did that
matter? She was sure to find another island on any course. They were like
the stars in the sky; and three huts in an otherwise abandoned raft of
cocoanuts were sufficient to induce our captain to stand in and lower a
boat.

Where were we then? I got out of the habit of asking that. If I were
given my bearings at all it was by chance, as on the night when our chief
officer, after what sounded to me like a distressing altercation with
our captain (at dinner, too!), but may have been nothing but the most
friendly Dutch, turned to me and began a recital. I stopped the soup and
listened carefully. He was reciting in English, which made the original
poem the more remarkable, Kipling’s ballad of the _Mary Gloucester_. The
recital ended. “An’ now, Mister Tomlinsohn, you will wonder why I do
this.” The Dutch seaman gazed at me earnestly, though not with greater
earnestness than I gazed at him, for he had remembered every word of the
poem, and more. “It is yoost because we are by the Paternosters, where
he drop his wife.” Could hospitality go further? Is there an English or
an American literary critic, not to mention a mere sailor, who could do
that? In the wide world, not one.

By such chance aids I would learn where in the world I was. There was
no other way. All without warning one day our steamer, our placid and
practical Dutch steamer, steered toward what I could see plainly enough
was the sack and ruin of Mount Zion. We were approaching a celestial war.
Battlements were tumbled and in flames, smoke rolled from those streets
of jasper, and the banners of its defeated hosts were sinking to final
confusion and the last night. A native ship was flying from there. Its
urgent sails were spread like wings too big for its body; perhaps it was
bearing away survivors. Nothing else was in sight.

We never reached that city. The _Savoe_ was next at anchor in a little
bay. She was encircled by the gloom of a forest which was older than
Memphis. I asked no questions, but went ashore and entered that forest,
wherever it was and whatever its name. Nothing was there. The trees
were real, I suppose, though they gave no more sign of life than
prehistoric monoliths. A slight noiseless rain and myself had the forest
to ourselves. No doubt rain there was always adding to the gloom; the
rain might have been only the gentle precipitation of the silence.
While peering into the shadows which deepened into a hollow, some lower
branches crashed and an orang-utan swung out to look at me. (Ah yes;
though I hardly believed it myself, even at the time, so you need not
trouble to believe it at all.) We stared at each other for about five
seconds, and then he lurched off in an explosion of breaking boughs. That
settled it. I was in Borneo.




CHAPTER XII


There was Java. Under some mountains so distant and of so delicate a
color that they were only a deeper stain of the sky were spread the flat
buildings of Tanjong Priok. To my surprise, I discovered the _Savoe_
had a crowd of passengers for Java. Where those Malays had been hiding
themselves I forgot to ask in my surprise, for they did not in the least
bear themselves like a subject race. I saw at once why the English
administrators of Malaya delight in these folk—learn their language
and live with them if that luck can be associated with duty, as the
bibliography of the Malay Peninsula plainly shows. One group of these
people was especially attractive. Its central figure was an elderly man,
perhaps an _orang kaya_, or a chief of some kind, in a tartan _sarong_,
a tunic, and the little white cap of one who has been to Mecca. From
the way he stood he might have been the captain. His was a natural and
unaffected dignity which showed that stature is of no consequence. He
was a small man. His complexion was a light bronze, and his high cheek
ridges and a slightly flattened nose were comely with those proud but
gracious eyes set apart in wide intelligence. His women were with him,
some attendants, and a school of children. They spread themselves across
the upper deck like a rainbow, for the bright scarf over the head of each
woman was a different wonder. One girl I thought was an elder daughter.
She seemed on easy terms with her father. Her scarf was blue silk in
which gilt crescents were sprinkled. The numerous buttons of her jacket
were English sovereigns. Her feet and arms were bare, except for silver
bangles, and her pose would have attracted the attention of any lady in
musical comedy who was supposed to learn that the tradition of a duchess
is different. As with one hand she held a younger child, whose head in
a yellow silk scarf peeped out nervously and wonderingly from behind
her, this Malay girl would touch her father; I think she must have been
amusing him with jokes about the dominant white race that was so active
about them.

Her sly but constant smiles were bright with an array of gold-plated
teeth. But only once or twice did her father answer her with a faintly
ironic grimace, as he listened to her and watched the busy officials who
had boarded us. The Malays, one hears, do not work, if they can avoid it.
They leave work to the whites and Chinese. Yet on that moral problem I
suspect the old _orang kaya_ would have had an entertaining word or two.
Life to him would be subtle and varied, and he would be a little apart
from it, and he would have a rich variety of names for its finer shades.

I regretted I could not seek his opinion about Java, a land that was a
serious disappointment to me some time before I reached it. The gorgeous
East obviously could not be, and ought not to be, so gorgeous as Java’s
holiday posters, which are in the style of the loudest Swiss art. “Come
to Java!” Well, perhaps not. Not while the East Indies are so spacious
and have so many other islands; not if Java is like its posters. Why
should the East call itself mysterious when it advertises itself with
the particularity of a Special Motor Supplement? I felt I ought to keep
away from Java. I thought I would prefer to leave it to those who enjoy
traveling round the earth in eighty days, and who see all the wonders of
it from the deck of a twin-screw composite restaurant and tennis court.
The fact that some important people feel, even while at sea, the mind
growing slack when withdrawn from the resources of the bridge table and
the golf course, is probably at the bottom of the world’s more violent
forms of Bolshevism. But Java stood in the way of my coasting steamer,
which had to call at every port, and at some places which are not ports
but merely wish they were, along the north coast of it. This hindrance
had to be endured for the privilege of seeing the outer islands, those
unimportant beaches which will have no posters of their own, for which we
should thank God and fevers, for some time to come.

Our first Javan port, Tanjong Priok, is the harbor for Batavia. And here
the mosquitoes came aboard in hosts so ravenous that they tried to bite
their way into the cabins, and so stuck to the new paint. I abandoned the
ship. Java may be a perfectly healthy island, and malaria there—as one
is led to infer—as rare and inconsequential as falling upstairs; but the
ship’s new paint scared me. It broke down my resolution not to see Java,
and I fled ashore. Even the hotels which sell picture post cards, and
offer the Javanese equivalents of the art products one pays for at Zurich
and leaves behind, might prove a shade better than such mosquitoes.

There is a railway from Tanjong Priok to Batavia. Black monkeys dwell one
side of the line, and gray on the other. The black monkeys never leave
their palms to cross the metals to mix with the grays in the opposite
palms. The grays observe carefully the same etiquette. The guide book has
no doubt about this, and some one on the ship is bound to give you the
same advice with such particularity that its truth cannot be questioned
by the polite. By the time you have persuaded the customs officer that
you have no explosives in your luggage, that your face and its photograph
in the passport really do approximate, and have got the man from the
hotel at Weltevreden to understand that you intend to go up by train and
not in an automobile already wrecked, the monkeys are forgotten. Yet not
by everybody. My train had not gone far when a Dutch traveler drew my
attention again to the curiosity. “You see? There are black monkeys on
that side. Here are gray. They do not meet. No. They do not cross the
railway, not each of them. Yes.” I was going to ask him whether they
would forfeit the government subsidy if they broke the contract and
spoiled the story; but the Dutchman looked so kindly, and so plainly
wished to save a foreigner from boredom, that the question would have
been a rank crime. I nodded, and looked first at the black tribe, and
then at the gray, to show him that his good nature was not wasted on me.

The hotels in the Dutch East Indies, in spite of an occasional Russian
String Quartette which plays hotel music at dinner if the lights do
not fail, cannot help letting you know that home is very distant. They
can do this without the aid of the banyan trees, the natives in their
bright sarongs and jackets, and the dead weight of the heat. Your
bedroom is isolated from the central public rooms by shrubberies. You
live there literally a cloistered life with lizards and flies. The
notions entertained by Malays of time and space are purely relative and
are easily disarranged; and so even when you ring for a servant you may
still remain lonely, with the lizards, and your finger firm but hopeless
on the electric button. You may watch the hawks poised in the upper
blue, or the fight between a hunting spider and a mantis in a corner of
the veranda. Nothing else is likely to happen. And it is hard to tell
one Malay servant from another, where they all recline on flagstones in
the shade, listening in beautiful patience to the appealing bells and
watching the grasshoppers. When not asleep Malays will observe nature for
hours without moving. But it would be wrong, for it would increase the
weight of the heat, to get angry with them. They are but children living
in eternity; and how can time be wasted by those who possess all of it?

Yet though one’s annoyance quickly evaporates, the tropical sweat which
it has caused does not. It is then that the happy nature of the Eastern
bath may be learned. At first that dank recess behind the bedroom, where
there is nothing but some toads, an earthenware cistern, and a brass
dipper, is puzzling, as well as repellent. How does one manage it?
Newcomers have been known to climb into the earthenware tub, and at once
upset themselves, with the water, on the flags. That is not the way to
do it. While the toads sit up to watch, you spill waterfalls over your
body from the dipper. The water is tepid, but occasionally it is almost
possible to believe that it has shocked you a little way toward an active
existence. And after this pretense in Batavia, what is there to do? A
man might be thought eccentric if he stood watching the Javanese ladies
up to their waists in yellow canal ooze, washing the household linen
while gossiping with the bronze figures of men who are posed near them
on bamboo rafts. Yet they make a picture which is worth attention, for
it is heartening to learn that the human form may be as good as that.
There is, too, the Portuguese cannon, an antiquity from the days of
the early navigators, which these ladies keep polished through sitting
upon it when prayerfully desiring a child; but its interest is soon
exhausted. They never sit there while being watched. For that reason, and
to make the shy practice of this ancient religious rite as obscure as
possible, the gun is secreted near some unlikely sheds, with a screen of
plaited rushes round it. It is framed with paper flowers, and it has a
little altar for the burning of incense at its butt. Strange, that faith
in a phallic shape should still be able to overcome all the superior
prejudices acquired from Brahma, Buddha, Mecca, and even from Jerusalem!
For it is said that European ladies know where to find this instrument
of generative magic, and to trust its power; which, if true, is much
more astonishing in our cautious days of limited families than even the
survival of a simple faith all the way from the dateless silence in which
sleeps Palæolithic man.

There is the observance of another rite in the Dutch East Indies that is
less worthy of respect but is no less remarkable; and watch it you must.
It is called the Rice Table. It is impossible to practice this rite in
secret. It takes more room than an old cannon; and the simple faith which
holds to its ultimate beneficence before all the derisive unbelievers in
a public dining room must be as strong as death and nearly as fatal.
I never got quite hardened enough to sit at dinner unperturbed beside
another man while he steadily overcame a Rice Table. Before he had more
than half vanquished his array of dishes I felt it better to creep
silently away, leaving my own dinner unfinished; for who could tell what
divine wrath might not be loosed in a time of food shortage if a human
creature were detected buried up to the neck in boiled rice and spiced
comestibles, and still was burrowing into it deeper with every mouthful?
Heaven may be tried too much, and a Rice Table is the kind of dinner
which might cause astonishment at the distance of the Milky Way. It is
not a meal, but a buffalo wallow. I said buried up to the neck. I should
not like to do violence to a figure of speech. I must insist on the
neck—the nape of it; that is all of a man’s features which are exposed
when he is bowed in the act of eating his Rice Table. It is proper when
relating the incidents of travel to be strictly accurate.

The first time I witnessed a man performing at this meal his campaign was
well forward before I noticed anything was strange, because it happened
that, at the time, my knowledge of Malay was being firmly disputed by
a Malay waiter. I got at length within a few degrees of my own course,
and then saw that the man opposite, before whom was a high mound of
boiled rice, was not attended by one servant, but by a long queue of
servants, and that each was bearing a salver, and that each was waiting
for the moment when he could take another step forward in the congested
procession. They moved up to the diner, shuffle by shuffle. As far as he
could—and that Dutchman was as deft and businesslike as a letter-sorter
on St. Valentine’s day—he selected portions of food from the long vista
of salvers and placed them with his rice. It would be mere vanity to
pretend that my knowledge of natural history is wide enough to unravel
everything the hotel kitchen had mystified for that Dutchman, but fish
was just recognizable, and chicken, eggs, nuts, prawns, seaweed, and
bamboo shoots. All these, and more, either went direct into the mound of
rice, or were deposited in satellitic vesicles arranged in orbits round
the solar plate. Then the diner pulled his mustache upward, adjusted his
spectacles, and briskly mixed the central mound into a discolored muck,
frowning shrewdly as he did it, while the Malays looked on with faces
subdued to resignation. Before it was possible to wonder what he intended
to do with it all his face plunged and the back of his neck stared
entranced at the ceiling. I don’t know when he came up. My own escape
into the hot night was before that.

A fitful display of ruby and emerald light, in which the shapes of palm
trees wavered, attracted me outside, for it was faintly reminiscent of
the bright illustrations to youth’s nicely expurgated edition of the
_Thousand and One Nights_. It proved to be only a cinematograph show.
In the open air, while limelight changed the surrounding foliage into a
fantasy, and noiseless bats as big as ravens made the shadows startling,
a mild Javanese crowd sat watching the history of “Faithless Wives,” and
other pleasing pictorial narratives of Anglo-Saxon fraud, infidelity,
treachery, silliness, and robbery under arms, with comic interludes as
unmistakenly funny as the brick which hits the policeman on the head.
What the Orientals thought of us, while getting privy knowledge at long
last of white society on its usual behavior from these frank confessions
by our leading cinema artists, they did not disclose. They silently
drifted home to their bamboo shelters. But if the magic lantern with such
vital and unquestioned revelation of our curious conduct when we are
comfortably at home does not accomplish more than all the propaganda of
Moscow in encouraging the Orient to suppose that white folk ought to be
treated with contempt, then there is nothing in common sense. There is a
pallid rumor—it can be as pallid as a nervous child who has dreamed of
a ghost—of a rising of the East against the West. If there is anything
behind it, then blame the cinematograph. Our best representative artists
are showing the East that its revolt would be merely a duty owed to
decency, a sort of righteous war to end inanity.




CHAPTER XIII


The trains of Java move only by day. The island is of great length, and
in some areas its surface is subject without warning to dissolution
by flood or earthquake. I was uncertain whether I ought to return to
the ship and face the mosquitoes, or risk the failure of a locomotive
to coincide with my ship at the other end of the land. When in doubt,
the risk should be put into the future. The longer the shot, the more
likely Fate may miss us. For a time, however, after I boarded a train
at Batavia, this indolent reasoning seemed to have a catch in it. Java
appeared to be of slight interest in the initial stage of the journey;
and of the four or more languages which are common in the island I had
but a faint knowledge of one, and even that amount of knowledge was
denied me by those who spoke it. As for the Dutch tongue, the animated
conversations of my fellow passengers exiled me as far as a foreigner
ever feels his distance from home. Yet how many of our experiences are
desolating simply because of our way of looking at them? I remember one
day when my Javan train was stopped in a jungle. Floods had washed away
lengths of the track ahead of us. That day began to fall toward the quick
sunset of the tropics, but the train remained as still as the giant
leaves which hung over us. Scarlet dragonflies were hawking about a pool
below my window, and above the pool, high in a tangle of leaves, an ape,
who appeared to suppose he was securely ambushed, eyed us in imbecile
curiosity. Were we to be buried all night there? I could not learn. I
tried to find out, but, though possibly my acquaintance with Malay could
lead to a railway accident, it will never be able to discuss it.

Then the rain began again with a steady force which made me fear for
other sections of that line, and for the coincidence of a future train
with my ship. The other end of the island was very far. But I had only
enough words to secure coffee and food. I could learn nothing. An
elderly and severe Dutch lady was sitting near me. She had been reading
closely a large volume—probably of affairs concerning the Seventh Day
Adventists—since the morning, with hardly a lift of her face. The long
halt, the continued rain, the gloomy forest in which we stood without
hope, the night we should probably spend in it, were nothing to her. She
read on, as though she had secured for her own eye alone a veritable
judgment or two from the yet unpublished Decrees of Doom. Compared with
her countenance, that unknown forest darkening to absolute night in the
rain was a May-time pleasaunce. Anyhow, I could easily presume that she
had no more ability to communicate with me than with a Hottentot. A
native brought me food, was paid, and went away. The lady then put down
her book, frowned at me over the top of her glasses, and remarked with
slow distinction: “You have paid far too much for that. Let me see your
change.” (Mechanically and meekly I displayed some insignificant coins.)
“So. Far too much you have paid. It is not useful. It also makes it very
bad for other travelers.”

My embarrassed eyes fell before the direct attack of her steel
spectacles, and I glanced apologetically at her book. It was the _Swiss
Family Robinson_, in a primitive English edition which resembled a
veritable fragment of a London home I have not seen since I was a child,
and shall never see again.

It is as easy as cheating the innocence of a wondering babe to get
credence at home for tales of travel when they are of tigers, men with
tails, cannibal dwarfs, head-hunters, islands where the women are so
lovely that it would be wicked to give the latitude and longitude, and
South Sea adventures more sensational than could be devised by a select
committee of desperate theatrical managers. But who would accept stories
of surprises by the plain truth? Yet it is fair to claim that even the
Robinson family on its obliging island never had a more incredible
adventure than my own with the Dutch lady in the equatorial forest.

I left Batavia for Sourabaya without regret, but with no hope, except
that my ship would be at Sourabaya to take me away. The orchestras which
played negro music to Dutchmen eating messes of rice, the cinema drama
which made one ashamed of belonging to a better race, the advertisement
posters that might have been continuations of the hoardings of Ostend,
had shattered another dream. I settled down to regard its bright
fragments in patience and resignation. Yet too soon! For there may be
more delightful islands in the world than Java, but the evidence for
them will have to be very well assembled. The likeness of some scenes
in Java to the colored pictures of the Garden of Eden in an illustrated
Bible of Victorian days is ridiculous. You suspect, as I did the monkeys
beside the Tanjong Priok railway, that those fair prospects are artfully
arranged by a clever government for the delectation of the credulous. But
there are too many of them. They continue uninterrupted in fortuitous
variety. Not far from Batavia a high serration of mountains appeared
in the distance, so very blue in that bright day that it was easy to
believe a scene-shifter was at work upon the background for the staging
of a lavish tropical romance. Soon we began to wind among the heights
and to cross dramatic ravines. Very cleverly done it was, too. I liked
that brown child dressed only in a hat as big as a parasol, who sat
on the back of a buffalo, resting one elbow on his living couch while
watching our train go by. That was a cunning touch. Just beyond him was
a group of amber houses, of bamboo thatched with palm fronds. They were,
as you have guessed, screened by the green pennants of plantains, and
were shadowed by cocoanut palms; and—as they would, of course, in such a
composition—they stood on the brow of a hill which descended in steps of
radiant emerald, in terraces of young rice, to a plain so far below us
that the river there was only a silver wire threading checker-work too
distinct and vivid to be anything but the masterpiece of an imaginative
decorator. Beyond that plain one saw then the full artful value of the
blue crags of the volcanic range with which the picture began.

[Illustration: _He Had Skimmed about Singapore in a Jinrickshaw All the
Morning_

(_See p. 65_)]

The orchards of Kent and California are not more assiduously cultivated
than is most of the island of Java. The Javanese agriculturalists,
ever since they had a civilized government—and that was early in the
Christian era—have had to make their fields meet the extortions of so
many conquerors before they dared to call any rice their own that now
they deserve the glowing testimonial of all directors of empire and great
business affairs. Their training has been long and thorough. Hindu,
Mohammedan, and European each has taught them the full penalty for Adam’s
fall; and so the habit of very early rising, and of a long day in the
sun, with but a meager expectation of any reward, give them the right
aspect of sound and reliable workers. You cannot rise at an hour in the
interior of Java, unless you never sleep, which will get you on the road
sooner than the country folk going to market. My first shock with a
motor-car in the mountains of central Java came through just avoiding,
long before dawn, a man carrying several thirty-foot bamboo poles. It
was so early that I thought he must be an Oriental student of William
Cobbet, or a corresponding member of one of the American colleges which
make one better than one’s fellow at a nominal charge. In keeping his
poles out of the wind screen we nearly ran down some silent children,
discovered instantly by the headlight, who were carrying trays of fruit.
This made us careful; but only just in time, for we had then to move
cautiously in a road full of the sudden ghosts of dumb folk who were
getting about the business of the day which had not yet called them. I
never saw people of the Malay race in any other island who were nearly
so finely trained as the Javanese land workers. There could not have
been a better demonstration of the value of learning one’s place in life
early—say not less than ten generations back. With plenty of time and
few interruptions it is clearly possible for a superior caste to evolve
a race of skilled workers who will do everything and yet expect nothing.
These people have terraced the hill-slopes of Java with padi fields till
the gradient is past human skill. Vast landscapes that once were dark
with jungle are now spectacular gardens. The decorative terraces, the
_sawahs_, bearing growing crops, have caught the hills in what appears
to be a bright and infinite mesh. Nothing can be lost on those hills
now, nothing of their immense fertility, not a drop of rain. Elaborate
irrigation works deflect and address myriads of natural rills to fill
with water the hollow steps of the slopes, which shine with rice. The
rills grow from threads to docile streams, descending disciplined courses
from high altitudes to the main rivers in the plains. Humanity has
nothing to learn from the ant. Its patient industry must astonish the
angels.

Through such scenery my train meandered all one day, as though
consciously it intended to make me apologize to Java. There was fun to be
got even in guessing from the color or form of the distant crops their
nature—rice that was just planted, was a month old, was just grown, was
in the ear, was sere stubble; and yams, cassava, tea, coffee, rubber,
teak, sugar, tobacco, pulse. The country folk themselves, conscious of
their ornate setting, were dressed for the part. A group of these women,
moving in a musical comedy, would give a manager complete assurance in
the matter of his box-office receipts. They are so modest and polite
that they never stare at a stranger; though with such figures, eyes, and
coloring, I doubt whether he would object greatly if they did. Their
manners are perfect, except that most of them chew betel nut and casually
make railway platforms and footpaths startling with red maculations. It
is distressing to see a beautiful woman laugh, when her opened mouth
looks as though a savage blow had just wounded it.

The railroads of Java are a novelty in inconsequential idling, and they
have so many surprises that are not in the schedules and the guide books
that I became the less anxious about my ship—there are other ships—and
forgave the posters of Batavia. Javanese trains should not be hurried.
That would spoil their sauntering. I began to regret there were other
islands of Indonesia to which I was bound. In the midst of huts and
foliage which pretended to be real the train would come to a standstill.
What was the name of this village which no one applauded? The old sport
of hunting for the name of a strange railway station acquired a new zest;
but as a rule I could find only the Malay word for a famous soap. To add
to my bewilderment everybody there was looking at my train, which clearly
was the real event. We had an audience of people so decorative that they
must have been attired in our honor. A diminutive brown lady in a yellow
wrapper, with elaborate combs in her hair, held up to my window a tray
with fruit, chocolate, and less well authenticated sweetmeats, and a
small selection of the novels of Miss Dell; and by her dawdling smile I
judged that she had sold Miss Dell’s romances to Englishmen before ever
my train was there.




CHAPTER XIV


The moist heat of Java’s plains and seaports, even when the interest of a
place is just a little more remarkable than the temperature, soon turns
one to thoughts of escape, in the bare hope that Java somewhere in its
garden has a bower which has not the peculiar virtue of a vapor bath.
“Why, if you go to Garut,” I was told in a voice which suggested a wonder
that I was not required to believe without Thomas’s proof, “you will want
a blanket at night!”

I had never heard of Garut, but one place is as good as another to a
traveler who is rewarded by whatever he can get. I found Garut in the
mountains of central Java, somewhere behind Tjilatjap. There was no
trouble in finding it. Everybody seemed to know it. But I shall remember
Garut as I remember Sfax, Taormina, Chartres, Tlemçen, and other odd
corners of the earth, some without even a name on the map, where we
arrived by chance and disconsolate, and from which we departed with
something in our memory, forgotten till then, that had been lighted
briefly by what may have been a ray of moonshine. Can such an experience
be communicated? But how shall a man define his faith?

Yet there Garut is—or there it was, for I am not going to assert the
existence of any spot on earth that was, for all I know, revealed to me
briefly by lunar means—there Garut is for me at least, high on a ridge
above a confusion of tracks through rice and tobacco plantations. The
bearings of the place as I saw it can be only vague, and are probably
wrong. The women of its _campongs_ cast down their eyes as you approach,
the children run into their huts, and the men raise their big hats of
grass politely. It is secluded within ranges of dark peaks, but its own
fields are bright and have the warm smell of new earth. From a grove of
bamboos which fringes the highest ledge of a vast amphitheater terraced
with steps of rice you look out into space and down to an inclosed plain.
The plain is remote enough to be the ceremonious setting for the drama of
a greater race of beings; men would be insignificant there. But the stage
is empty; only the cicadas and frogs fill that immense arena with their
songs just before the day goes. The ridge of the opposite side of the
theater dissolves in rainstorms and is reformed momentarily by lightning.

The night was cold. I had to get up to find that blanket. It was still
colder before dawn, when a knocking at my door warned me that I had
arranged to go to a village called Jiporai, where it was said I could
find a horse and so could ride to some mysterious height where there were
hot springs in a forest. That folly was of my doing—it came of my easy
compliance to a foolish suggestion made when my mood, induced by Garut
and wine, was inclusive and grateful. Nor would it be any use, I found,
to ignore that knocking. The native outside was going to keep it up. In
the bleak small hours my need for a horse had vanished. I did not feel
it. I did not want a horse.

Yet there it was; and out of the village of Jiporai the track mounted
quickly, while from the saddle of a stout pony—he was as petulant as
myself over this preposterously early excursion—I looked at the darkness
which filled the amphitheater of mountains; it was a starless lake of
night. We were only just above the level of that expanse of chilling
shadow, and its depth, straight down from where the pony’s feet clattered
the stones on the edge of it, was unseen and unknown. But I stopped
him when the sun came. He turned his head, too, with his ears cocked
eastward. We both watched. The great space below us quickly filled with
light. We could see to the bottom of it. Without a movement, rider and
horse were at once placed by the dawn at a dizzy height, on an aërial
path.

The pony snorted and shook his head. It was morning, it was warm, and
suddenly the earth began to exhale odors. We went through a flimsy
_campong_, with relics of totems over its huts, and shy women with babies
straddled on their hips pretended they could not see us. The men were in
the padi fields beyond. We came upon some of these workers making coffee
and cooking rice under a thatch propped on four poles. They accepted us
as though they had always known us, and I may have had a better breakfast
than that at some time or other, but I don’t remember it.

We had to pass through a deep ravine remarkable with the fronds of
immense ferns arched from its rocks. There was an outlook at times
over steep places, where distant lower Java was framed in immediate
tree-ferns, grotesque leaves, and orchids. We passed up to a grassy
plateau, which might have been an English ducal park. The flowers
there were of another climate—raspberry, brambles, the yellow heads of
composite plants, and labiate herbs. In a hollow of a forest beyond there
were forbidding and incrusted recesses where the foliage was veiled
in bursts of steam. But we did not pause by those caldrons of boiling
mud. The smell of sulphur is not good. Those pools were not designed
for the rustic wonder of travelers, nor even to admonish them of what
follows after sin. I do not know for what they were designed, but a few
years ago, so I was told, they boiled over and obliterated forty of the
villages where the people are so good-natured.

So we learn that the rich and beautiful island of Java is not, after
all, a creation especially intended to support the flamboyant posters
of Batavia. Sometimes it does things on its own account. It was even
with a degree of pleasure, later, that I learned I should not be allowed
to leave Sourabaya without a visit to the port’s medical officer. It
broke the spell of the Garden of Eden to find that that corner of it
is infected by the plague, and that anyone emerging from the garden is
suspect of subtle evil. But what attraction would there be in a snakeless
Paradise?




CHAPTER XV


When a scholarly English traveler I met at Batavia found in me no warm
regard for the ancient Buddhist tope at Borobudor, and only a loose wish
to see it before I died, he adjusted his monocle to get me into a sharper
focus. I tried to meet his sudden critical interest with an aspect
hastily mustered of original intelligence, but I could see my reputation
had perished. He was disappointed. An unfortunate sign now showed in me
that he had hitherto overlooked. I should have to make a fight for this,
or it would end in my seeing the famous curiosity.

The archæologist was severe, and spoke slowly, like one who knows the
truth. “Remember, you have come many thousands of miles. It is probably
the only chance in your life to see one of the most remarkable temples in
the world.”

“But I don’t want to distort my brief span by trying to cram every
experience into it. I know I can be happy without Borobudor.”

“Eh? Pardon me. But this relic is unique.”

“So am I, sir; so are you. We are even older than that old tope by about
seven hundred years. Besides, I have seen its portraits, and they fill me
with despair.”

His monocle dropped from his raised eyebrow. “Despair? It’s a wonderful
mass. It’s an amazing pile. I do not understand so incurious a man.
You astonish me. Everybody sees it who comes to Java. Despair? Why,
dammit, think of the industry, think of the devotion of those people who
converted the rocks of a hilltop into a huge temple!”

“I have thought of it. That’s what disheartens me. It is horrible. Those
stones with their carvings commemorate calm and settled error....”

The archæologist held up his right hand and waved it gently in the way a
policeman stops the traffic. I stopped.

“Excuse me. If they erred, what is that to us? It is their art which
matters, not its cause. And even its cause—such devotion to their faith,
carried to its topmost pinnacle, crowning a hill with the proof of man’s
yearning mind, deserves more than your flippant indifference. Borobudor
was a temple to God.”

“That’s the trouble with it. That’s the nearest to God we ever get. If
I went, I know I should only have it rubbed in that we seem unable to
receive a simple lesson in wisdom without at once beginning to elaborate
it into a system to justify what we want to do. Why, if Buddha were to
come to Java, Borobudor is probably the one place he would be careful to
avoid!”

“Sir, you have no reverence for your fellows. Those sincere stones
celebrate faith.”

“What of that? Have you ever had to jump for it when faith dropped one
of its sincere bombs? Those fervid stones embarrass me like fetiches and
patriotic songs.”

“I’ve never heard anything like it. You can’t mean what you say. I won’t
listen to you. Here is man struggling upward through the ages, and he
reaches something so wonderful as Borobudor, and you talk as though it
were a symptom of a disease. Monstrous! Why ever do you travel, sir?”

“I don’t know, but I prefer to enjoy it, if I can.”

“But how can you enjoy it if you miss the most important things in
travel? What do you learn?”

“The confirmation of my prejudices, I suppose. What else could I learn?”

“Ah, the war has destroyed respect and worship in you younger men. You
want to begin everything again, but you cannot, you cannot. Borobudor is
there, and it is too strong for you. You think you can forget it, but it
won’t let you.”

“Why was that temple ever dug out of the jungle to which it belonged? A
fixed tangle of dark and incurable thoughts!”

“I cannot discuss this with you, sir. There is nothing else like
Borobudor in the world.”

“This poor world is overloaded with Borobudors. We struggle beneath them,
yet nothing will satisfy you but you must dig out another from the forest
which had fortunately hidden it. There it is, to distress any wretched
traveler who passes it with the idea that man will never escape from
himself. Borobudor is a nightmare.”

Shortly after this interview I was on my way to the ruins. It was not
by intention. My affairs drifted that way, somehow, perhaps because the
roads of the world are clandestine with their memory of the past, and so
we move in the old direction of humanity without ever knowing why. The
archæologist was right. The Borobudors are too strong for us. There is no
escape.

But we entered a region of Java where it was raining—where it had rained,
apparently, for a period approaching forty days. Gray clouds were
close to us. If we saw a mountain it had the appearance of the severe
personification of the Creator at the Flood presiding over the drowning
of the earth. The hurrying rivers were alarming. Their yellow floods
were above the lower branches of the forests. The toy hamlets, which had
looked so delightful in the sun, stood in shadow and inundation, with
the water up to the veranda ladders, and from their perches on those
ladders the dejected natives watched the rain still falling. Then the
railway track dissolved ahead of us and we had to wait till another was
made. So we were very late in reaching Jokyacarta, and it began to appear
as though the rain would wash away the Buddhist temple, so far as I was
concerned. Jokyacarta is an old native capital of Java, and the place
where the last rebellion of the island broke out against the Dutch, in
1825. It must have been a good rebellion. It lasted for five years.
Though I was not anxious to see historic relics, I was at least curious
to see the Javanese in an ancient center of their culture, because their
mild and docile demeanor elsewhere no more suggested rebellion than do
the timid orphans of a charity school.

In the hotel at night I argued myself into a corner. What about visiting
this temple, and doing what all travelers do? At length I surrendered. It
was clear I could not dispute with everybody who asked me what I thought
of Borobudor—for it would come to that; it would be assumed that I had
seen it and was awed—so I ordered a conveyance for the morning. The
temple was thirty miles distant. I had better get it over.

In the morning, before my very door, the folk of Jokyacarta were going
to market. They were gossiping, and looking this way and that, as casual
as though all days were holidays and obsessions of the human mind had
never been perpetuated in monumental stone and enduring empires. Nothing
was dark in that throng. It was as varied as a garden and as engaging as
birds on a June morning. I joined it. It is pleasant to go to market, for
markets are places where people live and where even small change is more
important than lost and awful fortunes. A motor-car stood at my door and
its driver salaamed, but I gave him good morning and passed on.

Jokyacarta, even to my inexperienced eye, was an important city, for its
people seemed unaware of the urgency of the outer world. They were going
their own way. The walls of the Sultan’s palace, about which even the
great trees are trimmed and subdued to the shape of the Royal Umbrella,
the Javanese sign of right and might, are said to inclose the ten
thousand people of his court. It was easy to believe it of such walls,
for they were prolonged beyond the extent of a merely ordinary interest
in walls, beyond a modern indifference to the prerogatives of divine
right, and beyond a simple wayfarer’s knowledge of the requirements
of a thousand wives and concubines. Such walls will arise, of course,
out of an intricate compost of Brahma, Buddha, and Mohammed, when the
many laboring rice-growers of a country are industrious, tolerant,
and credulous. Something like it can be done almost anywhere. Other
nations have made an ornate muddle not so vastly inferior out of the
worship of the steam engine and the cotton jenny. Those portentous
gates and buildings, and whispers of an elaborate royal ritual within
so overwhelming and anciently traditional as to appear insane to an
uninstructed stranger, were confidently supposed to be inducements to me
to enter. Yet, no. I could see no hope there; and I was traveling on the
bare chance of finding plain daylight. I did hear that in all affairs of
state in Jokyacarta to-day a Dutchman sits potent but unobtrusive, and
that thus the impressive display of divine right is almost sterilized of
its divinity; yet for all I could hear, that Dutchman might represent
only another kind of righteous power, and, as compulsion of any kind will
almost certainly rouse resistance in my wicked heart and I did not want
to excite evil on a pleasant day, I turned aside.

How faithful and bounteous a spring of original life—common humanity
everywhere! It is like rain and grass and the sun. To read the history of
Java from the Hindu to the Dutch would lead a distant student to imagine
that its people must have had every spark and airy bubble compressed out
by the strong governments of fifteen centuries, and that there is left
but a flat and doleful residue of homogeneous obedience. But some joy
will remain after the strongest governance has done its best. That market
place, though at least as old as sultanic prejudice in concubines, and
vastly more ancient than the Prophet’s victories in Java, might only that
morning have come into bloom. Its leisurely throng had forgotten that
the military roads of their island garden are built of their bones. They
have risen again. You may look for their conquerors in the old library
of the museum at Batavia, if you so much as remember their names; but
the unimportant victims of great triumphs, secure with a secret which is
hidden from mogulship no matter what its cavalry and batteries, looked
as though they, after all, were the favorites of the sun. I don’t know
what the positive evidence for immortality may be. I have never seen it.
I don’t know how it can be proved that we are the sons and daughters
of God. But when I remember the sergeant who called to his men toiling
through the mud and wire where the shells were falling, “Come on, you! Do
you want to live forever?” and when I recall, as I must when most fearful
for the meek at heart, the smiling forbearance of another man when he
looked at the error and hate that were to extinguish his good will, then
I think there must be a light that can never go out.

That was an assurance worth going to market to get. It was procurable
at any stall in Jokyacarta. What you bought was wrapped up in it. It
was certain these people could do very well without the aid of sultans,
priests, or governors, whose assistance, somehow, they had survived, so
far. What promise of Java’s development could be better than the figures
and poise of those girls who were selling their _batik_ to a Chinaman?
They were there when the Hindus came, they had survived every conquest,
and there they were still, with eternity in which to have their own way
if Chinamen were obdurate. Their gestures and pose proved them to be of
an ancient and noble line. The great dove-colored bull beside them, his
nose and ears of black velvet and his eyes tranquil with drowsy pride,
had come with them all the way from the past. That market place, with
its craftsmen and women, could light the fire of humanity again on the
abandoned hearths of a bare continent.

I was already settled with this comfortable thought in the train for
Sourabaya next day when an official from my hotel, whose anxious face was
peering into every coach, presently found me. There had been a mistake. I
had not paid for my motor-car to Borobudor. It had waited for me all day.
Borobudor?




CHAPTER XVI


_July 1._—The hotel omnibus which met me at Sourabaya station last night
was like a processional car. The horse’s harness was covered with bells,
and I jingled off like an Oriental bride. When I woke this morning and
moved, a lizard flicked from sight behind a wall mirror. It was just as
though the wall had cracked in a ghostly way. There was no crack when I
looked again. On the floor an army of ants was doing to death a large
caterpillar. The giant heaved and threw the mites, but he was doomed. The
unhurried resolution and certitude of his enemies shocked me. I felt like
God on his dais watching a victory, and was half inclined to abolish the
lot—drop a boot on the tragic drama like a comet. It was so obtuse and
loutish an affair. But what could I do? My comet would only have worsened
the distressing mess. I was glad I was not God; I felt no responsibility.
A hot day; and the streets of Sourabaya sprawl into infinity. As usual,
the most interesting quarter of this East Indian city is the Chinese. The
shops of the narrow streets by the canal, and the canal, the Kali Maas,
with its gaudy sampans, are pleasing with curious stratagems and devices.
I might have bought one porcelain bowl, of a blue which conquered me, but
a gramophone in that shop was revolving Flowery Land music, and I was
hypnotized. The bowl was remembered again only when I had wandered off.
It was too hot to go back. Besides, the bowl was probably fraudulent. I
met a Mohammedan funeral. Behind it was an Arab on a bicycle. He wore a
red fez, white linen jacket, zebraic shirt and tie, cerise pantaloons,
brown boots, and his purple socks were racked taut with suspenders.
I found a big store with many English books. Yet I noticed the usual
distinction made there between Dutch and English travelers. The Dutch, in
translation, get the best of everything of ours. There, amid the coffee
berries, rice, tennis shoes, tinned tripe, and white shirts, was a great
assortment of our literature; but it was unapproachable in its Dutch
guise. For me there was only tinned tripe. I will not mention titles and
names, but I went through hundreds of books in English, hoping for the
best, with the ready guilders in my willing hand. A bald-headed man might
as well have searched the rows of bottles and pots in a hairdresser’s
shop devoted to the ladies. But it was possible in that shop for a
connoisseur to find exactly what he wanted in a display of the choicest
brands of English tennis racquets.

_July 2._—There was something odd in the look of my Dutch steamer this
morning when I boarded her off Sourabaya. I had not noticed it before. It
was not her suggestion of indolence. Even a liner which carries important
people and the mails on long voyages to the great ports of the world may
appear to one who visits her as if she were thoroughly tired after her
exertions, and did not intend to move for a long time. It was not the
_Savoe’s_ languor which was remarkable. One might expect lassitude in a
torrid roadstead of Java. But her design suggests that she expects no
weather but halcyon; yet her boats are broad and shallow scows, with
diagonal strakes for greater strength, and are fended all around the
gunwales by stout rope. If the mother ship does not expect to meet even a
gale, it is certain her boats are meant for handy work on seas which in
shallow waters will break into a dangerous surf. Their davits and falls
are clearly designed to get the boats out and away quickly and often; and
that is certainly very unusual in the boats of a steamship.

Her sailors are working—if closely watched one could almost swear they
are working—at tasks which do not appear to be relevant. Their cotton
trousers have attractive floral patterns, and their neat muslin bodices
are very ladylike. Their millinery, as another sparkling Parisian outrage
in Oxford Street, would have all the attraction of originality. They are
Malays, of Java and Celebes. The _Savoe_ is bound for more beaches than
I have counted, and she may deviate and add as many more as pleases the
captain. They are scattered between the Java Sea and New Guinea, and
some of them are places which are not named on the common maps. For that
reason I had supposed I should be the only passenger. I was wrong. Some
_prahus_ approached us. Each had two triangular sails, set upside down
to my eyes, for the base of the triangle was uppermost. These open boats
flew with great wings, and their narrow bodies rocked in a startling way;
the men who handled them had little to learn. In fact, the chief officer
told me they were Madurese and the grandsons of pirates. They flew
alongside with our passengers. The first out was a perambulator. A Bugis
woman followed with her child. No athlete could board a lively motor-bus
with more grace than that Malay mother launched from her prancing craft
to our gangway. She was followed by a tangle of humanity, Malays, Arabs,
and Chinese, in costumes as noticeable as those of the actors in an
inexplicable allegory. Among them was a lady who was neither Bugis nor
Dutch, but something of each, who wore what might have been bed drapery
with a design of pomegranates and parrots, a turban, and a black gauze
mantelet. There was also an Englishman with a monocle. There was a Hadji
in his white cap, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, a maroon sarong or
skirt, and a khaki tunic.

We sailed; and the background for just such an extravagant and willful
romance as would accord with our company has been provided all day by
the mountainous coast of East Java, the sun, and the clouds. There was
plaintive music from the queer soliloquizing instruments enjoyed by our
native passengers, who are berthed on a lower deck, which has open sides,
and was light and even fresh till the passengers had occupied it for a
few hours. By then banana skins and the chewing of betel nut made that
deck a horror to our chief mate, who, being Dutch, is a sailor with a
noticeable strain of the housewife. But Malays are used to floors of
earth, or else to floors of bamboo with the earth a few feet below. Decks
to them are to recline upon and to spit upon.

I am bound to confess that the perambulator, and the swarm of brown
children whose voices reach my cabin on the boat deck, are contrary
to my idea of what is right in a voyage in strange seas. What have
perambulators to do with the Flores Sea and the Macassar Strait? What
has a bicycle—for a bicycle swings from an awning beam over a Chinese
peddler, who sprawls on a mat on the after hatch—what business has a
bicycle with pearl fishing or with _manuk dewata_, the “bird of the gods”?

There is something else, too. There is the incessant and valiant crowing
of many cocks. But when I reproached the mate because my voyage was being
made between a nursery and a farmyard he said: “But you do not know. We
are in a world by itself. You shall see.” And to begin with a trifle I
discovered that the poultry is all game-cocks, and that matches might be
arranged on the ship—but would not be allowed by the captain—at any time.
For the Dutch, having put down head-hunting among most of the islands,
and piracy altogether, considered it wise to leave some outlets to the
pugnacity of the islanders, and to their passion for gambling. Piracy,
of course, was merely gambling by speculators of temerity, skill, and
enterprise; and it was only the armed steam launch that eradicated it
from the complex reefs and shallows of these difficult seas; and that
means, of course, that it was ended but last week. Something, then, had
to be allowed to these leisured but mettlesome men, and so cock-fighting
and gambling were left for their indulgence, as compensations for the
loss of the more desperate pastimes.

There was something even worse than the perambulators and the chewing
of betel. I found the signs of another passenger in my cabin, though I
had been promised I should have it to myself. There was a sun helmet in
the other bunk, and very foreign baggage on the floor. I am sociable, I
hope; but never when I am alone. This was too much. With the sun helmet
was a book; Conrad’s _Rescue_, in English. I flung out, churlish because
there was not time to change into another ship and go elsewhere. Later
in the day I went to the cabin to get my binoculars, and found there my
cabin mate. He is a gentle Dutchman, and is genuinely sorry to intrude.
I assured him that I was desolated because my tenancy of the cabin must
annoy him. He sent for drinks and professed his love for all that is
English. This must be sincere, for he declared he had read _Paradise
Lost_ in both English and Dutch; and he mentioned Conrad with his hands
upraised because words completely failed him. He used to live at Bromley
in Kent, and his wife was at school at Bideford in Devon. I remained
there with him, and forgot why I wanted the binoculars.

_July 3._—At sunrise to-day my Chinese boy brought me coffee, and handed
me my pipe as though it were a scepter. I looked out of the cabin window
to see where we were. I put down the coffee at once, where nothing could
hold it, and it spread on the floor. This was excusable. Our ship was
approaching the narrow strait between the islands of Lombok and Baly. If
there had been no reward for overcoming the doldrums of a long voyage but
the first light of day caught and bewildered by the forests and clouds
of Agung and Ringani, the Peak of Baly and the Peak of Lombok, volcanoes
which regard each other, supernal and terrible, over remote celestial
kingdoms of cloud, then those small islands between the Java Sea and the
Indian Ocean would have been enough. It was the kind of reward which
comes to a traveler when the gods forget that he is often discontented
and unworthy.

We anchored off Ampenan, a village in a bay on Lombok’s west side. There
was a beach of black volcanic sand, a heavy surf, a line of palms so
still they might have been cast in metal, and behind them heights that
were merely blue shapes. In the clear green deeps alongside sharks were
lazily and patiently patrolling for anything that might happen. They had
nothing else to do, and so considered the _Savoe_ was as good as any
other waiting-place. Then—but how they came there I never saw—we were
besieged by canoes, which would have looked unsafe on a pool, weighted
with daring paddlers who were ready to face any wave while they had an
inch of freeboard and boys to bail out the wash with bent palm leaves. I
did not see what business the Savoe conducted at Ampenan. I was much too
dazzled by gyrating canoeists who balanced themselves on rocking bamboos
by their toes over leisurely sharks.

_July 4._—We have lost the Englishman with his monocle. Heaven knows
what he proposes to do in Lombok. We have added a Malay rajah and his
ladies to our company. He is a wizened old man, barefooted, in _sarong_
and jacket and a little turban. Even a voyager among these islands for
the first time would not mistake that old man for merely another native.
Once, at a mere hint from him, men had died. His mouth and eyes still are
those of a man whose whims, if fantastic, have not always been futile.
His wife is dressed like an old-fashioned suburban lady on the Sabbath,
but she has added a barbaric tiara in pearls and trinkets which suggests
that she will revert to a Dyak custom after divine service is over.

[Illustration: _The Road Was Empty, Except for a Bullock Cart_

(_See p. 68_)]

Our lower deck is a _campong_, or native village, with a population even
larger than the usual hamlet of huts. That deck is occupied from the stem
to the stern. There are Arab and Chinese quarters, from which women are
absent. But the Malays are one big family, unpartitioned. They are asleep
on their mats, or they sit in groups, men and women, gambling with cards.
There are messes of rice in great pots, strings of fish, melons, red
earthenware jars of water, and queer smells. Cabbages and maize hang from
the beams. The cocks crow, the parrots screech, and the children squat
and stare like infant Buddhas at the ship’s gear, and at myself when I
pass. I hear there is never any trouble here through the ladies. Each man
knows the other has a knife. Besides, as a ship’s officer put it to me,
“There is no trouble, because they have not the morality of Europeans.”

_July 5._—I have been trying to teach myself, with Mr. Potter’s East
Indian pilotage books and the charts to assist me, where I am going.
But I have given up the task. I shall take what comes. It is clear this
voyage will occupy two months, and yet we are not likely to be out of
sight of land on a single day. We shall go north and south, and east and
west, but with a general easterly bias. I abandoned my attempt to trace
the course of our voyage when it developed into a ravel which had the
equator entangled in it thrice in twenty-four hours. That was too much.
But I did get a vague idea, from the large-scale charts, of the extent of
Indonesia. It would want the Atlantic Ocean to give it elbow room. There
are 3,000 miles between Acheen Head, Sumatra, and New Guinea; and half
as many between the Philippines and Melville Island, North Australia.
Within those marks it is a pleasure to read the beautiful names of the
seas—the Java Sea, the Flores Sea, the Banda Sea, the Arafura Sea, the
Molucca Sea, and the Sea of Celebes. The islands dot the spaces like the
stars in a chart of the heavens. And here I am, among the constellations.
We passed the first item of the Spermode group two hours after lunch,
and the captain thereupon went to the bridge, in mauve pajamas and a
cigar; Dutch ships have their own customs. But all our officers are most
friendly souls, and one imagines they are speaking English excellently
until, among themselves, they show how much more familiar they are with
their own language. They are able and versatile seamen, for this ship
has to look after herself, in the way ships did in the past. She has her
own company of cargo coolies, and her own shipping office, because our
officers must buy and sell cargo, ship and stow, book passengers and
inspect them for trouble of every kind, appraise trade opportunities for
the use of headquarters in Batavia, and publish the news of the world on
distant coasts. Our chief mate is even a good ethnologist. One should
be that when one’s duties are among the subtle possibilities of Malay,
Papuan, Polynesian, Arab, Chinese, Japanese, and whites who are even more
difficult and dangerous to label. It is sunset, and we are approaching
Macassar.




CHAPTER XVII


A ship should have light when making Macassar. The Spermode Islands dot
the sea about the southwest end of Celebes, and though the blue film of
the waters there seems just tangible enough to float such fairy-like
islands, yet it is best to con them by day, and from a wide berth. So
your ship will approach Macassar either not much before sunrise or while
a memory of the vanished day with a brief exaltation holds away the
night. The approach to its harbor, when the sun is near the horizon,
especially if there is a stillness before or after rain during the wet
monsoon, would make you believe, looking ahead from the ship’s bow, that
“the storms all weathered and the ocean crost,” you were nearing that
“favored isle, where billows never roar, and brighter seasons smile.”
For there is no end to the illusions of travel—indeed, they are the
best of it, and part of the fun is in seeing them break. Half an hour
of the beatific! What more should we expect? It is an experience long
enough for the good of any mortal traveler. At the end of that time you
are alongside a modern wharf and the bunker coal. Macassar is properly
proud of its modern facilities, as they are called. Luckily it is easy to
escape from them.

The city, though old, with all the history of the Malay islands from
the sixteenth century in its streets, native, Portuguese, Dutch, and
English, has still behind it a land of which we know hardly more than
we know of the future of true religion. Macassar is, in fact, only a
market place on a beach where gather the traders and ships from hundreds
of islands about it. With the exception of Singapore—a very much greater
place—Macassar is, I think, the most interesting town in the East Indies.
You soon get tired of Batavia and Sourabaya, sporadic cities where the
distances, which would be very little in a temperate climate, in Java are
almost impassable gulfs of heat and dust. And even native inland cities,
where the Javanese are still listlessly protecting the relics of their
traditions and their native crafts that have not yet been foundered in
the flood of shoddy from Western civilization, soon weary a traveler. He
sees with his own unaccustomed eyes that often what the natives pretend
is their traditional craft was made by machinery in the likeness of the
original at Manchester or Dresden. But tourists do not see Macassar.
It is aside from their track. There is no need for Macassar to deceive
chance visitors, and to deceive its regular visitors, the traders,
requires careful thought and takes all its time.

It has its own atmosphere, which is largely, though not altogether,
caused by the fish which is spread out in half-acres to dry in the sun
near the waterside. Its heat, too, is not a smothering weight, but is
bearable. You can get about on foot. The natives are a lively and sturdy
tribe—its men were active and resourceful pirates in the past—and so
the byways of Macassar are attractive with figures which make drab and
meager a visitor’s memory of his prosperous industrial city of the hard
north. And the Chinese are established in Macassar. But then they
are everywhere. There is not an island in the archipelago without its
Chinese trader; probably an honest one, too. You cannot help liking the
Chinese. Talk of the tenacity, the artless and audacious, enterprise,
the courage, resourcefulness, delicacy in humbugging, and the other
qualities of the Anglo-Saxon which have made him what he is—all that
would tax a Chinaman’s polite resolution to keep his smile well hidden.
He was like that when a child ten thousand years ago. He sits in front of
his shop in Macassar to-day—an open shop, without windows or door—where
there are great paper lanterns pendent, and a red banner with letters
of gold. He smokes his opium pipe. He wears short black trousers and a
blue jacket and a little black cap, and sees Heaven knows what ancient
dream through his horn spectacles. His face is tranquil and benevolent.
His tiny daughter with her long black pigtail and fringe, an incredibly
animated ivory doll dressed in miniature cotton trousers, and his little
son with a clean-shaven poll and dressed in nothing at all, play with
dice at his feet. He can never be beaten or outlived. He is unconquerable
and deathless. He has forgotten more than our culture has had the time
to acquire. He is such a friendly soul, too, if you are sufficiently
cautious when accepting him. He has his own theater in Macassar; a safely
fascinating place once you have subdued the magic of its orchestra. And
his temples! There is in Macassar one which will draw you every day
you are in the port. You will find yourself outside it again, lost in
the attempt to unravel its involuted fantasy, and without knowing you
were going to it, though it is in a back street. To stay a season in
that back street of Macassar, in one of the Chinese houses opposite the
temple, would be greater fun than to explore every tomb in Egypt. Nobody
appears to see you in that street. Not any of the strange eyes which pass
look at yours. You might not be there. And all the doors in that street
are shut to you, spiritually and in fact.

Well, not all. Perhaps not every day. A door there opened to me one
evening. It was not my fault. I was taken by an Englishman who knew that
Chinaman, and who introduced me as a man from Limehouse. The result was
astonishing. I had to refuse all that beer and brandy, and, instead,
desired orangeade. It was good orangeade. It was wonderful orangeade. I
remember that night now only as a bright but distorted dream in which
move the shadowy figures of a fable of Cathay. But an hour came when I
knew, at least, that I must leave my friends; and in the street, alone,
and in the Macassar dark, I assembled my intelligence, which told me
that my Chinese friend, in expansive hospitality, had vastly improved
my innocent drink with cognac. How was I to manage the gangplank of the
_Savoe_? That had to be faced. Anyhow, I argued to myself, you can sleep
at the foot of it. But at the foot of the precarious inclined plane, in
the light of a ship’s lantern, stood a little child, the daughter of a
Dutch passenger, who was just waiting for a man like me to come along.
Her mother ordered me to carry her daughter aboard. Now how did I do it,
and without a fault? I wish I knew.




CHAPTER XVIII


When the morning is very young and the light has but little heat in it,
Macassar’s native dock, with its quays of coral rock, and a gathering of
schooners and canoes, is almost merrily absurd with a fabulous beauty
and a suggestion of wild and secret adventure. The little schooners are
gypsies for color, their names are stars and flowers—Bintang this and
Buroh that—their brailed sails are sheets of light, and their reflections
on the languid water, which is an uncertain blue mirror, are slowly
dissolving flakes of lightning and rainbow. The Malays sit on their
decks, cooking breakfast. There is a smell of dry fish, copra, and wood
smoke. They look so frail, those little antique models, with their tripod
masts, their sweeps, and low bows and upstanding galleried sterns. But it
happens that once I saw one driving in the dangerous currents, a breeze
chasing her from the Indian Ocean, in the channel between the islands of
Sumbawa and Lombok, and the impulse was to cheer.

When it is better to find some shade you can turn into Macassar’s main
street, its bazaar, and then discover, looking into the bags, boxes,
casks, and baskets, for how few of the commodities in this part of the
world you have even a name. Some stuff it is possible to guess at,
though who eats desiccated frogs and dried cuttlefish? But most of it is
mummified and enigmatic. The irregular buildings have roofs of red tiles
which cast a good shade from widely projecting eaves. They are of timber
and stone, lime-washed in blues and yellows, and if you chance to look up
out of the stream of dark humanity you see dim figures in upper balconies
who are watching the street below, as grave and still as decorative
images.

A stranger might hesitate about entering the great market on the
outskirts of the town. The crowd there is so active, so alien, so intent
on its private affairs, that some courage seems necessary for pushing
into it. But the Malays are the politest people on earth. You will be
hardly conscious that you are seen. There will be no importunity to buy;
and if you understand bazaar Malay, any stallkeeper will cheerfully lose
customers to explain to you what his wares are and what has to be done
with them; what, for example, the name of that curious fish is, where
and how it can be caught, and what to do when preparing it for the pot
so that it may nourish and not cause death with convulsions. After a
time, too, you will not be startled by what on the floor looks like the
evidence of a recent bloody affray. Here, as elsewhere in Indonesia, the
people chew areca nut, and those sanguinary blotches are only the spittle
of a multitude. Presently you will get almost used to it. In any case,
the Malays, men and women, will go on smearing sireh leaves with a little
lime, put in some areca nut, and some rose petals or other aromatic herb,
leisurely chew their packets, and change the sensitive mouths of their
youth into the semblance of an accident.

No port in the Indies has much to show that is more interesting than its
fish market. That is but fair. Not many visitors may find entrance to
its best clubs, or may know the joy, even at long last, of meeting its
superior people. But we all may go to the fish market. The choice fruits
of the tropics, and its solid vegetables, may suggest that home is, after
all, only about the third or fourth turning round the corner. But the
fish! What crude and vulgar creatures cod and halibut would look in the
company gathered from the submarine gardens of the tropics! Nothing is
vulgar there, nothing crude; though there are many creatures which look
terrifying, or instantaneous, or unnamably wicked, or are shaped and
enameled in a way which suggests that they escaped at midnight from the
designs in the Chinese temple or an Oriental jeweler’s workshop.

To learn what hardly credible living things may come from the reefs and
atolls, it is better to go to the fish market in the early morning. That
the fishermen dare to handle such objects is surprising. Often enough one
would as soon experiment with the unknown mechanism of a bomb. Even the
fishermen regard a number of these creatures as of the devil, for some of
the spines, gill covers, and skins are as venomous as an adder’s fangs;
and the sea serpents, those brightly colored ribbons common enough among
the waves, and all as deadly as cobras, cause a surprising number of
deaths to those whose business is with fish net and traps. One morning in
Macassar’s fish market there was a man who seemed to have supposed that
the fish he had caught was too awful or too bulky to allow him to bring
in more than the head, as a trophy. He showed me that head. It was as big
and heavy as a mastiff’s. It had the same expression of sullen interest
and ready hostility, but with larger teeth. It was olive green in color,
with yellow spots. Its name its captor did not know. He had not seen one
before. He knew only that it was _ikan_—fish. After all, it was just as
well to inform a stranger that what he saw was _ikan kapala_—the head of
a fish. It was not a case for mere guesswork.

There were cuttlefish that day looking like opalescent lamps in which
the light was hardly yet extinct; and the crabs might have been an
astrologer’s imaginative effort at Cancer. The perch, of course, were
a host, and more varied than tulips because they differed so in size
and color. One of them is famous in these waters, a superb fellow in
scarlet, _ikan merah_. The common fish were mackerel, the bonito the
most noticeable, for it is often of the size and rotundity of a small
pig. There were young sharks, and several species of rays and skates, a
few of them too big for one man to lift. The coryphene was there, the
dolphin of sailors, which expires prismatically; though that fellow must
be witnessed when just caught, for a mere description of his display
when dying would never be believed. In the market place the coryphene
is remarkable only for its suggestion of immense speed, and the vicious
upturned lower jaw and teeth designed to take the flying fish as they
drop back into the sea after a flight which was not swift enough to carry
them from pursuing calamity. Many of the creatures were unknown to me,
and I fancy some might have surprised an ichthyologist.

Yet each morning the display in Macassar’s fish market is differently
ordered. The program is never repeated. I could never think of it as a
market place, or that I was looking at mere provender. It was manifest
the sea was still experimenting with life and was in no hurry. It was
dissatisfied with its work each day as soon as the designs were finished,
and so threw them out to us as waste. Then it began on other effects.
That place in Macassar, therefore, was hardly a market. It was less that
than the studio of an artist resembles Billingsgate. Macassar was merely
getting daily what the rich and vast workshop outside considered was not
quite what it meant to do. And that workshop has, of course, plenty of
time and light in which to satisfy itself. The sun and the warm seas have
all eternity in which to play with life, to shape and color it to the
likeness of whatever perfection was once hinted. The Italian jeweler of
the Renaissance never approached the easy opulence, the merry variety of
ideas, and the wild ornamentation, which can be seen any bright morning
on the slabs of that fish market of Celebes. There I saw the ocean’s last
hilarious but puzzling jokes. Fun was being poked at us—derision made of
our own dull and monotonous efforts at creation.

But when you look out from Macassar’s beach to the place where those wild
forms and vivid dyes are native, they are the less surprising. Anything
might happen out there. Out by the Spermode Islands it is not the sea.
It is a blue radiance, as still as the ecstasy of an intense passion,
and the areas of coral rock betray in blinding incandescence what secret
energy is at work.




CHAPTER XIX


The warehouse and office of the shipping firm at Macassar whose principal
acts as British consul assure a wanderer from home that his affairs may
be there considered of consequence. I noticed that office with approval
before I knew it was under my flag. It appeared to be a solid structure
of the Portuguese occupation, and its calm was cloistral. Along the hot
street it cooled the sidewalk with a roofed colonnade. The white columns,
in that sun, were shafts of light, and under them the open doors of the
warehouse admitted to warm gloom and the smell of spices. I stepped
into the shadows, where I could just make out old beams and a vista of
bales, and snuffed it up. I thought this must be the smell of Macassar.
Perhaps smelling it is as good a way of getting the history of a place
as any other. When I called there for my letters, respectfully waiting
for attention in the light of an upper story where clerks in white linen
were silent over great leather volumes, presently I found a difficulty
in raising my voice above a whisper in that immemorial hush. A clerk
approached, listened to me, and vanished without a word. Not important
enough to be noticed? But presently I saw him beckoning, in a side aisle,
like a grave priest to an initiate, and I followed him past a motionless
guardian of the sanctuary—that figure might have been a statue, or it
might have been only the Malay equivalent of a hall porter—to an inner
room, and he left me. I was alone there, with a matured table on which
documents were orderly, and two chairs. I sank into the leathern deep of
one, and looked at Chinese almanacs on the wall. I like Chinese almanacs.
They are always decorated with figures of Chinese girls in embroidered
tunics and trousers. Every one of these girls has a black fringe, and her
expression beyond doubt is exactly what would lead Chinese soldiers to
adorn their dugouts with national almanacs. That is what interests me; I
try to find the angle where a Chinaman would stand to admire something
different from what I see at mine. There were two large maps of Celebes,
and they made that great island greater, than ever with blank spaces
which had no names. On a sideboard were many samples of mace, gums, and
tortoise shell. There was a chart of the East Indies, and advertisements
of ships and their sailing dates. I could have been contented there for
a long time. The feeling came over me that I should like to sit at that
table and play with ships and produce. But when the proprietor entered
it was certain that there was a game at which I should be badly beaten.
There could be no doubt he knew more about it. He knew more of a good
many things; but his bearing gave me the easy notion that his valuable
time was for me to spend as I chose. He appeared to understand Europe
better than most Europeans, and though it would have been easy for me
to have disagreed with him about Mr. Lloyd George, I did not care to do
so. I had not brought the Welsh mountains with me and did not feel equal
to going back for them. There were my letters; and outside afterward
it occurred to me, when I remembered what is so often written of
British consuls, that occasionally there may be bad travelers as well as
unfortunate consuls.

That night, in a ship so still and quiet that it surprised me to find I
could switch on the cabin light, I read in my bunk Wallace’s story of his
visit to Maros. It is a passage I know well. The naturalist so clearly
was surprised by Maros, and could not forget it. Maros is about thirty
miles behind Macassar, and here veritably I was in Macassar; yet a peep
at Maros was no easier than though I were still at home. Indeed, it
seemed more distant than ever, as though time and not distance separated
us. But in London I was unaware of the meaning of thirty miles in Celebes.

When I opened my eyes again it was daylight, and the consul’s clerk stood
by my bunk, regarding me in respectful sadness, as though I were a hero
lying in state. When he saw I was awake, then his hat, which he held
against his breast, began to revolve in his hands. He apologized. But
would I care to go to Maros? The consul’s motor-car was beside the ship.

We went. The consul’s clerk had never seen Maros. Too busy! And on
Saturdays and Sundays there were swimming and tennis. We passed a swamp
overgrown with the plumes of nipa palms, and nearly ran over an eagle
while watching the water for alligators. The great bird got up from under
the bonnet as the brakes ground our wheels on the dust. Our way led us
over flat country. There were many buffaloes in the rice fields; they
were more noticeable than usual because so many of them were albinos. The
villagers were husking cocoanuts, or were out cutting acres of rice stalk
by stalk with little knives. Ahead of us, eastward, was a high blue
rampart to the plain, and in an hour it was right over us.

This wall was broken but unscalable, soaring immediately from the plain
to a height perhaps of a thousand feet. It was an array of pinnacles so
long and sharp, chasms so abrupt, clefts so narrowly cut, and all clothed
with shrub even when the face appeared to be perpendicular, that it was
the most freakish landscape I have seen, and was as surprising as though
in a retired spot Nature were amusing herself with some miraculous fun of
her ordinary media. Here and there was a bare surface of pale limestone
rock, with massive coagulations and stalactites, like the keep of a
castle in Gothic legend. The rock appeared to be as cellular as sponge; a
fact, perhaps, which accounted for the vegetation clinging to the steeps.
Presently the wall stopped us. A precipice was on one hand, and on the
other an incline of water pouring smoothly over domes of rock. Where
the water came from could not be seen. The green crags towered round
it, ascending from shadow into upper sunlight. The water came over the
hummocks as clear and still as glass, only occasionally giving a burst of
foam. Now, in the East Indies a traveler cannot help remarking how poor
that region is in butterflies compared with tropical America. Perhaps in
insect life the Amazon country is the richest in the world. One sees more
butterflies in greater variety of species in a Brazilian forest clearing
in an hour than would be seen in Java in a week. But the inclosing walls
and tiny beaches of this strange watercourse of Celebes were distracting
with swift and brilliant insects. They were at rest like flowers on the
dry rocks of the stream, or were jostling one another for moisture on the
damp sand at the margin, or were soaring like birds athwart the cliffs.

We were told there was a path by which we could reach some upper falls,
and we found it, though occasionally it left us without guidance in a
dark cave, or on a bowlder with the water heaping past, or waist deep in
the herbs of an inclosure to which there seemed no way out. The sky was
but a narrow road of blue above us. In one smooth pool on the opposite
side a party of natives were bathing, but so dim was the water under the
overhanging cliff that even their bright Malay dresses were indistinct.
Some of these people came over to us and conducted us to a shelf from
which we watched the water shooting through an upper chasm in a smooth
vitreous weight. We appeared to be at the bottom of a profound cleft in
the earth. The sun was high enough now to spill day over us. The shaft
was full of light. The natives were sociable, sitting near to watch us,
though only rarely did they make a shy comment. They appeared to consider
us as of greater interest than anything in their strange land. My odd
occupation, the collecting of diptera, compelled them at last out of
their shyness. They helped. What they thought of it I cannot say, but
presently a party of their children came to me with a present. It was a
flying lizard, and from their jolly smiles I have a suspicion that the
joke was against me.




CHAPTER XX


Whether I looked at the grotesque shape of Celebes on the chart, or
leaned on the ship’s rail to watch the unfolding of its coast, I could
hardly believe it. The map shows the island as a bundle of peninsulas
tied in the middle and flung anyhow on the ocean. There Celebes sprawls,
with none of its long limbs straightened out. It lies between Borneo and
New Guinea, and is akin to neither. For that matter, it is like no other
island in any of the seas. It is big enough to be noticeable—its area is
greater than that of Java—yet few people seem to have heard of it.

I suppose we all know Borneo. That island is sufficiently familiar to
cause mirth in any London music hall by the mention of its name. As for
New Guinea, so many sensational books are now appearing about it that our
nerves no longer respond. But Celebes has been overlooked; and that, when
you come to think of it, is not at all a surprising fate to befall what
is entirely and freely original. It has received less critical attention
than Laputa. We are much less certain about it than we are of such
evident things as the subconscious self.

The fact that the old and famous port of Macassar stands at its southwest
corner makes no difference. Macassar is not Celebes. Probably few of the
natives of Macassar know that their city is Celebesian. There is a steam
tram, which it is polite to call a railroad, that goes out of Macassar
for about sixty miles, nobody knows why and few people know where. If
I had met a dinosaur I should not have been more startled than when
that train accosted me while sauntering one day outside Macassar. I had
never been warned of it. Its snorting was unnatural. Heaven knows where
the Macassarenes stable it when the queer creature comes home at night.
Macassar is merely a convenient meeting place for traders to sort out
the gums, spices, copra, tortoise shell, mother-o’-pearl, and bird skins
which have been collected in the multitude of islands east of Java.

Celebes must have bewildered the early navigators with its odd and
infolded shape. They could rarely have been sure whether they were still
there, or had found another island. The very appearance of its shores,
you would think, ought to have prompted in some modern explorer that
feeling which drives the curious to wander mystified till they discover
the center of a maze. I know how it worked on me. Yet there do not appear
to have been any famous journeys through the island. I kept my own
foolish impulse under prudent control; yet one day, when leaning with a
young Dutch naval officer on the rail of our trading steamer, both of us
staring at Celebes, he became suddenly mad or ecstatic, though he was a
shy and quiet man, with pale hair and questioning blue eyes.

[Illustration: “_One of ’Em Looked at Me As He Came Aboard_”

(_See p. 75_)]

“Let us land,” he cried aloud; “let us go there!” He pointed to a dark
inlet in which nothing had happened, by the look of it, since it was
made, except perhaps some trifling piracy and murder. “Let us walk on
from there till we come to the other sea!”

That was it. A lovely, seductive, and most likely a deadly coast. You
couldn’t keep the eyes off it. If, growing limp and weary with the heat
and the uneventful day and a sea which appeared to have lapsed into the
notion that we had at last reached the Age of Gold and that the lion and
the lamb were reconciled and sentimental, you went to your cabin to read,
you never stayed there more than ten minutes while the ship was cruising
along Celebes; before ten minutes were up you were on deck again. Why
pretend we don’t know what song the sirens sang? We know quite well. We
have heard it more than once. But the song looks so idiotic when we set
it down literally. We are forced, therefore, to make an academic mystery
of it, a method which preserves for our edification in idleness so many
of the classic topics which help bookmen to a bare living. God forbid
that I should deprive them of an item of it. I will omit a transcript
of the sirens’ song for that reason, and also because it would cause
Ulysses, Mungo Park, and many others, including the Dutch naval officer
and myself, to look so embarrassed. Why do we ever listen to the sirens’
enticement? Well, why do men put feathers in their hats and go to war?
Why do some of us love wearing regalia and making secret signs? Why
are men abstemious when there is wine about, and smugglers when there
isn’t? And above all, what is it we find in Beethoven or in _Christobal_?
Nothing that can be quoted on the Stock Exchange; nothing which can be
stated explicitly without arousing mirth in our enemies and indignation
in our friends; for it would involve the whole mystery of the arts
and the philosophic reduction of beauty to its elements. Nevertheless,
Ulysses did well when he tied himself to a mast.

I tie myself to a mast, as it were, while Celebes is in sight. Our ship
all day moves past a tumult of crenellated ridges, heights often so sharp
and aberrant that how the forest stands upon them is a mystery. Those
hills are unexplored. Dense jungle darkens them from the clouds to the
shore. Celebes is upon the equator. But the heat on the ship is only as
though halcyon weather were giving a trifle too much to the sun. Our
steamer sometimes threads the channels of the skirting islands whose
shores, like those of the mainland, are gloomed by forest. Areas of the
coast become thin and ghostly when diaphanous vapors are caught on the
crags. The bright gauze then spreads and settles below. There is no wind.
We draw abeam of an occasional beach, a thread of gold between the cobalt
sea and the somber forest. No man ever lands there. The sea is empty.
There is nothing living in sight but the frigate birds, black shapes
high over the water with long angular pinions outspread and motionless,
soaring and circling in the slow leisure of timeless spirits. There is
nothing else at sea except the purple shadows of clouds and the stippling
of beryl where the coral is only just submerged. Once Drake passed this
way; but it looks as though nobody has been here since. Our steamer
idles along, apparently without a purpose, as in a frivolous escape from
scheduled and consequential duties. We are acquitted and released from
all that makes men feel serious, active, and important.

At sunset one day the sea was a fathomless mirror because the hulls
of cumulous clouds had sunk in it beneath the inverted violet peaks of
Celebes. Celebes floated athwart two heavens. Over Borneo, where the sun
vanished, the basaltic horizon clouds were the broken ramparts of a world
wrecked and lost. The fires of the final calamity were nearly out. Only
from the base of that wall did the last day of earth burst in one thin
explosion of scarlet. It spread no distance. Night quenched it at once. I
stood at the ship’s rail, watching the place where the forlorn hope had
failed.

“Mr. Tomlinsohn,” said a voice beside me, “will you have a gin and
bitter?” It was our chief engineer. He comes from Amsterdam.




CHAPTER XXI


Our sailors are Malays. My first impression of them was that they were
languid and ladylike seamen. No doubt the captain had been unable to
get white men for the voyage. He was forced to do what was possible
with mariners whose headdress is neat and pleasing millinery, and who
sometimes wear attractive lace bodices. One man I saw hauling on a rope,
whose jowl itself was as threatening as a bare knife, wore a blouse
with an elegant design in birds and flowers. His trousers, which were
more or less white, had lavender stripes. But make no mistake about it.
There would be fewer lives lost when a ship comes to trouble if white
seamen knew how to lower boats and get them away as expeditiously as our
Malays. When we see a grove of cocoanuts we stand in. I hear no orders.
Our men appear to be loafing. The master is on the bridge. The chief mate
is on the forecastle head. The leadsman is in the chains. The leadsman
chants, and the bright apple-green water of a reef with its fringe of
snow insensibly approaches. And I am still listening to the echoes from
the hills of our roaring cable when, as if our boats were sentient and
behaved like retriever dogs, they are already away and making for the
beach. For our men get plenty of practice. In the Gulf of Tomino alone we
called at about fifteen little places in one day, anchored, and got the
boats out.

It would be useless to name these beaches. They are known only to the
Dutchmen of the K.P.M. (It is easier to write those letters than to say
Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatshappij.) These steamers serve all the Malay
Islands. They touch at places where there is nothing to mark land but
a tree or two upright on universal glass, lost under vast and radiant
clouds. What is the use of naming such spots? One sunrise our siren
blared when we were idling along Celebes. Another anchorage! I was going
to the upper deck and overtook the captain. Where were we? At Paleleh!

But what and where is Paleleh? I had never heard of it. On the map before
me now it is not even marked. Yet surely it should be there; I am certain
that once I saw it. Why does the map so casually doubt me? I must have
been there, and it ought to be fairly easy to recognize the place again.
There was a narrow gulf going deeply into the land, and in the pallor
of dawn the moon’s ghost had stopped rolling when on the verge of a
declivity. As it was, it was hanging only just above the water. An islet
was at the entrance of the bay, on a floor of silver. Every tree on it
was plain, but as though seen in a dream. The sun came up over a tumbled
sea of acute hills, and to them we headed. His rays struck down profound
chasms toward us. Over the starboard bow was an immense dark wall, with
a threshold of chrysolite athwart the mirror of the bay. That vague band
of greenish light at the foot of the wall began to crystallize, and the
crystals became the fronds of cocoanut palms. Set within the groves of
that beach were the huts of Paleleh.

There cannot be any doubt about it. My map is at fault. I landed at
Paleleh, and I remember a shop kept by a Chinaman—on consideration,
however, that is not evidence. The shops in all these places are kept
by Chinamen. Nor can I pretend that the fact that nothing was happening
at Paleleh proves anything. Nothing has got its work cut out to prove
Anything. Yet I must insist that the arrival of our steamer caused
little interest, even among the children. I thought the folk of Paleleh
had passed out of time, and so knew all. They had been through every
experience. Their sun announced itself every day to them in just that
way above mountain forests; its light fell in great rays from upper
embrasures. Their sea was always of the same colors. Men sometimes
came to them from the other world and then went again. An astonishing
butterfly was hovering over the scarlet blossoms of a shrub by the
foreshore; a group of children by the shrub, no less surprising with
their colors, were as indifferent to the creature as though they knew all
the wonders of Paradise. Our own Malays were wading up to their middles
from beach to boats and back again, carrying bags of copra, till the hot
air was loaded with the oily smell of it.

I sat on a beam at the end of a jetty, waiting for the steamer to warn
me to board her again. Near me a canoe was anchored by a large stone and
a cable of rattan. I could see her thin cable oblique in a transparency
to where her anchor rested in three fathoms; and it was then I noticed
that the water in the shadow of the canoe was a wavering and translucent
sapphire. Is it likely that I could have invented such a color as that?
The sea might not have been below my feet; only occasional ripples
betrayed the division between air and water. A shoal of little fish
glanced in electric flashes amid the branches of a bush of coral, and a
larger fish, black and gold like a tiger, hovered over them. Pipe fishes
ran their long snouts along the surface. A sea snake, banded yellow and
black, threaded the submarine garden and serpentined into a hole in some
rocks. A score of Paleleh people were sprawled on the old timbers of the
wharf. They had nothing to talk about and nothing to do. They could have
taken no less notice of me if I had been invisible. I certainly got the
feeling myself that there was no reason in such a place why a steamer
should ever sound a warning, or that, if it did, one should ever heed it.




CHAPTER XXII


Before this book is done I shall have to speak of Maguire; and it had
better be here while there is nothing else to do. Borneo is on one side
of us and Celebes on the other, and I don’t know which the _Savoe_ will
visit next, for both are at the same distance, and she appears to be
heading for neither.

I had heard of Maguire in the most unlikely places. His name would slip
into a conversation early and naturally, but, so far as I could see,
without occasion. It might have been waiting about, in the air, in the
shadows, ready to take any excuse for prolonging its mortality. “Once
when I was with Maguire ...” It was always supposed that I must know
him. There was never a prelude, no hint of a face or a figure. Everybody
ought to know Maguire, I had to suppose, or else lose the richness of the
stories about him. But I had never met Maguire, and nothing that I was
told of him made me feel that in him something rare had eluded me. For
nothing was ever said which made him plain. Yet this man had so impressed
himself upon those who knew him that they could not pass a few odd days
with a stranger in a coasting steamer or a government rest-house without
thinking of him.

When two or three travelers somehow got round to Maguire again, by candle
light after dinner in a rest-house, I then began to watch the shadows
alter as the silent Malays troubled the darkness beyond us, or gaze into
thatch, searching for the rustling lizards I could hear but could not
make out. It was not much good listening to what was said about that man.
I knew it would be no more than hints, with all the clews left out for
me. They seemed to think it was unnecessary to say more.

What was curious was their note of respect. They were not respectful
men. Respect out here for an absent wayfarer is certainly strange. The
climate and customs of this coast and forest do little to put us in a
good light. But even so, I could not glimpse Maguire as a reality. He
was an amusing myth, if anything at all. Besides, nobody is expected to
take quite seriously much that he is likely to hear in the ships and the
coastal towns from Singapore to Zamboanga by way of Borneo. One hears
many odd tales, but their chief virtue is that usually one has plenty
of time for them. Maguire was like the stories one heard of adventures
on unfrequented distant islands, of queer native customs, of accidents
in grotesque circumstances which could have reached their perfection of
monstrous form only after long usage and polishing in the cabins of many
ships and in many random hostels. Perhaps once there had been a man named
Maguire, and a few words about him were still being passed round because
they could not be stopped, and because nobody really knew whether he was
alive or dead, and did not care.

One day a chance companion I found in a village on the coast of Borneo,
after mentioning the now familiar legend, said he was going to see
Maguire that afternoon. Would I come? The Irishman was staying in the
place.

Was that an invitation to add an aspect of veracity to an unsubstantial
story? Of course! It was supposed that I would forget it—have something
else to do that afternoon; for out East there is rarely a need to see
in these invitations more than idle politeness, because conversation,
too, in this moist heat, becomes slack and aimless, and therefore easily
friendly. So I was greatly surprised, when comfortably reading, to see my
friend stroll in and affect reproach that I was not dressed like himself,
for an immediate visit to the substance of this familiar legend.

I had to go. There was a large native house built on stilts above the
ground, with the usual groups of cocoanut and betel palms about it. We
saw an elderly Malay, a lean and dignified figure—a _datoh_, or chief, I
understood—who met us at the foot of a ladder which led up to the door
of a great hut. Within the shadow of that door some figures watched us,
which we knew were women by the brightness of their dress. Near the chief
were several little children staring at us, all of them naked but one
tiny girl, who wore a silver leaf pendent from a silver chain round her
hips. My friend and the chief conversed apart.

I was told at last that Maguire was not there. “He has been here,” the
_datoh_ says, “but he has gone again, and nobody knows where.”

Nobody knew where! Of course not. I looked at the chief, who nodded
seriously, and half turned and waved an arm toward the forest. I stared
solemnly at an indigo range of hills set far back in the dark unexplored
land beyond that clearing, and nodded as sagely as the _datoh_. The Malay
smiled sardonically.

There came a long interval in which I heard no more about him. In fact,
we had something else to think about at that time. It was near the
beginning of the rainy season—much too near for me, for with yet another
chance companion I was at last traversing the forests of the inland
mountains. I was not happy about it, for the country was new to me; new
to most white men, in fact, for where we were it was unsurveyed. And my
companion, who was leading our little party, confessed to difficulties in
a way which convinced me that if I did not take charge of an expedition
which was no affair of mine, then it might finish up in a ludicrous and
unfortunate way, and that it stood a good chance of finishing in such a
way even if I did.

I believe the Malays with us divined what was in my mind. We were
standing in perplexity and extreme discomfort in a jungle track which had
been made by the beasts, listening there to my companion’s confession of
despair through being at fault in his quest. The natives must have known
what opinion I was forming, because when I looked up they were watching
me closely and were paying no attention to the other white man. Some show
of resolution and indifference in adversity—which I did not feel in the
least—certainly had to be given this business of two Europeans. With a
fine display of the use of compass and chart a point was fixed upon, and
we took another route.

We camped for the night. There were sandflies, a mug of coffee, and
nothing to eat. It would certainly rain. Our wet clothes were blotched
with blood because of leech bites. I cursed that night the folly of my
impulse to a new experience. I had found an adventure now, without
doubt. “If we could only meet Maguire,” groaned my despairing companion.
That was the only bit of fun of the day.

We continued our journey next morning through a forest and up a shrouded
declivity, which was so gloomy and fantastic that I could not help
glancing apprehensively into its silent and heated shadows. But we saw
nothing, of course, except the tracks of animals. We plowed up to the
knees through horrible bogs and then stopped to disconnect from our
bodies the leeches which we had picked up in them. We paused for a rest
by a clear stream in the woods, across which the trail we were to follow
went up still more into the shades. Our men stood about, their packs on
the ground, picking off the beastly worms from their brown limbs. The
columns of great trees inclosed us in a wreckage of vines. The trunks
mounted into a silent darkness. These tropical forests are not so
friendly as English woods.

I was waiting for my companion to own up to a disposition to start
again, and was gazing up the track we were to follow, when two terriers
appeared. They were not native dogs. They were much too independent
and truculent for that. They stopped when they saw us, cocked their
ears, barked, and looked back to somebody. A slight but lively figure
appeared, making long, energetic strides over the forest litter. Its
face was hidden by the broad brim of a felt hat. It wore a neat khaki
tunic, riding breeches, and puttees. It was a soldierly figure in that
dress, with a rifle under its arm. “Why, there’s Maguire!” exclaimed my
surprised companion to himself.

The figure stopped a few paces off and surveyed our most unbusiness-like
outfit. It did not seem to notice me at all. But I knew at a glance who
now would take over our little affair. This man, Maguire, was going to
take charge of us,—that is to say, if he lived. The translucent pallor of
his shrunken and hairless face was ghastly. The eyes were alive, however.
They were restless, abrupt, and intent. Their instant bright regard
seemed to penetrate. I was impressed, but a little repelled also, for
somehow the pallor and the intensity of force suggested by this slender
figure gave a hint of coldness and cruelty.

“Been sick?” he was asked.

“Fever, and nothing but durians to eat for a fortnight.”

While the two of them were talking, I undid one of the packs and got out
a bottle of whisky.

“If you’ve lived on durians for a fortnight, what about a drop of this?”

Our new friend stared at the bottle, then smiled a slow and beautiful
smile. “This saves my life,” he said.

Maguire decided for us. I did not hear what the decision was, and did not
trouble to find out. I was far from sure that I should like the man, but
I was quite sure that his was the only word worth having in that place.
One only had to look at him. I should go where he led. He and his rifle
started off with decision enough, quickening our pace, somehow giving
more activity to the Malays and inspiring my despondent companion with
an ardor from Heaven knows what source. I put away my chart. We forded
unknown rivers continually, waded through swamps, climbed hills, and
swung down through the jungle on the other side; and all at a pace and
without a rest which would have caused some of us to complain bitterly
a few hours before. Our leader never looked back and never stopped. He
expected us to manage difficulties in his own way. If a man with fever,
who had starved for a fortnight, could go like that on a mouthful of
whisky, I wondered what he could do when he was at his best.

He shot a wild pig, and got us to a small hut at last, where, with the
right kind of fire, which had been impossible in the dank forest, we had
what must have been the most enjoyable dinner ever spread on a floor.
That hut was on the slope of a clearing, in a narrow valley, and below
us a river was turbulent over rocks with the first impulse of the rains.
We sat on a log, he and I, looking across and yawning, and watching vast
storm clouds gather about the sunset. A respect, at least, began to form
for that strange man, perhaps because he gave a comfortable feeling of
security where there had been none before. His speech was ironical, yet
in such short, quick sentences that the unwary might have thought the man
was a simpleton. For a very brief time I myself thought so, till I got
from him a shaft which was no accident, but was aimed to hit me where I
felt it. But Maguire did not smile, though I laughed aloud. He had my
bearings before I had got his. Did he know London? He smiled.

“You can keep your great cities,” he said. He was whittling a stick,
and held it away from him while he shut one eye to scrutinize its
straightness. “One day in Singapore, when I have to go, is enough for
me,” he remarked. “It’s better here.”

“Why, what’s the matter with the cities? I’ve been wishing lately I was
back in one.”

“I guess you have been. You would. But I never do. This is all right for
me. I know what things are here.”

“We know what they are in the cities, I suppose.”

Across the river, a mile away, as it fell dark a local storm thundered
and flashed.

“Another sector catching it to-night,” said the man in the dark beside me.

“What’s the game?” I asked. “A local raid?”

Maguire chuckled. Then he said: “The Somme told me all I wanted to know
of Europe—that and the Vimy Ridge and some odd corners. If you smart city
people arrange a show like that again, don’t worry about me. I shall be
fine here with the orang-utans.”

My now invisible partner said more, which would have been allusive except
for the easy derision which his fun did not sufficiently moderate. I
got the idea that I was included in his mockery. Then he began to chant
softly a very indecorous song, a specialty of the Australian soldiers
when they felt most hilarious on the march. I knew it and joined in.
Maguire thereupon broke loose, and together we bawled the offensive words
at the mute desolation of central Borneo, just as once they had been
shouted in defiance of the nightmare in France.

For some time after that he took care of us, and what otherwise would
have been a region where men like myself most likely would have died,
he turned into an attractive and adventurous prospect. The Malays,
wherever we met them, greeted our leader as though he were good fortune.
Certainly we never found a difficulty—though sometimes I thought they
were insuperable—which did not vanish as soon as Maguire went to it.

I lost count of the days, and often could not have guessed within a score
of miles of our place on the map. That did not matter. It is something
like a miracle that another human soul, without knowing what it is doing,
should change the look of the world to us, turn a steaming forest full
of unknown dangers into an exhilarating pleasure, and make even the
loathsome leeches, hunger, and the thought of fever only the jokes of the
place.

The rains, rather before they were due, began in almost continual
seriousness. We had to plunge into and half swim some of the streams.
The leeches increased by myriads. Darkness settled down on the hills,
penetrated, like something palpable, into the everlasting woods, and
remained there, a settled gloom. We were never dry. Maguire was working
round to the hut by the river where we had spent the first night with him.

But something had gone wrong with that country. The hills had become
morasses and the low ground was water. The jungle was flooded for miles.
But Maguire was concerned about a Chinaman he had left in that hut, and
he was going to reach it. To me it seemed impossible. We were thwarted
at every approach. And it still rained, as though the solid earth were
doomed and there would never be dry land any more. Maguire at first was
comical at any new check, with eloquent outbursts against Chinamen and
their entire uselessness and inconsequence. Let the beggar die. Then we
would turn back as if he had abandoned his quest. Soon, though, we found
he was only trying another device.

At length the man became silent and serious. We had no more of his fun;
and for twenty hours he and I alone toiled through that inferno of
water, mud, and trees, in a menacing silence and twilight of the earth.
That fellow’s energy and his tireless and intense mind took me along,
indifferent to anything that could happen now, as though his body and
spirit were sufficient for two men, for any number of men.

Within an hour of night we came to a vantage above our hut, and that
river, once so low and picturesque, was now a swollen power destroying
the country. It had no confines. It was driving irresistibly through the
jungle of the lower slopes, carrying acres of trees with it. Its deep
roar shook the soul. A patch of land near us, which yet was unsubmerged,
was alive with pigs and deer.

Our hut, though it had been high above the river, now had the water
around its walls. A hundred yards of eddying but quieter river separated
us from it. Beyond it again our canoe was tugging violently at its
tether, which was attached to a tree. In a few minutes its nose would be
pulled under. And the Chinaman was sitting on the roof of the hut. When
he saw us he raised a melancholy howl.

Maguire undid his puttees, took off his boots, waded in, and off he went.
It was lunacy, and I could not help him. I could not help myself, after
almost a day in that forest. The swimmer passed the hut and reached the
canoe. He got in, cut its mooring rattan, and presently had the Chinaman
off the roof and beside me. The man sprawled at our feet, shivering and
moaning. Maguire kicked him and loudly demanded to know why he had no
food cooked. Had he been smoking opium all the time, to let the river
rise like that? He could take his money and go. The Irishman pushed off
again, called out that there was a rifle and map in the hut and he must
get them. When he reached the miserable structure I saw that entrance to
it was impossible; the water had almost reached the eaves of the thatch.
But a figure in the last light of that day appeared on the ridge of the
thatch and began hacking it desperately, casting the palm leaves into the
stream; and presently it lowered itself through the hole it had made and
disappeared within.

I watched for the silhouette of Maguire to reappear on the ridge of that
precarious vantage in the waters. The Chinaman beside me continued to
moan, and in frantic desperation I could have kicked him myself. It grew
darker. The hut suddenly went oblique and continued slowly to decrease.
Maguire’s head appeared above it like a black chimney pot. He began to
chant aloud his ribald song. Then the flimsy structure flattened on the
water, flattened and spread, with the Irishman in the midst of the vague
rubbish, and hurried downstream, missed a headland of trees, tossed in
the waves of a cataract, and all I could see of it went on and vanished
at a place where some giant bamboos were stretching and rocking on the
flood like slender rushes.




CHAPTER XXIII


_July 12._—We are at Amurang, a village on the northwest coast of
Celebes. It is only a line of palms and huts under the hills, but it
serves to remind us that the world is inhabited. Our siren blared, and we
waited for Amurang to bring to us its wealth. There is a huddle of dugout
canoes with double outriggers by our side, most of them peddlers with
fish and fruit for our native passengers. We idle and watch this invasion
of spacious emptiness by a little happy life.

There were added some interesting figures to our saloon company at
Macassar, and my position at table has again changed. Now I am sentenced
to the bottom; but I have been at the top, and the last change assures me
that the Dutch officers have accepted me as one of the ship’s company.
Opposite to me now is a fragile young lady in white muslin with a
pink sash. She is, I am told, a native of Minahasa, with no European
admixture. Her crown of black hair dwindles her pale face, which is
flattened, like the Malay, though it has no more color than would be
cast by a soft, transparent shadow. Her lips are full and purplish, her
nose broad, and her large eyes, widely separated, are as apprehensive
and limpid as a deer’s. The chief officer tells me that a century ago
her people were cannibals. She compares in graciousness and refinement
most favorably with the best Europeans, and her occasional embarrassment
during dinner when yet another hearty Dutch mess of pottage appears at
her elbow is very funny, and a pleasant comment on our civilized habits.
I like the way she recoils from a dish of oily meat. One would as soon
offer it to a butterfly. She speaks French, as well as Malay and Dutch;
but I do not intend to expose my Parisian accent to the regard of a
daughter of cannibals, for I know what it would look like. I have not
spoken to her; and to-day she left us. The farewells here are no concern
of mine, so I do not stand at the gangway. To my agreeable surprise,
the Minahasa nymph, who had never looked at me, floated across the deck
to bid God-speed to the torpid and solitary Englishman, offering me a
tiny hand in a way that would have honored a king. We need not stand
in awe, perhaps, of the gap in time between a savage and the daughter
of a hundred earls. And there is with us now another native lady, not
quite the same, but I hear she is most deplorably rich. This must be so
because her ears are weighted with diamonds as large as bottle stoppers;
and she wears more rings than I should have thought the fingers of two
hands could accommodate. She is middle-aged, haughty, and coffee-colored,
and her elaborate European dress of silk gives her massive figure the
shapeless bulk of a costumed elephant. Her bare brown arms with their
freckles, like indelible stains, are heavier still with gold bangles. She
was announced as Miss Evans, but she does not speak Cymry. What would
not one give to learn her family history? What Welsh pirate—they were so
often and so successfully Welsh—who retired to Java long ago for reasons
that were sufficient, enriched her people by linking them to the men of
Harlech?

[Illustration: _He Sits in Front of His Shop in Macassar_

(_See p. 127_)]

_July 13._—This virgin coast of Celebes, which again since Amurang has
appeared to be a ghostly conjuration near us, yet not to be verified, has
suddenly become solid, humane, and close, and is called Menado. This is
the chief port of Minahasa, the northeastern limb of Celebes, and Menado
lightly sustains the beautiful name of its province. There is nothing so
good on the coast of Java. Mountains surround Menado’s noble bay; and
beyond the business quarters of the town, which of course are no better
than commerce usually makes of its quarters, the broad roads, shaded by
kanary and cassia trees, are bordered by shrubberies in which villas,
mostly of timber in the native style, float hull deep in a tumble of
leaves and flowers.

It is politic to get lost when you are ashore at a place for the first
time, and it was not long before I had to disentangle myself from a
native village in which I fancied I was invading screened affairs. Then
I found myself lonely on a steep bank of black sand, where in places
trees overshadowed the sea. Along the foreshore was a tide line of sea
litter, husks of cocoanuts, carapaces of crabs, dried sea-urchins,
strayed timbers, and a fragment of a ship’s board on which were the
last two letters of her name. A drove of lean and grizzled swine were
nosing there. A few catamarans were made fast above the tide to volcanic
bowlders. Only the smell of decaying sea wrack was familiar on that
beach. While I was sitting on the gunwale of a dugout canoe, over which
was a dark canopy of leaves, assured that I could hear nothing of
Charing Cross, and wondering why I had not remembered earlier that such
beaches may be found if one is both willful and lucky, a voice asked me
whether Celebes pleased me. That figure in white had come down behind me
unannounced by sand that was as dark and noiseless as midnight. He was a
Dutch official, and he had seen London in my hat. (That hat!) Did I know
Lake Tondano? No, but I had heard of it. Then would I honor him by going
thither in his car? The Dutch are friendly souls, though not often so
informal and enterprising as that. I assured him that I would convey my
warm approval of Holland to Whitehall.

The rest of Celebes may be waiting for its explorers, yet soon it was
clear that Minahasa is not only comely even in Indonesia, but that it
would be remarkable among earth’s showiest attractions. Our car mounted,
was besieged by flamboyant foliage, was released to vast prospects
where a misty lower brightness that was the sea invaded a far vague
plain inclosed by mountains; there were dark islands in the sea. We
passed through forests to the shrilling of cicadas. When we rose to the
coolness of the plateau of Tondano the villages suggested that they had
been designed to excite the wonder of strangers. The houses were in the
style of the Malay hut, but were larger and were built of solid timber
on stone foundations. There was evidence everywhere that the folk here
were refined and gentle. Along the ledge of every veranda were porcelain
flower pots—not vile petrol tins, as everywhere else in the East, which
make even orchids look like molting birds of paradise in cheap cages.
Roses, dahlias, sunflowers, and crotons with colored and variegated
foliage were neatly displayed under plantations of areca and sugar
palms, and the plantains. The cattle resembled the deer-like creatures of
the Channel Islands at home. The plain about the great lake was planted
with rice and maize. In one hamlet, where the Protestant church was a
surprise with its air of placid content and irrevocable decision, the
brown nippers were just coming out of school. No procession of young
virgins taking the Hampstead air under the eye of a mistress who would
stand no nonsense could have improved on the sedate superiority of
those girls of Minahasa, bareheaded, barefooted, in white muslin, with
prodigious plaited tails of black hair tied with black bows. They carried
books in their hands, and they seemed well aware that they were of the
best people and must walk home in just that way. They did not look at us,
but talked to one another discreetly, and my own feeling certainly was
that I belonged to a cheaper suburb.

My Dutch companion noticed my astonishment and chuckled. I learned that
no more than a century ago this part of Celebes was inhabited by savages
who lived in village communities placed higher on stilts than usual,
for they desired to have a chance, if surprised by head-hunters. And
all of them were collectors of heads. It was a local pastime, for as
they did no work, they had to amuse themselves somehow. Each village had
its own dialect, and cannibalism was then a righteous act, conferring
virtue and turning men into heroes, as warfare does to-day. The Dutch,
who followed the Portuguese into northern Celebes, woke after a hundred
years of sleep to the fact that the natives of this part of Celebes were
rather different from the other islanders; that they were more active,
more intelligent, more comely, and that they were not, by comparison,
uncleanly in their ways. So encouraged, the Dutch presented these savages
with a few coffee beans and some instruction. To grow coffee it was
necessary for the head-hunters to descend from their stilted homes; and
to sell the crop in Tondano meant the making of roads. With their homes
on the ground, and easy paths between the hostile villages, the hunting
of heads became much too serious for a pastime, and it was given up. The
present village of Tondano would be an ornament in a petted baronial
estate in Sussex, but originally it was built on piles in the great lake.
The Dutch officials, however, preferred to meet these people where you
were not likely to drop through the floor into deep water just when you
were getting the better of an argument with some fine fellows dressed in
a few shells. They persuaded the villagers of the propriety of rebuilding
Tondano some miles away from the unhealthy lake. And that was where I
found it, with its children leaving their schoolhouse and carrying their
books with such conscious grace. Why is it we are told with even furious
emphasis that it is impossible to alter human nature? Is that emphasis
really a symptom of fear? Do our brigadiers really worry because they
dread that they may be cured of head-hunting? Do our social parasites
secretly fear that they may be cured of greed?

_July 14._—At sunset we passed through the Sangi Islands, eyries for the
pirates of Sulu a few years ago. Our course is east; we have entered the
Molucca Passage. I remained on deck, kept there by a mere name. After
Magellan died in the Philippines the survivors of that most remarkable
of voyages came south to the Moluccas, the “Islands of the Kings,” and
sheltered at Ternate. Ternate is a word, as Milton knew, like Samarkand
and Cathay. To the Elizabethan it meant the splendor at the world’s end
and the most a sailor could do. At midnight I had the deck to myself,
and there I stayed till daylight. The bo’sun-birds, which are said to be
the restless souls of dead mariners, mourned around us in the dark. Now
and then one of them would pass like a wraith through the beam of light
in our foretop. The unseen surge chanted quietly of what men had done
and of what men had forgotten. Our ship, I began to feel, was at the end
of time, was at the verge of all the seas, and she herself was but the
shadow of a memory drifting under strange stars in a quest for what man
will never find again.




CHAPTER XXIV


One day the chief engineer of the _Savoe_ was feeding his parrots. He has
a noisy display of them on the boat deck. When I spoke to him he turned
on me abruptly and peered intently at my face for a clew, perhaps, to
what he thought was an English joke. “You cannot stay at Ternate,” he
said, doubtfully. I explained that this was easy. One merely left the
ship and did not return. It was not possible, the chief replied. And
then I learned that the island might vanish at any moment. It was only a
volcano. And while it remained above the sea I should be without electric
light, intellectual resources, gin, himself, and news of the world. There
was nothing at Ternate but barbarians and nether fires. I told him that
barbarians would be a nice change and that I had a morbid interest in the
infernal.

“All right,” he said, bitterly, “when we find you again you will ’ave
fezzers in your ’air.” He pantomimed with his fingers, to represent
quills upright on his brow. He turned to his parrots and refused to
converse any more with an ungrateful fool.

But how could anyone approach the Spice Islands at sunrise and not wish
to call that his journey’s end? Leave the ship and possibly the world?
If Ternate was not the place for which I had been looking, then it was
the phantom of it; and in any case it was my duty to stay, if only to
dispel an illusion, and then return to become a cenobite who had proved
this alluring world to be a dream from which nothing should be expected.
We stood toward Gilolo, as it is named on the English maps, though it
should be called Halmaheira. That greater and more distant island of the
Moluccas was only a definite shadow of lilac. Behind it were monstrous
billows of vapor that could have rolled from a fire which had been
immense, but was extinct. The volumes of smoke, and that sea of tarnished
silver, had been stilled. Nothing had moved there since the last of the
old navigators sailed westward. Close to us soared the two imperative
heads of Ternate and Tidore. Whether the fires of Ternate were alight, or
whether the dawn had merely kindled a cloud at its summit, it was hard to
say. Some native craft were about, but I thought they were abandoned, for
they did not move, but remained in one place between sea and sky, held
fast by their reflections, perhaps.

We passed the small island of Hiera, a rounded lump of forest, and drew
abeam of Ternate. At first it seemed merely the perfect and typical
cone of a volcano, but soon its summit was seen as a more irregular and
complex crater, with embrasures, and the northern side of it reddish with
precipitous ash. An old lava flow wound down in black hummocks through
the verdure and ran into the sea. Ternate, excepting along its narrow
selvedge of plantations, seemed more a place for birds than for men. Its
high inclined upper forest was recessed into many dark ravines. Its bare
head was in an upper light beyond the attainment of man. Some smoke was
constant there, and, we imagined, some reflections; but all was so remote
that fancy could do much as it liked with the summit of Ternate, which
was not quite of this world. We opened the village, and came alongside a
jetty in deep water, where the bottom could be seen in the way we should
see fields if the air was a tinted and pulsing lens. I stood on the old
planks of that jetty, with the lucky barbaric figures about me—Malays, of
course, but these men were more inclined to laughter and energetic talk
than the natives to the westward. The hair of some of them was waved, and
there were even a few frizzy mops; New Guinea is next door to Ternate.

Between the planks I could see the tide under our feet, but if a swarm
of fish had not passed below like blue arrows and like globes of yellow
light, the water would not have been there. Crimson lories were perched
on the rail of the jetty and on the shoulders of the barbarians. There
was an unusual liveliness and sparkle in the air. I knew perfectly well
my ship would have to leave without me.

In a lane out of the village, which led up the first slope of the
mountain, I found the _pasangrahan_, or rest-house, in a shrubbery of
hibiscus. A Malay lady called her boys, and they showed me to a large
cool room, and behaved as though they expected and hoped that I should
never leave them again. I sat in the shade of a veranda, looked out at
some cocoanut palms overhanging our garden in a blaze of still light, and
lit a pipe. My steamer’s siren abruptly warned her loiterers. She was off.

I struck another match. Some one laughed in the next garden. What else
would anyone do in a place which appeared to be all gardens in peace in
the glow of no ordinary day? Then my ship gave her salute of farewell.
Water would be between her and the jetty. I was marooned.

What is luck when we find it? It depends on ourselves, I suppose. It
is only a way of looking at things. Luck is not there if we cannot see
it; and even if we have no doubt that at last we are looking at it, our
exclamation of pleasure, should we be indiscreet enough to make it, may
only prove to our saddened friends that we are in reality no wiser than
their privy guess.

It was long past noon, and by the look of the rest-house, and the empty
lane beyond the garden, and the prospect of the slope of the mountain,
Ternate was abandoned. There was not a sound. Nothing moved; not a bird,
not a frond. The fronds might have been of enameled metal. Perhaps
everybody had departed in the steamer and the island was mine. I felt,
as did Robinson Crusoe, that I must go out and make an inventory of my
fortune. The lane led up toward the impending declivity, but as though
that ascent were far too steep it turned lazily northward among the easy
groves parallel to the beach. There were many smells. One had to stop
and try them again. Once it was frangipani, and once it was vanilla, and
once it was cloves. There was a somber plantation of small and unfamiliar
trees. They had glossy leaves and a fruit like green plums; but their
fragrance, which was only a faint and occasional air, was familiar. My
memory was slow, and I wondered why it was I knew the smell of trees I
had never seen before. On one tree a number of the green plums had opened
at the bottom, and disclosed within each was a heart overlain with a
scarlet filigree. In that twilight the opened fruit were as bright as
glow lamps. What are the Spice Islands for but nutmegs?

The great breadfruit tree with its extravagant leaves, the slight and
delicate areca palm under the crowns of stalwart cocoanuts, and the
translucent emerald pennants of the plantain, may all some day get the
verses they demand. But not here. When I looked at them that afternoon I
felt in the mood for singing them, yet singing is another matter. To feel
impelled to sing in praise, though that is a mind commendable in a man,
may result in notes having but slight harmonic relevance to the genius of
the impulse, a sad truth which poets often regret to observe is known to
their critics. Sometimes I saw a house, looking in its frailty within an
arbor but the afterthought of a lotus-eater who wanted a thatch for his
sleeping-mat; a ladder led from the ground to its door, which was open
to show that only dark silence inhabited it. The trees gave the lane a
kind of greenish dusk. There was no sea and the mountain was invisible.
Occasionally the path crossed the dried bed of a torrent, and by the
water-worn bowlders of such a miniature ravine I turned off through a
plantation of palms to find the sea. By the look of it that grove was
eternal. It had no end. The gray aisles of inclined trunks gave only an
illusion of space. I could not surprise the columns into granting any
deep vista. They closed round me as I passed, though I did not see them
move and could not hear them. But suddenly they opened, and left me in
the sun on a beach of black sand.

Even the sea was asleep in the heat. It was only breathing. There
across the water of a narrow strait soared the peak and forests of the
neighboring isle of Tidore. Tidore’s sharp crater reached as high as a
white cloud. I stood in an effort to understand this apparition. But what
could mortal man make of it? Besides, it was all as surprising as that
brief but unexpected revelation of the earth’s virtue which shines at
times just before the sun goes. But this brightness of the Moluccas did
not fade, though I watched it for I forget how long. Tidore remained, a
wall of forest diminishing to the sky, seemingly true and close to me,
but with that denying strip of sea between us. As for my own island,
there were the cocoanuts behind me, and one melancholy bird calling in
them. The beach on one hand disappeared among some mangroves, which were
wading in the sea. On the other hand, beyond a spit, was a canoe with a
stem like the neck of a swan, a frail black shape on a shining tide, and
in it the naked moving figures of three fishermen appeared legendary.
I attempted to reach the little cape, to look round the corner, but a
swamp turned me inland again and brought me to an impassable region of
mangroves, an aqueous wood holding only shadows, where grisly stems
projected from the sludge like the elbows and knees of the drowned. The
mud of a near pool erupted into life and a crocodile raised its head to
regard me. Moreover, night was not far off.

It was comforting to find the lane again, where now the islanders were
strolling leisurely home. The women balanced pots on their heads, the men
carried fish. Lights began to appear in the shacks. At supper that night
perhaps I might have eaten less _daging babi_ if the Dutch missionary
who occupied the rest-house with me had not displayed so speculative a
mind in philosophy and had not indulged me with stories of neighboring
islands which would have been improbable from any man but a scholarly
missionary. Roast pig, however, when it is eaten late and thoughtlessly
with philosophy, metaphysics, and anthropology, is a revengeful beast,
and I woke with a sweating sense of a calamity that approached. What was
it? Where was it? I could not see even the mosquito curtains, and my
electric torch proved false. I listened for whatever was coming.

Nothing came; but my bed, which appeared to have the same dread as
myself, trembled on its own account. I supposed then that the missionary
might be walking heavily in the next room.




CHAPTER XXV


In the early morning, which did not come too soon, I found the missionary
out by the beach. He told me my bed had been frightened because the
island itself had moved. Indeed, some nervous people left their beds
long before sunrise to watch flames at the crater. The missionary threw
up his chin to look at the summit. That was as peaceful then as a chalk
down. He suggested that trouble was coming. There were signs, he said,
that the present outlines of sea and land about there were disapproved
by whatever artist was surveying them. The resolve was accumulating for
a more comfortable adjustment, and some folk, living somewhere about
the line of volcanoes running through Sumatra, Java, the Sundas, the
Moluccas, the Philippines, and up to Japan, would presently know that
they had to pay for the relaying of the earth’s floor thereabouts.[2]
This missionary, himself resigned to the will of God, had seen it happen
in the past, but he complained that he would prefer not to be a witness
if our basement were withdrawn suddenly because another place required it
as a first floor. Just off the pier on which we stood a Malay in a canoe
was straining at a cast net so full of a sort of little herring that it
seemed to be as heavy as a load of silver.

After breakfast, as rain threatened, my Christian friend presented me,
as an unexpected treat, with a various donation of the kind of magazine
which is currently popular in England. He told me that he is in the habit
of sharpening his knowledge of English upon them. I glanced at them, but
wondered what he could mean. I had thought his knowledge of our language
was different from magazine English, which it would be unfair to teach to
Papuans. There was nothing else to do, so I toiled steadily, as a sort of
propitiatory penance for my leisure on a tropical beach, through number
after number, in a fatuous effort to discover why and how they were made.
What first drew me to this quest was the discovery that quite a number
of the stories oddly concerned the South Seas and the Malay Islands.
For some reason well known to the wholesale milliners who trimmed those
pages the Orient and the South Seas are the decorations favored by those
who enjoy popular magazines. On the whole, perhaps a Malay or a Solomon
Islander, when imagining the marvels of London and Manchester for the
wonder of his neighbors, might conceive something stranger than those
English yarns about the oceanic dots of the tropics; yet it is proper
for us to bear in mind that at home we are supposed to be not as unaware
as Solomon Islanders. We ought to know more about them than they know
about us. And, anyhow, there is no escape from the fact that English
is our language, and that we ought to use it to better purpose than do
the less fortunate their feathers, shells, and glass beads. There can
be no excuse for our untutored abandon with the words which once were
ordered into “Macbeth” and “Endymion.” When we see our fellows, nearly
five hundred years after their renaissance, when Athens and Rome and a
New World together called them out of darkness into light, using to-day
their heritage as though it were no better than the wash in which may be
floated the delectable oddments for the trough, then it is certain that
Malay fishermen, chanting traditional songs at their paddles, know better
what to do with their life and letters. In one magazine an Englishwoman
wrote about a ship as though the English had never seen a ship since the
_Mary Rose_ foundered; a Papuan, before he had got over his excitement,
and before fully recovering his speech, might make the same display
over an airplane. In another magazine there was a tale of Borneo. Its
writer was moved to describe for us the forest of that great island, and
from him I learned that “the aged and unprofitable jungle monarchs—like
elderly bigoted ministers of a past decade—must give way to the eternal
advances of the younger generation. Henceforth there would be no
shackling, clogging weeds, no more overcrowding, nothing but clear-cut,
regularly planted yielders of latex.” True, we know that kind of writing
is always possible, and comes up anywhere when the ground is neglected
among the brickbats and the old meat tins on the outer marches of our
culture. What is original about it now is that we should display it for
sale, as though it were a gardener’s triumph. And how well it symbolizes
the happy mind of the civilized man as he contemplates in confidence the
superiority of his state! He has never seen the forest of Borneo; but he
does know the beauty of motor tires. He has never seen the dismal rows of
mean Para rubber trees, exiled and regimented, and does not know that a
close and long association with such a plantation would be excuse enough
for an outburst of crime on the part of a gentle and sensitive gorilla.
He recognizes motor tires at a glance, but he has never stood alone in
the silence of the Bornean forest, and so is unaware that in kanary and
gum-dammar trees there is a somber and Gothic majesty which man has never
attained except in those cathedrals he has now forgotten how to build,
and that about the capitals and pediments of those columns a wealth of
ferns and epiphytes is so airily poised and startling in that spectral
light that a watcher is inclined to wonder whether he should trespass
further. Unprofitable and clogging weeds! No wonder we have forgotten how
to build cathedrals and to compose symphonies when rubber plantations
are taken to symbolize the conquest of mind over matter! Is modern man
degenerating into a noisy and destructive urchin who will use the whole
planet as once the Vandals did Rome? Certainly his behavior is becoming
alarming, and his confident guffaws under the eternal stars must warn
them that life below has taken another awkward turn. Yet it is idle to
complain. Science has put the tools into his hands which he for himself
could never have discovered, and it looks as though he will maim himself
and all else with them, unless some one brings a light and a mirror
before it is too late, and persuades him to take a long and steady look
at himself.

I crept into the room of my benefactor, the missionary, and left with
him the incubus of that printed matter. It was sufficient to sink the
Moluccas. It would justify any earthquake. I wanted it to be where I
should not be reminded of what it represented, and departed to the
evening beach to forget it. The rain had cleared. The sky was ready for
the sunset. The Malay women, in colors which would make Monte Carlo
seem like an outing of Calvinists, were gossiping in the streets of
the village. The Chinese shopkeepers sat by their doors, smoking and
watching their children at play. The fishermen were on the beach, slowly
making fast their boats. There was a smell of drying sea-pulse, but no
head-hunters and no noticeable murderers; and I was the deplorable and
only representative of the whole tribe of beach-combers. The sea, that
deceptive sea of tide-rips and reefs, was as radiant and benign as though
it had confessed its sins, and peace was now in its ancient heart and not
sharks. Gilolo and Tidore were built of lapis-lazuli, but Ternate was of
olivine, and about its head were clouds which, after various dyes, became
bright gold after sunset, and reflected about us briefly the aura of a
day we had lost. Lights appeared in the deeps of the shadow of earth, and
stars in the sky. The beach of Ternate, at sunrise and sunset, changed
thus every day. I never saw it repeat itself. Why should it, with all
those colors? That light, and those islands, cleared the last doubt, the
last stain of misgiving left by the memories of Europe, that our own star
might be one now omitted from the regard of Heaven. It still had the full
celestial benefit.


FOOTNOTES

[2] Not till I returned to Singapore did I learn that it was Japan which
had to pay.




CHAPTER XXVI


I learned one morning during my stay that the people of Ternate had
been considering me, and had concluded that I must be there because I
wanted pearls. Pearls were brought to me. Patient figures would squat
for hours on the veranda, waiting for my return, and would then approach
in disarming politeness with small packets on outspread palms. These
contained globules of many shades, some of them attractive. But I was
as well satisfied in looking at them as if I had possessed them. Could
I have done more than admire them if I had bought the lot. My knowledge
of Malay, however, is insufficient for me to convey to pearl merchants
my oddities in æsthetics and the ethics of property, and so they left
me, most reluctantly, and I believe under the impression that I am an
extremely knowing purchaser of pearls, and one it is hard to deceive.
Then the merchants of Ternate, finding that I had rejected their entire
stock of pearls, tried me with some gems and stones of these volcanic
islands which were more interesting than the pearls, but very poor
relatives, nevertheless, of tourmaline, jacinth, rock crystal, peridot,
and such. These failed. Then to my veranda came coins of the old Dutch
East India Company, and even some ancient Portuguese silver, and two
eighteenth-century Dutch glass tumblers. I held an audience with curios
every morning after breakfast, and was startled once to find in a
packet containing shells two of Queen Victoria’s sovereigns. The last
time I saw sovereigns was in Paris in 1914, and then they were mine. I
touched those relics reverently, to the great approval of their owner,
who thought at last he had found me at home. In a week I supposed I had
seen all Ternate’s jewels and oddities outside the old palace of the last
sultan (who is now safely sequestered in Java), but one morning a box
was placed at my feet, and a cus-cus was released. I saw at once I did
not require a cus-cus, but encouraged the keeper of it with money to let
the little creature play about. No evidence could have assured me with
greater certainty that I was nearly as far from Singapore as I was from
home. That zoölogical freak belongs to a region sundered from Asia by an
oceanic gulf nearly as profound as its age in time.

I enjoyed those morning audiences. My visitors were modest in all but the
value they put upon their wares, and even that they estimated with such
humble grace, and urged it so softly, and with such an engaging appeal
from innocent eyes, and they were so attractively dressed, and took
gratefully my refusal as though it were full acceptance, that I felt it
would be easy to have them as neighbors for the rest of my life.

These people of Ternate might be explained by an ethnologist; yet if he
did it nobody but other ethnologists would understand him, and probably
they would deny all he said. The people of my island are, of course,
of the Malay race. But what is that race? The Javanese of Jokyacarta
and the Dyaks of Borneo are of the same race, though you would never
guess it unless you were told. You could not be expected to guess it,
for early Hindu migrations to Java, and other causes, have reduced most
of the resemblance to the brownness of skins. There is often something
effeminate and timid about the look of a man of Java, but you would
never forget to treat a Dyak with the courtesy due from one gentleman to
another gentleman who happened to be well armed and to have a look of
cool independence about him. Once I saw a European strike a Javanese,
calmly, accurately, and with contumely, and then stride on slowly as
though nothing had happened. If he had so behaved to a Dyak he would
have become an unsightly object on the instant. There is certainly a
Malay type, to be recognized throughout the islands. That Malay is less
than most whites in stature, but his figure and bearing are attractive.
His complexion varies a little, but it is usually bronze. His hair is
straight and black, his smooth face is slightly flattened, and his high
cheek bones diminish his chin and jaws to delicacy. His nose is small,
with prominent nostrils, and his lips are boldly curved and full. He
looks better with his mouth shut, for he chews betel and his teeth are
black. His dark eyes are grave and watchful. His beauty, in fact, is not
generally admired. But that is a matter of taste. I myself found it a
pleasure to look upon him and his family, for it was clear that in spite
of his apparent indolence he has solved the problem of existence more
happily than his betters. He appears to enjoy every hour of the day, and
to find very little to worry him. He is not eager to work; yet, why be
eager for that, when the primal curse rests lightly? Some fishing and a
little time in the padi field set him free to enjoy contemplation and
gossip, both of which he loves. But, for the fun of it, he will suffer
any hardship in adventure. He is serious in converse and softly spoken.
He does not like brusque and ardently curious people with loud voices. It
is better, though, not to misread his gravity, for he is an observant man
and his humor is dry. He does not meekly tolerate conduct which violates
his own code of manners, for he has the mind of an aristocrat and assumes
that his worth will not be questioned. I was told that he is quick to
appraise the social standing of his visitors, but he always cleverly
disguised whatever views he had about me. A carrier of my pack in the
wilds, though there he allowed himself but the bare luxury of a cloth
about his loins, would stand and converse with the simple dignity of a
gentleman who had no illusions left. But he never complained. It might be
late, our direction uncertain, our night’s shelter unknown, and our food
unfit for a good Mohammedan. But he would merely express a bare opinion,
while disengaging with a big toe the leeches which clung to the other
leg. Neither did he praise me. He would pick up his pack, the matter
decided, in the manner of a man who could go on forever in good company,
and there would not be another word from him. Yes, it would be easy and
even pleasant to throw in one’s lot with the Malays. A Malay hamlet is a
much more attractive result of human effort, and it shelters a happier
people, even though it is not far beyond the stage of the lake-dwellings
of the Neolithics than Birmingham. Somewhere into our calculations at
home for the enjoyment of what sunshine we are likely to get, a few
alien and sinister factors have crept, and have deflected our figures and
poisoned our sum.

[Illustration: _The Malays Sit on Their Decks, Cooking Breakfast_

(_See p. 129_)]

Where the Malays came from is still in dispute. They are bold seafarers,
and words of their language are found, it is said, in Madagascar and
Polynesia. It is now believed that there is an affinity between them
and the Polynesians. But nobody who has seen a little of the Malay
Archipelago could doubt that it is a vast region for the fusion of races
as magnetic as is now the American continent. The playground of the
schoolhouse of Ternate, where little girls chattered among cycads and
hibiscus, has received marked contributions from China, Arabia, Papua,
and Europe. A passing ethnologist, his glance over the shrubs alighting
on some quaint and lively little cinnamon-tinted fairy in white, would
want all his skill to tell him whether her demure nose and mouth were
from the East or West, though her hair and eyes might be slyly of the
Orient. Ternate, of course, though now it is forgotten, and though it was
never any more extensive than its present six miles by eight, was for
centuries as attractive as a perfumed gem in these seas. Have you read
the eulogy of it in _The World Circumnavigated by Sir Francis Drake_? It
was not surprising, therefore, when looking into that school garden, to
find reasons to admire the potency of Bagdad, Peking, Lisbon, the South
Seas, and Amsterdam. The market place, too, if you were out early enough,
was even better, though there the influences were less marked, for the
Malay was dominant.

The market is held in a small maze of narrow alleys down by a corner
of the beach. The fish is landed directly into it. Some of the alleys,
those where the women sit on the ground before their garden wares,
are sheltered from the sun with white awnings. A group of Malay women,
when dressed for everybody’s eyes, make a finer display than any summer
border in full bloom. Flowers, even masses of larkspur, roses, marigolds,
peonies, and hollyhocks, could never equal that market place of Ternate,
for flowers never turn their heads, and do not smile with such art.
The women of Ternate sit in rows facing each other, and the pathway is
carpeted between them with plantain leaves. The avenue under the awning
is pellucid with filtered light, but patterns of glowing day fall through
apertures to emphasize oranges, green and scarlet chillis, mangosteens,
and egg fruit. Vagrant light glitters from moving combs and bracelets
of gold, and on some vivid dresses is like a shout of triumph in the
distance. These good people placidly accept their visitors. Their manners
are perfect. One is at one’s ease. A native of Gilolo who had brought
over his tobacco in a canoe one morning, pulled out several copious
handfuls, wrapped them deftly in a square of banana leaf, and for a few
trivial coins gave me sufficient potent stuff to make all a hardened
forecastle crowd wonder—after one pipeful each—whether smoking is not
the worst of follies. And that man of Gilolo was another sort of Malay,
with wavy hair; but then the Papuans in that market place with their huge
frizzy mops, faces almost black, and open and constant smiles, showed,
like the cus-cus, that Ternate is on the border line of another region,
far from the Malay Peninsula.

My friend the missionary, who has spent most of his life among the
islands, confused the ethnological problem still more that night with
a story of one island he knows, which I should like to see, but never
shall. It was not far from me then, and yet more difficult of access than
Spitzbergen is from Edinburgh. He called it Makisar. It is to the south
of the Moluccas, an isolated lump in the direction of Australia. The
Dutch sent a garrison of a hundred of their countrymen and their wives
to Makisar some time in the seventeenth century, built a stockade for
them, left them, and forgot them. There the descendants of the garrison
are to-day, still in the stockade. To that island, about that time or
somewhat later, came some English folk named Francis and Coffin, and
a Dutch family named Joosten from Macassar. They, too, went into the
stockade, which had no traffic with the islanders. The stockaded part of
Makisar to-day is peopled with men and women with light eyes and skins
and fair hair, who are European in appearance, but who have no word of
Dutch or English, though their names are out of the Church registers of
the West of England and Holland.




CHAPTER XXVII


_July 16._—The Jalan Pantai, or the seashore road, of Ternate, has an
affinity with that prelude to the day when the risen sun has still to
surmount the high land of Halmaheira across the sea; or so you think till
you are sauntering there when the sun has fallen behind the volcano at
the back of you. The truth is, that path is so responsive to light that
morning is there before its hour, and day remains when the sun has gone.
This morning the path by the beach was as elated as though with good
tidings which a stranger like myself could not be expected to understand.
I did not know the reason for its joy, but I could share it. It was high
water. The sea itself could have been the dawn. A sailing canoe, with
prow and stern so shaped that the craft was like a black swan with a head
at each end of its long body, was flying in the brightness between us
and that land which lay athwart the east. Tamarinds and other trees made
a dark roof to the path, but the light came low and level through their
colonnade. One tree had strewn the road with white corollas, the size of
goblets, and their stamens were long tassels of white silk tipped with
pink. Careless bounty! By the jetty was a stall for the fishermen, with
coffee, fried cakes of fish, pineapples, and mangosteens; some cockatoos
and lories sat on the branch of a tamarind beside it. The high peak of
Tidore was the first to see the sun, and signaled the news to us from a
cloud. From the end of the pier I thought I could see through the water
even to the little stones lying on the sea floor in five fathoms. Corals
and sea-growths were darkly grouped about the greenish pallor of tracks
in that garden. The coral was tall and branched, or was in rounded beds.
Its shapes wavered and pulsed in the unseen movements of the crystal.
It dilated and diminished in areas of olive green, orange, crimson, and
gray. It appeared to be not much below the surface of the glass, but
bonitos like torpedoes of blue light glanced over it in midspace and
changed the illusion, and other fish, like oscillating silver coins, like
tinted glow lamps intermittently charged, like swooping black and yellow
butterflies, like the petals of flowers quivering in a zephyr, deepened
and extended the sight. Their vivid forms would appear suddenly where
there had been nothing, and then, like apparitions, become absorbed in
their element. The heat of the day, which had come, was unnoticed.

_July 17._—The surgeon of the garrison took me over with him to Tidore in
his motor-launch. He had some cases of yaws and dysentery to attend to
there. I was reminded that this paradise, in spite of its shining aspect,
is only one degree north of the line. Tidore once was the rival sultanate
to Ternate’s; both little islands, in their day, competed for the rule
over many greater neighboring islands, though I believe that Ternate was
in the end the more successful. Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English
intrigues in turn encouraged those natives’ claims which promised most
profit at the time to civilized impartiality. About the east side of
Ternate there are several decaying forts, and many derelict cannon, of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The more cut-purse maxims of
a hustling commercial college probably are but transcriptions of the
mottoes on the cannon butts of those lively traders of the past who
wanted spice, and invoked the aid of God’s blessed gunpowder to get it.

As we neared Tidore the islands and coasts changed their outlines, and
Ternate disappeared, for the village of Tidore is on the east side of its
island. There were the usual beaches of black sand of a volcanic island,
and the shore was littered with bowlders of weathered lava. From the
landing place a spacious white terrace, with an occasional cannon by its
balustrade, rose as though to a palace secret in the foliage above. We
had that terrace to ourselves, however, a fact which seemed queer to me,
and mounted it till we came to mounds of grass and shrubs and half-hidden
walls. The palace has been overthrown. In that high sunny place there
was no sultan, but only a silent sprite of a bird, which moved about the
tangle of vines, watching us, as though wondering what men could want
there. The village by the shore is almost derelict, and the esplanade, so
remarkably broad with its white walls resplendent at noon, and the palm
fronds above it, is but a memory of an importance almost hidden now under
grass. Not even Dutch ships visit Tidore to-day. There are stone houses,
and radiant white arches and pillars framed in creepers, and other hints
of Spain when Spanish adventurers had no doubt all the seas were theirs.
But Tidore on my day was abandoned to a brilliant light; we arrived after
it had lost its interest and was beyond the verge of a living world.

_July 19._—The padre showed me some graves of English seamen in the
cemetery to-day, but their stones were illegible. The Chinese cemetery
is next door, with its curious quarter-moon tombs on rising ground, and
that, too, of the Malays, where the little gravestones are overgrown with
shrubs. But I had discovered these places early in my stay on the island.
The frangipani, which in the Malay islands is the “grave flower,” is
freely planted, and so many other shrubs are in bloom that this little
corner of island is a good hunting ground for insects; and, of course,
it is not frequented by the natives. I may loiter there unobserved. The
Chinese and the Malay burial places show that these people somehow have
resolved the fact of death into their view of the earth, and they make
no fuss about it. They don’t invite it, but when it comes they take it
quietly, and their graves are as if they had no doubt the dead know best
what to do with themselves. But the Christian cemetery is a loud and
desperate effort to deny the fact. One curious structure there incloses
the grave of a man named Laurens. It has a roof and an upper story. By
the tomb is a map of Palestine and a series of biblical pictures. The
walls of the inclosure are decorated with a host of framed texts, mainly
of promises to the righteous, as though Laurens was prepared against
the Last Day, and was ready to present God with a bundle of I O U’s.
Surmounting the texts is the crest of a cavalry regiment, and so many
other symbolical figures are scattered about that on the Resurrection Day
Laurens should have no difficulty in establishing his merits, even if the
entries made by the Recording Angel are inadequate. And so that Laurens
shall make no simple but disastrous mistake when he gets up, a hand is
stenciled where he will see it at once, with its dexter finger pointing
to the sky.

The padre has spent most of his life among the islands east of Borneo
and Java, but appears to be doubtful that he has saved many souls, so
I did not pursue like a mean actuary the tender subject of missionary
enterprise. He thought that missionaries merely imposed a form upon what
remained essentially the same thing. The islanders still believe, when
matters are urgent, whether they go to the church or the mosque, that the
spirits are more potent than the prophets. If they go through the form
of Christian marriage it is only to propitiate another doubtful element.
They marry still by the process of _lari-bini_, to run with a wife; or of
_kawin-minta_, to buy a wife. In the first there is a pretense of taking
a girl by force from unwilling parents, and then a formal forgiveness and
a payment. Or the consent of the parents is at once given and the price
is paid. They may come to the missionary after that, to make things right
all round. In the Kei Islands a marriage contract is made on a piece of
wood, on which symbols may show that the bridegroom owes four gongs,
two guns, and three drums, for the girl. He then enters the home of his
wife’s parents and serves until the credit marks on the marriage contract
correspond with the symbols on the other side of the stick. The padre
told me that recently he baptized the black children of an Englishwoman
who lives on Halmaheira. But these mysterious “English,” whenever I have
come across an example, might be Arabs or Tamils just as easily. And they
always speak a Port Said variety of cockney, when they know the language
at all. Their names, however, are solidly British.

_July 24._—Crossed over to Halmaheira to-day, and landed at the village
of Gilolo, at its northwest corner. This extensive island appears to
be covered with forest from the water line to the mountain tops. It is
still unexplored and almost uninhabited. We landed by a mangrove swamp.
The tide was out, and as it will take more than one day to explore so
much mountainous jungle, I sat on a stump and watched the surface of the
glistening mud. It was riddled with the burrows of little crabs. Some
were vermilion, others were white, and one sort was violet with legs of
pale blue. They seemed to have had disturbing news; perhaps it was an
election, perhaps the Gilolo exchange had fallen, but that flat of mud
was a scene of hysterical activity. Each alert crab, whatever his color,
was a morsel of irrepressible curiosity and could not keep indoors, but
must hear all the news, and so sat at the mouth of his burrow, or crept
away from it to eavesdrop on his neighbors. He moved with an air of such
studied and circumventing cunning that he might have been the secret
agent of an embassy or a trust; but at the first haughty gesture of a
neighbor’s claw—now then, none of that; keep away there, quite far off,
please—fear shot him home. When our little motor-boat was returning to
Ternate, a run of six hours, we got caught in opposing tide-rips and
currents that had heaped in the intricate channels of the islands, and
occasionally I wondered whether her engine would stand it. We gyrated at
times in a light-headed and sickening way, and the Malay who steered
us (good man!) had all he could do to keep us from being swamped. It
was a relief to get under the shelter of Ternate, where we picked up an
abandoned sailing _prahu_ and took her in tow.




CHAPTER XXVIII


But for the durian, the spell of Ternate might not have been broken. I
should have lost count of days and nights. I might have imagined that
I had been cast upon a place beyond time and storms and was living on
another plane. There is much to be said for the lotus. It is a benign
gift. What happens when we neglect it is seen in the anxious and haggard
aspect of morally superior communities. But the durian is different.
I did not know that, however, when I mentioned it to my companion,
the padre, as a famous Malay fruit I had not experienced. Nor did his
answer forewarn me. He became alert and eager at once. He confessed he
was greedy when he saw a durian. He said grandly that it was the king
of fruits. Other men, I remembered, have been as extravagant over the
durian. What is it Russel Wallace told us? “Its consistence and flavor
are indescribable. A rich butter-like custard highly flavored with
almonds gives the best general idea of it, but intermingled with it
come wafts of flavor that call to mind cream-cheese, onion sauce, brown
sherry, and other incongruities ... rich ... glutinous ... perfect ... a
new sensation, worth a voyage to the East to experience.”

What a fruit! The padre assured me most earnestly that he would get me
a durian. I must eat one, and my soul would be made gracious. However,
he must have forgotten it. No durian came. Then late one afternoon I
returned from an attempt upon the mountain, and was light-hearted after
losing myself in a forest above the clouds which refused to let me pass.
I had seen crimson lories flying in solitude like pigeons. A great
bird-winged butterfly, one of the gold-and-emerald _ornithoptera_ which
till that day had never been more than a colored flash in the distance,
that afternoon paused overhead, planed down to a flower which was near my
face, and pulsed its vivid body so near that I could see the quivering
of its antennæ. We may call mind the aim of life, if that flatters us,
but the tense life which vibrated that superb creature evidently was
obeying a command which we have never heard. No sooner had it gone than a
swallow-tail even larger, a very folio butterfly in black, crimson, and
primrose, alighted on the same white trumpet, weighted down the pendulous
and swinging flower, and danced to its movements. Overhead an eagle was
poised, surveying the mountain seaward. He knew I was watching him. His
bright eye kept meeting mine severely. The sea was even more remote below
us than some of the clouds. I got back to the veranda of the rest-house,
tired but pleased, and was going to my door, but stopped.... What was
that? I forgot the crimson lories. My memory had gone straight back to an
old German dugout with its decaying horrors. I thought I must have been
mistaken, but advanced cautiously. Nothing could be there, I told myself,
that was like the trenches of the Flers line. Confidence returned; the
suggestion had gone. Then the ghost passed me again, invisible, dreadful,
and I clutched the table, looking round. At first I could determine
nothing, but presently on a wall bracket I saw resting a green and
spinous object as large as a football, and tiptoed to smell it.

It was!

The padre appeared, but was not dismayed. Instead, he called a native
with a knife to open the durian. The man performed this on the green
porcupine most expertly from one end, disclosing soft and creamy
contents. I tried to forget the smell, took a portion, and, as they used
to say in France, went over the top in daylight. But I knew at once
this was my last durian. Facing the foe, I fell. That indelicate odor,
and the flavor of a sherry custard into which garlic had been slipped,
overshadowed Ternate for some hours afterward. The smell shamelessly
wandered about, and the taste of the garlic remained after the sherry was
forgotten. Only sleep interposed to stop my bewilderment over what Russel
Wallace could have meant by it.

And in the morning there was something else to think about. With the
Assistant Resident, a young Dutchman who talked like a boy from an
English public school because that indeed was what he was, I was to
attempt the crater of the volcano. It was two hours before dawn. Sirius
was blazing over Gilolo. We wished to be well up the slope before the sun
was there. But our two Malay porters had another opinion about the need
for an early start, and Sirius was paling into a sky of rose and madder
before we got away. Our men, father and son, were not so interested in
that mountain as the other two in the party. The father was the guide,
and carried a _parang_, a bright Malay weapon of such weight and balance
that it is good for either agriculture or homicide. Not one of our party
knew the mountain above the upper forest, and only the guide and myself
had been as far as the forest; for Ternate, even official Ternate, though
its interest in its crater is acute, yet is satisfied with a distant
prospect from the beach. This oceanic volcano is 5,200 feet high at
present, and in the sun which is usual to the island the summit may be
said to look out of sight. Why go? One need not.

But if one goes, the beginning is made in elation. The gardens of spices
and the cocoanut groves are traversed with ease. The gardens are cool
and scented. The ascent is gradual. You feel that such a journey could
be continued forever and that any material refreshment would profane
it. But suddenly and brusquely the slope is not gradual. It is quite
otherwise. For a few minutes, while a fierce light beats upon you—no
more nutmeg trees—and the ground is rough which rises within a foot
or so of the nose, you suppose that this interlude is only a playful
gesture by the mountain. It wishes to test your devotion. In this it
succeeds. When you pause, the thumping of the heart is like the pulse of
the silence. The perspiration drips from the fingers. You are surprised
and a little dashed. Every mirthful thought has deserted and gone home.
When the uplands are surveyed to see if they are any nearer, sweat runs
into the eyes. And they are not any nearer. The slope is immediate,
continuous, tractless, and tropical, and the summit has vanished behind
that overhanging forest which has yet to be reached. This playful little
gesture of the mountain seems to be its normal attitude, and requires
some thought.

So our party discovered, this morning. With what enterprise the Dutchman
strode ahead, energetically kicking pebbles backward at me! He was as
frolicsome as a goat. He leaped from root to root where they were tangled
in the shady path like cables. I followed meekly, wondering how long I
should last. I hoped his ebullience would be cooled presently. The sun
came up; but we were still deep in the plantations. My companion appeared
to have decided that the British should see what a little nation could
do; and it had clearly dawned on me that, though my flag may have braved
the battle and the breeze for a respectworthy period, I should disgrace
it in a race to the crater against Holland.

While I was still valiantly holding out, determined to go on or drop dead
on the track, I saw my friend stop, take off his helmet, and gaze into it
reflectively. He did not move when I reached him. That was a good chance
to show him the attractive character of the sugar canes growing beside
us, their plumes surmounting staffs which were of chocolate circled
regularly with thin bangles of gold. If one stood in a certain way, I
assured him, the chocolate had a purplish bloom. But my friend wiped his
face and gazed at me with an expression of abject pathos.

We turned aside, while recovering, to a small cluster of native huts.
They were built on a narrow step of the slope, from which we looked out
over treetops to the place where the village we had left was a smudge
on a long serpentining coast. Under a thatch apart were several shrines
to the spirits of the sea and land, and in one of them was a good model
of a sailing canoe, beside which was placed a little rice to prosper
somebody’s voyage. But only the chickens were about; we saw no spirits
of the sea or land, and not even a solid husbandman.

The sun was now above the trees, apparently crystallizing the foliage
into rigidity with its straight glare. We continued our upward toil. The
sun was on our backs. Above a half acre of scratched earth, in which were
hasty pineapples, tobacco, and cassava, the track vanished completely at
a point where an earthquake had flattened three huts. That clearing was
grown over with labiate herbs and a kind of raspberry. Above it the cliff
of the forest regarded the huts and the advancing wayfarers with such
impassive aloofness, as though man were a late and unimportant curiosity
on the earth, that I myself thought it might be as well to erect a shrine
to whatever hamadryads haunt tropical groves. But my Dutchman, though he
affably agreed, did not appear to get more than a misty notion of the
idea, so we continued the ascent.

Our guide disappeared in a canebrake. We stooped and followed him, and at
last were crawling astern of the sound of the Malay’s busy knife. This
original progress began in amusement; at least it was a relief from the
sun; but I could not help noticing, in about two minutes, that a spiky
tunnel, in which the air is like steam, has its disadvantages. Then we
had to stop and wait on our hands and knees, for we could not hear our
guide. Suddenly his _parang_ broke loose again somewhere on my left,
and as suddenly ceased. The guide’s face, after a long silence, pushed
aside the stems near us—how native to the wilderness is a Malay’s face
when morosely it just peeps out of jungle grass!—and he told us he was
lost. It had seemed to me that it might be so, for his knife strokes
had had a wild and erratic ring, as though the obstinate vegetation were
being punished. We crawled back, therefore, in the reverse order, and
the elegant young Dutchman reverted to his native language, as that,
probably, was better equipped for expressing the results of the brittle
but resistant nature of the herbage on the knees. The guide, though, was
a good man. The world is wide, his manner led us to infer, and the day
is young—why not get lost? He turned on the mountain again with a quiet
energy altogether different from his early display. For the first time I
began to suspect that we might reach the summit.

He went to the gigantic grass again, struck it with his knife, and thus
sank into it. We stooped in slow pursuit of him; sometimes crawled, were
whipped in the face by elastic stems, were stilettoed and bayoneted.
I learned, being so near to the earth, why grains and spores turned
at once into such a high tumult, for what was under my hands was warm
and humid, and I should not have been surprised to feel it stir at my
touch. We continued to move carefully on hands and knees, but, excepting
that we were going up, I had no sense of our direction; only a tangle
of dark ribbons could be seen overhead. Why was I enjoying it, as I
withdrew another broken dagger from my trousers, wiped the sweat from my
face on my sleeve, and looked at the blood on my hands? I don’t know.
Perhaps some of the energy which jetted upward in that mass of hard
green fountains was charging me. The smell was strange, and it may have
been the original smell of earth; we may have been close to a young and
salutary body. I had an idea that if I crawled long enough there I
might overtake some lost time. It was while bravely continuing with this
fortifying thought that we emerged, and found ourselves in an open space,
with the jungle at hand. But before toiling up to attack that louring
palisade we thought we ought to pause and recover uprightness, so we
disposed our gear about us, reclined on a fallen tree, and contemplated
the way we had come. The Malays crouched below us. They are very good
at contemplation. They can maintain it, all day if necessary, without a
movement. Our log was situated well on the way to the clouds. It might
have been a seat on the edge of a darker cloud. The log was hot and dry,
being nearer to the sun. I was idle-minded—I felt that I had been excused
from what was necessarily occupying the attention of envious men, who
were now a long way below me. The way we spent time here was no matter,
because it was unlimited and unmeasured. The corrugations of the log were
lanes and alleys for an industrious population of ants, and I watched
them with the calm abstraction of an immortal who was far too great to
understand the reason for so much activity and resolute enterprise that
apparently got the tiny laborers nowhere, except into trouble now and
then. But they appeared to like it. They did not know they were ants.
With what industry and courage they carried particles up and over the
ridges of the log, which were mountain ranges to them, determined to
get their burdens somewhere, however high their mountains! They took
no notice of the contemplating gods above them, and very little of the
commotions and earthquakes the gods made on the log with idle fingers.
Probably that log was too immense for them to know, so how could they
understand that it was only one log of a forest in a small island which,
to the knowledge of the immortals, was insignificant among many islands
of a vast globe? No doubt most of them got their particles safely home by
evening. Success, success!

A little way down the incline, upright on the verge of space, were two
areca palms, but far more distinguished and remarkable shapes than ever
before I had seen those trees. They framed a far vision of Gilolo and
cloudland. It was not easy to say at once which was island and which was
vapor. But then, even the minor projecting sprays and fronds about us
there seemed strangely posed and of more than the usual significance.
The bee which alighted on a labiate flower at my feet was not related
to anything I knew. I was invading his world, which seemed to have been
warned of intruders and was curiously intent and quiet. Nothing moved
there but the bee, and perhaps he had not yet heard news of the invasion.
Immediately below the black figures of the areca palms the eastern coast
of Ternate and the sea reminded me of the indentations of a chart on
which the ocean was symbolized with the usual color. It was not easy to
believe that our mountain top was based on anything more substantial than
a tinted presentment of earth.

[Illustration: _Gathered from the Submarine Gardens of the Tropics_

(_See p. 131_)]

The Dutchman overcame the spell and the silence with a shout, and we
rose to face the rest of the upward journey, which was only half done.
A little climb brought us to the woods, and there we worked at first
along the edge of a ravine the bottom of which was in night. We entered
by a wilderness of bamboos, and the crackling of the dry parchments of
their spathes under our feet made an uproar which startled me, for it
announced us to every dryad on the mountain. And there is no arguing with
bamboo piping. If the pipes are stacked in any abundance in your way,
then you must find a path round them or go back. The forest grew darker
as we worked toward the head of the chasm. It was dank and elfish. The
light was suspect. The shapes of the trunks and boughs were gnome-like.
The way along the edge of the ravine was difficult with wreckage which
looked like fallen trunks, but the shapes collapsed at a touch. They were
only a treacherous semblance. The profusion and variety of the ferns, the
queer tricks of parasitic growth—one decadent climber, its air roots no
more than a spider-webbing, studded a tree with fleshy disks like green
dollars—and an occasional view on the stem or the under side of a leaf of
a shield-bug as brilliant as a black-and-scarlet flower, ought to have
kept us from going farther, but the intelligent curiosity of adventurers
always moves them on from what they see is good to what they know nothing
about.

The slope often rose so steeply that the angle seemed unsafe for so
heavy a load of forest. When we looked upward the trees might have been
falling on us at a noiseless speed. We were always on the point of being
overwhelmed. It was an act of faith when a projection was grasped for
support, because you imagined the vast overhanging weight would at once
begin to revolve with the extra burden. That sense of insecurity made
the shock the greater when a bough gave way. But we did not fall far;
the next tree below checked us and flung us against another tree, and
that one threw us to the ground. Luckily it was much cooler up there. A
full view of the sky was infrequent, even when we looked back. When we
looked down, during a pause to recover breath, instead of the contorted
tentacles of aged roots ridden by fungi and moss reaching toward our
faces and the columns leaning out of the shades, there was an upper
show, in a light which was as fixed and greenish as a rare fluid that no
wind could stir, of giant leaves even more fantastic than the succuba of
roots; banners of wild plantain, pendent epiphytes, and the crowns of
tree ferns which suggested, in that light, that we were lost in time and
not in space, and had worked backward to the Mesozoic epoch.

From the beach of the island, looking toward the summit, above the forest
one sees what appears to be grassland. It seems from below as smooth
as the English South Downs. We got out of the forest at last into this
very upper region, and found the grass. I had been looking forward to
the experience of tramping over bare downs at such an elevation above a
tropical sea. But that smooth grass was elephant stuff ten feet high, and
for another half hour we could not see more than a yard about us. Then
our way began to descend, so that when we crawled from the tunnel we had
cut we were in a great bare depression of the mountain, which from below
would not have seemed to be more than a dimple. To the bottom of this we
had to make our way, with but one brief peep ahead of the terminal cone
to encourage us. The cone was certainly much nearer, but surprisingly
more distant than I had expected to find it from that vantage; and our
outlook was more restricted than we should have found it in most of the
byways of the village below. The ground of that basin, and up the farther
slope of it, was broken and thinly grown over with coarse grass. But I
must confess that I ceased to pay much attention to the details of our
circumstances, for I had the feeling which, I suppose, used to trouble
those who could hear, as they approached him, the grumblings in the very
belly of Moloch. We were very much by ourselves, and the god, although as
yet his face was hidden from us, was immense and powerful. Now we knew
it. We smelled him now and then. His breath was of the Pit. I began to
have premonitions of what was the security of the tenure of those spice
gardens down below. We toiled up to the top of the ridge which veiled the
face of the god.

At last, there he was. He was black and naked, and smoke was drifting
from his head. And he was still some distance away, apart, elevated, and
awful in the serene blue. It was clear that Milton had wrongly reported
his expulsion from heaven. He still dwelt there. In fact, he had it to
himself. He was solitary in the sky, monstrous and fuliginous under
his lovely canopy, with a desolate court about him, and a footstool of
blackened ruin from which the angels had fled.

Before we could mount to his throne we had to make another long descent,
as it were an act of obeisance; and as the Dutchman, who had become very
humble, advanced deferentially over the cinders and clinker, I could see
plainly that, though we might hope to be ignored, divine compassion in
this spot was as absent as the supernal choir. Our only luck would be to
find the god asleep.

This, too, was the worst stage of the journey. We were compelled to
forget our outward prospects. We had to keep our eyes searching for
likely foothold in the tumult of the knives and ax-blades of the slag.
A slip in that chaos of spiked and edged metal would have been ugly. A
few minutes of the exercise made us pause. There was not a sound. The
buzzing of an invisible fly was remarkable. During the pause I noticed
in surprise that our exertions had taken us but a little distance; the
journey to the bottom of the descent and up the final slope had been
prodigiously lengthened since we had discovered what a walk there was
like. The two Malays, I observed, were seated on the top of the ridge
we had left, and were again in contemplation. They were not fools. They
had no desire to look into the gape of a volcano. Their curiosity was
already satisfied. Around us on the litter of broken metal were scattered
numberless great bowlders that had acquired a horrid iridescence and some
flowers of sulphur on cooling; they were the bombs which the god throws
about when he is playful. But at the moment all sound had ceased except
the murmur of that unseen fly, who kept with me for company; and the only
movement was the quivering of the air over the heated stones, for the sun
was magnificent.

By the time we reached the edge of the crater every ten yards had grown
to a mile, and we were in the tired mood to be insulting, even if
challenged by Cerberus. There was no sign, however, that our approach had
been noticed. We were free to gaze into the open mouth of the god. He was
fast asleep, and breathing so gently that his gusts of vapor were slight
and unalarming. Our own foothold was more disconcerting than the crater.
It was not easy to find a standing place that was clear of communication
with the nether fires. Vents and fissures everywhere were exhaling hot
mephitic gases, and when I thought I had found a corner, by a huge
bomb, which gave me a space exempt where I might be at ease, a fumarole
presently became active under my feet and sent up strong sulphurous
blasts. The rocks about me were bright with the lichens of Avernus, lurid
incrustations of chemicals which showed more than anything else the kind
of garden we were in.

The crater itself was halved by a wall, and the half within our view—we
did not visit the other half—was a precipitous hollow the bottom of which
seemed choked with rocks; but as to that I offer no definite opinion, for
I did not climb down far enough to satisfy a scientific conscience, but
only a conscience which is amenable to desire. Those stained cliffs were
not usual. The crags were calcined red and black, and they were blotched
with sulphur and verdigris. There were occasional bursts of steam. That
gape was loaded and charged. The desire to play adventurously inside
such a muzzle vanished at the sight of it. When the natives of Ternate
prudently assemble their canoes at signs more violent than usual, and
even abandon their nutmeg groves, they are not showing timidity, for on
the summit I got the impression that in the belly of the island there was
a power latent which could lift it bodily from the sea.

But where was the sea? As soon as we turned from the crater and looked
outward we forgot the nether fires. There was no sea, however. There
was no sky. There was only a gulf of light which was blue to infinity.
We were central in space. We looked southward for the cluster of the
Moluccas, but in that blue vacancy the islands and the clouds were
all immaterial; the isles of Motir, Makian, and distant Batchian were
mere conjectures, though in that clear and tranquil light I imagined I
could see as far as Paradise and the solution of sorrow. But what is an
island when the clouds float below it? There we saw Motir, the nearest
of those suppositions of land, a frail and pallid wraith which did not
move from its place in the blue, but was constant in the midst of the
traveling islands of cloud. Some of them, in appearance, passed under
it. Gilolo had sunk profoundly. It was only a lower abstraction of bays
and promontories. Beyond it the glimmering sapphire was the Pacific.
Our near neighbor, Tidore, and the lower slopes of our own island, were
occasionally revealed; we had immediately below us at times a far but
vivid memory of the green world we left one fine morning. But that memory
would dissolve under lambent white ranges of cloud, and again we were
marooned on a raft of burnt rocks translated to the neighborhood of the
sun. The clouds of the trade-wind were much more substantial than Gilolo.
They approached us as lunar continents, resplendent and majestic, moved
down rapidly on our meager upper foothold as though to sweep us along,
but divided below us and surged past in shining ranges while our raft in
midway space felt anchored to but the slenderest hope.

It was with reluctance that we began our return. We had a surmise that
we should like to continue forever in that upper light where what was
mundane was reduced to faint symbols and abstractions, but doubted the
value of our intuition. We had but little faith that we could maintain
ourselves in that rare light, in that serene expanse; and perhaps we were
right. We are not ready for it yet. We plunged downward rapidly, once
we were over the slag heaps, and were soon in the gloom of the forest.
The forest seemed more secure, its darkness more homely, its troll-like
shapes more in accord with the heart of man, than a luminous vision of
eternity.

I do not know how long it took us to descend. We fell automatically.
Fatigue flung us, at times, long distances which did not seem to bring
us any nearer to home. The never-ending jolts in weariness destroyed
thought, and reduced the mind to a heavy enduring lump. My personal lump
acquired a measure of intelligence again when at last some inconstant
sparks in the air took my attention, and I found they were fireflies in a
Chinese graveyard. We were nearing sea-level. Then music approached, and
lanterns, and a wedding party passed by, with tom-toms, pipes, and dance.
My friend, the Dutch missionary, stood near. “I’ve been praying for you,”
he remarked, grimly. He was thinking of the nether fires. But he did not
know that perhaps it was his very prayer which had saved me from the
danger of a transcendental mirage of sublimity.




CHAPTER XXIX


_August 6._—A cloudless morning in the Java Sea, and the dry monsoon from
the southeast is fresh and strong. In the southwest, at seven o’clock,
the suggestion of the mountains of the island of Baly was high in the
sky, but no land was under that celestial range. At noon our steamer was
passing down the Allas Strait, with the peak of Lombok to starboard, a
dark cone resting on a wide kingdom of cloud, and from under the cloud
the verdure of the island descended to the sea. Close to our port side
were the tumbled uplands of the island of Sumbawa. Sumbawa, like all the
islands of the Lesser Sundas to the east of Lombok—Flores, Sandalwood,
and Timor—is under the subjection of a dry wind from Australia, and its
bare pale hills and bright grasslands are remarkable after the coasts
loaded with forests of the other islands of Indonesia. Lombok, on the
starboard side of the ship, is a much darker green, and has no open
uplands. It is a quite different personality from Sumbawa, its neighbor.

_August 7._—This morning I woke in my bunk thinking a Malay was running
amok. The frightful lamentations of his suffering victims brought me up
at a bound. I peeped out, but could see only a line of palms individual
against the screen of a morning mist. The chief officer then paused at my
cabin door, but he was calm. He always is. That noise? We are at Ampenan.
We shall take here three hundred pigs for Singapore. The horrific
wailings then broke out afresh. The chief officer smiled, and compressed
his nose with his fingers significantly as he went for’ard.

There are already on this ship hundreds of cockatoos and lories from New
Guinea and the Moluccas—the speculations of Chinamen, I believe. Among
the many kinds of lories is a crimson bird with green and gold markings,
but named by ornithologists, with unfailing reason, the Garrulous. If
a Malay does run amok among us now, the cries of the stricken will be
unheard in this maniacal din. Though I should not blame the pigs. I
think, on the whole, it would serve us right. Each pig is stuffed into a
crate of cane, of his own shape and almost of his size, and the crates
are stacked into living barricades with alleyways between. To walk
through one of those alleyways—supposing you are indifferent to wet muck,
heat, and smells—is to arouse the cries of the hopeless sufferers in
Purgatory. The pigs scream at you. They call down a murrain upon you. You
feel shamed by those intent little eyes. But one cried and cried. Its leg
was broken.

_August 8._—We have been crawling since early morning under the coast
of Baly, with Gunong Agdeng itself, 9,500 feet, looking down at us. The
stark and calcined cone is deeply scored; but the _sawahs_, or cultivated
terraces, reach so far up the mountain’s slopes that they appeared to
the eye to be parallel markings on impossible declivities. At one place
on the shore a Hindu temple was distinct, just above the surf. Baly, of
course, has been faithful to Brahma. The Mohammedan conquerors of Java
appear to have left the hot and resentful natives of Baly, the island
next door, to their ancient evil ways; and doubtless the soldiers of the
Prophet were wise, as since then the Dutch have discovered. The Balinese,
one may guess, regarded Mohammed as Orangemen do the Pope, and it
happens, too, that the men of Baly are famous as makers and users of the
kris. The hilts of all their choicest weapons are carved into the scowl
of the Hindu war god. The Balinese are fanatical, as we say of an enemy
when his obstinate bravery becomes a nuisance, and at times during their
affairs with the Dutch a whole community has chosen to die, flinging
itself on the bayonets and bullets. In 1906 the Dutch were at war with
a rajah of the island, who came out with all his court in a sortie, not
with the intention of fighting, but of dying to escape dishonor. Brahma
does not seem to encourage Falstaffs. It was only in 1908 that this
island was brought under the direct rule of the Netherlands. We landed
at Buleleng, on the north of it, in a surfboat, and Baly soon made us
regret that we had not gone there earlier and now had not long to stay.
The island is extravagantly fertile, and after seeing so many other Malay
islands the people of Baly, though of the Malay race, appear foreign.
Their _campongs_ are different. The hamlets are hidden within walls of
mud, and the huts are small and squalid. There are many pigs about, and
fetishes dangle everywhere from trees and the thatches of the homes.
The people are taller than most Malays, lighter in color, upright and
independent in their bearing, and good-looking. The women are bare to
the waist. They have a very beautiful ox, the domesticated variety of
the _canteng_, a biscuit-colored beast with white stockings, a creature
with an action which compels one to watch it as it strides past. There
are shrines and temples, or the remains of temples, everywhere along
the roads, but to me they were only the manifestations of a congested
aberration of reason. At Sangsit there is a remarkable example, built,
like all I saw, of a red stone which somehow was in accord with the
malignant masks that leer from its carvings. These temples are roofless.
There is an outer portal at Sangsit, and beyond it a courtyard with its
walls and stone columns crawling and convulsed with figures of demons
peering from a tangle of leaves, flowers, and intricate symbols; other
portals within lead to more secluded courtyards, and all of them are
piled with stonework so tortured that one recoils, as though from the
pointless intensity of a maniac’s heated and frenzied labors. When once
the human intelligence gets away on an interesting bypath in seclusion
it soon makes the dark and startling mysteries of the beehive and the
anthill look like plain daylight. The “coal sacks” of the Milky Way, as
we call those areas of unplumbed night, are not so awful and admonishing
as the lightless deeps of the human mind.

_August 9._—We are anchored off Sourabaya again, and we are perplexed by
a problem in morals. The chief officer, who flatters me with his innocent
assumption that all Englishmen quite easily find their way about in
morals, supposes that I can help him to unriddle this difficulty. Many
of our crew have deserted; but, as the mate gravely explained, his best
men are loyal. Our mate, whom I respect and admire as an excellent seaman
and citizen of the world, then conducted me to a portion of the forward
shelter deck where our men are berthed. There, I was surprised to
observe, presiding over trays and baskets of stewed fish and red pepper,
matches, sweetmeats, cigarettes, and fruit, were twelve dark but comely
vestals, their shiny black hair maintained in gracious coils with gold
ornaments. Their sarongs would have been envied at a Chelsea Arts ball;
their muslin jackets were frail designs in white mist. Their bangles and
rings were worth many guilders. They lifted their eyes to us—or, to be
accurate, to the chief officer, who is a tall and handsome young man,
with the badge of authority—and were as demure, timid, and appealing as
gazelles.

“What must I do, Mr. Tomlinsohn? Do I want zhese women here? No. I will
not have it. I do not like it. Do zhey zell matches? Yes, and no. I know
zhose matches. But if I pack zhem off, I lose my ozzer crew. Do I shut my
eye?”

His proper distress was manifest. He must keep good order in the ship.
That is his duty. But he must see the ship is worked out of harbor
to-morrow or the day after. That also is his duty. I assured him that
certainly this was a matter which only our captain could decide.
The captain would know what ought to be done, for not only is he an
experienced navigator, but a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, I am
neither.

_August 13._—The captain has had several new orders daily, and for nearly
a week we have moved about the north coast of Java—Sourabaya, Samarang,
Pekalongan, and Bawean. But Bawean is not Java; it is a lump of isolated
forest in the sea between Java and Borneo. Its natives have a good
reputation in Singapore as servants and chauffeurs, and we went there to
get some; they are also famous for their brand of sleeping-mat, a fact
which was of no interest to me till I saw some of those mats, when at
once I coveted them. They are certainly a loving tribute to Hypnos.

At Sourabaya we sweltered for days while waiting for cargo, which was
on the quay, but which we did not get. A fleet of steamers was waiting
for sugar. The go-downs of Sourabaya were full of sugar; but the ships
sail light, nevertheless. The follies of Europe blight even the crops
in far tropical islands. I have seen the price of copra drop on a beach
of Celebes at the bare rumor of another French movement in the Ruhr. We
left that copra on the beach. The natives could not accept the price, and
were frankly puzzled that their labors should have been wasted, and that
now they were unable to give our captain their orders for hardware and
cottons, which would have gone to Europe. From this distance, Europe does
appear indecipherable. Paris and London might be, from their behavior,
provincial villages. Europeans cannot see yet that steam and the
telegraph have made one undivided ball of this planet. Careless makers
of mischief throwing stones from the Quai d’Orsay may smash windows in
the Pacific. That we should love our neighbors as ourselves is too much
to expect of men who, just as compelled by dark thoughts as the masons
of the temples of Baly, are elaborating gases for choking their fellows.
When I read in the East Indies the last telegrams and wireless messages
from Europe, and see the direct consequences on Malay beaches, my
feelings are the same as when I looked at the leers and grimaces of that
stonework celebrating the travail of Baly’s pagan soul. O little town of
Bethlehem!

_August 15._—Singapore was in view in a heat haze at 7 A.M. I was
wondering what now I should do and to whom I could go. That array of
vague buildings, and the crowded shipping of the anchorage, had no place
for me. Everybody else on the ship was energetic and determined and knew
precisely what he must do, and was getting ready for it. Now, I did meet
at Singapore, when first I was there, a principal of an English line of
ships who kept about him in the tropics, by some miracle, the coolness
and divine certainty of an ancient British university; and somehow, by
prescience, by hints, by cunning stratagems, he made the temperature
of that city lower for me than it was for others. If only I could find
him when I landed! But he did not know I was coming. Our ship had not
got way off her when I saw one tug detach itself from the rest of the
indeterminate shipping, and I thought it was making for us. We anchored;
and that tug had to back a bit and then come ahead again on the stream
while our gangway was lowered for health officers, our ship’s agent,
and customs men. And there was my friend sitting in a wicker chair in
the fore part of that tug like a god, cool, directive, with the gift of
tongues, knowing all. And yet it is wondered why half the tonnage of the
world is under the Red Ensign! His foot was on the gangway as soon as it
was fast. The Dutch officers were very annoyed. Even their own agent had
not arrived! Would not my friend wait a little? Wait? He calmly stepped
aboard, stayed there till he saw all my belongings were in the right
order, and steamed ashore with me to breakfast—which was laid—before the
other passengers had done more than wipe their hot brows in a prefatory
way.




CHAPTER XXX


That romantic seaport town of the Orient made him uneasy. He wanted to
get away from it. Yet how it had attracted him once—but that was when it
was only a fine name on the map of the coast where the Indian Ocean meets
the China Sea. Its upheaval of life startled him with a hint that it was
without mind and did not know its power and what it was doing. This life
seemed to have no intelligence; it was driven by blind impulse, even
to its own destruction. Humanity would go on, without knowing why, and
without getting anywhere, till its momentum failed.

He would have to get away from the place. If Christ himself were there he
would have to pull a jinrickshaw till he dropped, or sweat from sunrise
to dark in an evil barge, even if he were lucky enough to escape one of
those many diseases with a course as certain, in that climate, as a spark
in tinder. He would have no name, though he had God’s last word to men.
He would be only a bubble on that broad tide, and when he went out, who
would notice it on such a flood?

But questions about human life in the East might just as well be
addressed to the silent jungle at the back of the town. That was fecund,
coarse, and rank. No way was to be found through it. It climbed for air
and light and clung to its neighbors, glued itself to them and choked
them or was choked, coiled in strong sappy lengths, was full of thorns
and poisons, though sometimes it had a beautiful blossom and a sweet
smell. The seaport was like the jungle. Its people flowing in dense
streams incessantly through its streets were moved by powers without more
purpose or conscience than the unseen causes of the jungle and the coral
reefs. These Chinese were not men and women, but conflicting torrents.
And the white people only appeared to be different. But they were not.
They were fewer, and so more noticeable. They were drifting on the same
casual flood. They kept themselves cleaner and safer by superior cunning;
but they were going the same way, with the same barbarous indifference.
Duty was whatever was most pleasant. Beauty was as far as the sunrise
and sunset. Conscience was a funny prohibition of freedom. He would have
regretted that he had left England, only he began to see that the Orient,
London, and the jungle were all driven by the same unknown causes to an
undesigned end. Human life had come to the earth just as fungus comes at
a certain incidence of moisture and warmth, and as it would slough when
the right focus faded. All these movements of life would slow and stop as
unreasonably as they began and continued, and nobody would ever know why.

Some of the men he met there enjoyed it. They preferred life without any
restrictions. They quoted Kipling—they were always quoting Kipling. You
were broadminded if you did as you pleased. Places like Malay Street
were in the nature of things in the tropics, like hibiscus blossoms and
fevers. It was no good expecting tabernacle notions to be helpful in that
climate. Nothing mattered in life except to see that you did not get
stung through carelessness when taking the honey.

He would have to get out of it. He boarded a little coasting steamer, and
then learned she was bound for Siam. Anywhere would do. Bangkok would be
another heaving pool of men, but there would be an interval of the sea
between, which would take some time to cross. He had thought, when he
left London, that he was escaping the shadow of the war, which was the
shadow of humanity without a head; but either that shadow was everywhere
or else it was indistinguishable from his own. She was an old, neat, and
homely little steamer. The _Brunei_ could have been lowered into the hold
of a liner. She might have been a token out of the past of what had been
good and solid. Yet her character would have been plain only to a sailor
or an experienced traveler, because her lower deck was a tumult of Malay
and Chinese passengers and her crew of natives, and parrots, and shouting
Chinese stevedores, and cargo hurtling through the air on hooks and
slings.

There were four other saloon passengers—English planters and traders.
One shared his cabin. That fellow was already occupying it, grunting as
he stripped himself, “to get into something dry.” The cabin smelled of
his acrid body. “I’ve been ringing for that damn Chinese steward for
ten minutes. Seen him about? I want a drink.... But I know what it is.
They’re trying to hold me off. I’ll have it, though; I’ll have that drink
and another. Bible Brown can’t stop me.”

“Who’s he?”

“Don’t you know him? He’s the skipper. The only man out here who thanks
God at table with his head bowed over tinned food. It’s a fact.” His
cabin mate chuckled while his head struggled with his shirt. “And he’s
against the booze and the ladies. But I ain’t. Not in this God-forsaken
world. How does he live?” His cabin mate dropped his heavy bulk suddenly
on the settee and began to pull off his drawers.

So he left that small place to his chance companion. The collars, hair
brushes, cigar boxes, boots, and clothes of that big, prompt, perspiring
fellow were scattered over both bunks, the hooks, and the floor. Just
forward of the cabin a little man in uniform was leaning over the rail,
and in a mild voice was calling some advice to the lower deck. Then the
little man turned wearily and absently, but saw him and surveyed him with
friendly eyes for a moment in a detachment which seemed to put centuries
between them.

“Good morning. Are you Mr. Royden? I’ve a parcel for you. Come with me.”
The little man led young Royden to a door over the top of which was the
word “Captain.” The uproar of the anchorage remained outside that cabin;
it might have been an insulated compartment. Over a table by the forward
bulkhead, between two port windows looking ahead, was a card with a
bright floral design round the text, “Lo, I am with you alway.” A pair
of spectacles rested on a large Bible, which lay beside a blotting-pad
covered with shipping documents.

“We shall be leaving in an hour, Mr. Royden. I hope you will be
comfortable aboard. She’s very small, this ship, and bad when she rolls,
but she’ll stand anything.” The captain looked up at his tall young
passenger, and touched his arm in a reassuring way; he seemed tired and
gray, as if he were holding on to a task of which now he knew the best
and worst. His clipped and grizzled mustache and square chin checked an
easy presumption on his good nature which might have been encouraged by
his kindly brown eyes.

“If you want any books to read, there you are,” said the captain. He
nodded to a small glass-fronted cupboard. Royden took one step and
glanced at the books with interest. Then he shook his head. He would not
have shown a smile about it, only when he turned the captain met his look
with whimsical amusement.

“I thought not,” said Bible Brown. “Yet I don’t know how I should have
lived without them, out here, out here.” The captain talked of politics,
of the war, and of the affairs of the big town just outside, as though
these were matters he had certainly heard about, were matters which
experience teaches a man he should expect to meet in this world, and
may take his notice for a moment from the real concerns of life. So
Royden had been in the war, in France? Yes? He gazed at his passenger
thoughtfully for a second, but asked no questions. Royden felt a little
indignant. That had been the most awful thing in history; and he had seen
it. But this cold little man, with his Bible, thought nothing of human
life. That didn’t worry him. He didn’t care what became of it.

[Illustration: _Macassar Is a Convenient Meeting Place for Traders_

(_See p. 140_)]

All that day they were passing the land, close in. That coast must
have been the same when the earliest travelers saw it. Man had made no
impression on it. It had defeated his feverish activities with a tougher
and more abundant growth. The gloom of its forests looked like a sullen
defiance. It would give no quarter. The turmoil of humanity at the big
seaport from which they had sailed that morning appeared to have less
significance than ever. This jungle, with the least chance, would push
that swarm of men and women into the sea again. The day died in flames
behind the forest, a dread spectacle of wrath, as in a final effort, soon
surrendered, to light an earth abandoned to dark savagery. Let it go.

The _Brunei_ was in ultimate night, carrying her own frail glints,
apparently nowhither. There was nothing in sight. The stars were
hidden. There was only the melancholy chant of the surge, the song of
the bodiless memory of an earth which had passed. On the lower deck,
just showing in the feeble glow of a few lamps hanging from the beams,
was what appeared to be a cargo of bundles of colored rags. The native
passengers were compliant. Not a sound came from there. Beneath the
nearest of the lamps a little child lay asleep on its back beside a
shapeless heap of crimson cloth. With its ivory skin it looked as
though it were dead, in that light. Its tiny face expressed repose and
entire confidence. One arm was stretched out, as though it had reached
for something it wanted before it died, but the hand was empty and the
forgetful fingers were half closed over the palm. On the deck above, the
three planters, round a table, were sitting in their pajamas, drinking.
They were not talking. They appeared to have surrendered to everything,
after trying to escape together under the one light in night for company
and refuge. They did not look at him.

Royden remembered that the captain had told him he might go up to the
bridge whenever he felt like it. He fumbled in the gloom forward of the
deck house for the handrail of the ladder to the bridge, and felt his
way up. For a moment he thought nobody was there, that the ship had been
left to go where she pleased. Then he saw the head of a Malay, just the
head in the darkness, apparently self-luminous, suspended, and with its
eyes cast downward, as though steadfastly contemplating the invisible
body it had left. In another moment Royden saw the head was bent over
the binnacle. Then he heard a mild voice, as though it came from the sea
beyond the ship, “Here I am.” The captain was at the extremity of the
starboard side of the bridge. The little man was only a shadow even when
Royden stood next to him. He was leaning his arms on the rail, looking
ahead. Neither spoke for some time. Nothing was to be seen ahead. There
was no light and no sea.

“I suppose,” said Bible Brown, presently, “the other passengers below are
drinking.”

“Yes. Well, some are sleeping.”

The captain made no comment. Royden said, after a pause: “You must get a
curious view of us. You see an odd habit or two of ours, for a few days,
and then you see us no more.”

Still the captain was silent. When he spoke, he said: “You are mostly
alike. You are simple enough. I know you.”

Royden was slightly startled. The old fellow had never seen him before.
But he smiled to himself when he thought that these cranks, too, were all
alike.

“You are all alike,” continued the captain. “I see you once—once or
twice—and not again. You cannot help yourselves.... Sometimes I wish I
could help you, but there is no time. You all know where you are going,
and you are gone too quickly.”

The complete assurance of the old fellow! But what did he care for
humanity, after all?

“You are going to Bangkok, Mr. Royden, aren’t you?” asked the captain.
“Some voyages ago I had a passenger for there. Young like you, but a
girl, a child. She had come out from England. She was a little different
from the rest of you. I thought she looked like my own daughter. Couldn’t
make out what she was going to do in a place like that—an innocent girl
of about twenty. She asked me some funny questions about Bangkok. I
could see she was frightened. Then it came out. A native prince had sent
her money, and there she was, going to marry him. Do you know what that
means? Well, I told her. Told her how many wives he had already. She
cried. She didn’t know till then. But do you think I could help her? No,
Mr. Royden. She had taken the money, and spent it, and there she was. She
said she was forced to do it now. It was her duty. I had to leave her at
Bangkok. She was bound to go, she said.... Poor little soul!”

They both stared ahead. There it was entirely dark. The sound of the
surge, to Royden, was like the droning of his own thoughts. All were
drifting. Nobody really knew where he was going, nor why. Not even Bible
Brown.

“I can’t make out, Captain,” he said, “how you find your way in a
darkness like this.”

“Find my way? This darkness is nothing. It is a fine night. I know my
course. There is the compass. The darkness is nothing. I keep my course.
To-morrow we shall be off Tumpat. I know where I am.”




CHAPTER XXXI


After our little coasting steamer had worked clear of the noisy
bewilderment of Singapore’s crowded harbor the reality of the East
dissolved. The East again was only a silent presentiment. For several
days I saw to port the somber hills of Johore, Pahang, and Trengganu,
and behind them each day the sun disappeared in an appalling splendor of
thunder and flames. But those hills by the China Sea and the wrack of
day above them were in the same world; one was no nearer to me than the
other. The weather was heated and calm, and the sea was glazed, for the
monsoon was northeast. I was bound for Bangkok. Yet Malaya was implicit
in that magnificent dread to port at dayfall; though how could I enter
it? How does one reach the sunset clouds? I had come to see that land,
but I had given it up. I was going to Bangkok instead. Singapore is
not Malaya—it is more Chinese than anything else; nor Penang; nor even
Malacca. You may drift about from one anchorage to another in the China
Sea and the Bay of Bengal—voyage along both sides of that strip of Asia
which reaches down to the equator and is called the Malay Peninsula; or
travel leisurely in a railway coach for days past inland stations with
pleasing native names, or career for weeks over excellent roads, through
miles of rubber plantations, jungle, tin-mining districts, old Malay
hamlets, and modern Chinese compounds, and feel all the time that you
will never enter Malaya. I had tried every device in an effort to glimpse
it, but it had eluded me; and soon I must go home. We ought to have more
sense, of course, than to try to touch a dream, or to reach that place
which exists but in the glamour of a name.

The agent of our steamer at one sleepy coastal station, when I asked him
whether it was possible to travel inland away from the usual roads, shook
his head. He did not know. He thought not. It was wild and uncertain.
Nobody ever did it. He had been there nine years and had not been more
than ten miles inland. That overseer of cargoes and manifests looked
toward the hills, and I thought for a moment that his glance was half
regretful. “No,” he said; “I shall never know what is behind them. I’m
too busy. And when I’m finished here I shall go, please God, straight to
Dorking. Do you know Dorking in Surrey? That’s where my hills are.”

And his, I think, is the experience of nearly all the exiles from Europe
on that coast. Those men are not really incurious. Their youthful
ardor, the zest for adventure which carried them out, has been subdued.
Commerce caught them on the way, and imprisoned and disciplined them.
They have not seen and will never see more than the cocoanut and rubber
plantations, estate inventories, poker at the club, tin mines, and
coastal go-downs and cargo manifests, of their fate. They do not talk
with the natives, but with commercial travelers. The extent of London and
New York and their unquestioned control is terrifying. Our maps give no
indication of it. They seem to have men everywhere in bondage, and you
find the chains are as despairingly stout and reliable on a Siamese beach
as they are where fixed to their awful staples in Threadneedle and Wall
streets.

So Bangkok, another great city, was the best that I could do. Nobody
could help me to anything better. I was free to regard distantly from
my steamer the home of the Sakai, the hills where the little forest
people use poisoned darts and blow-pipes, and where, in fact, life is
still unaware that it is nearly five hundred years since Vasco da Gama
rounded Good Hope. I was now no nearer to those hills than if they were
in another planet. There was nothing for it but to remain contented as
a happy tourist, and not to ask for too much. A week’s journey inland
from most of those roadsteads by the mouths of rivers—called _kualas_ on
the local map—would get me to where the Malay folk were living in the
way which was traditional before the coming of the English, even before
the coming of the Portuguese. But if any sedentary person supposes that
it is easy to break through the spell of the settled highways of this
world then he had better try it. Only good luck will get one through;
and I should like to hear how to arrange for the advent of that angel.
In another two days we were due in Bangkok. There I should see fantastic
temples, smell stale drainage, buy pictures of the place at the hotel
office, drink and gossip with cynical exiles to kill the evenings, and
then be more than glad to embark again. To feel the spirit of enterprise
moving you is not enough; a door must be found, and the key to it.
Malaya, however, was closed to me, as in fact it is to all but a few
government officials, prospectors, and men who are indifferent to
prudence, time, space, and the neat virtues.

A young fellow passenger, to whom I had not yet spoken, that evening
at dinner said something to the captain which I did not hear, and the
captain thereupon turned to regard him in mild surprise and amusement.
“Are you through,” the captain said with a wise smile. “I hope you will
like it, but I think not.” An elderly planter next to me chuckled. The
young man began to hum a tune, as though he did not hear.

“How will you do it?” said the planter.

“Oh, on an elephant, or walk it, if it comes to that, or take a _prahu_.
I don’t know. But I’m going.”

“And you call that a holiday?” said the planter, smiling bitterly.

“No, I call it a lark,” said the young man.

“I wouldn’t do it for a tenth share in the ship,” the captain assured me.

“Do what?” I asked, in suspicious curiosity.

“Why, make my own way to Ulu Kelantan, to where that river rises,
somewhere among the rhinoceroses over there.” The skipper pointed at the
night beyond the open ports of the tiny saloon.

After that dinner I forgot my excursion to Bangkok. I did not want it.
The young man assured me that he would not obstinately disapprove of my
society, and that he thought I could furnish myself with what was needed
for the trip up country at a place he called Kota Bharu. We should land
next morning near there, at Tumpat. It was fortunate for me that night
that those places were not on my map and that I could not prove my new
friend did not know what he was talking about, for otherwise I might
still have been prudent and continued in comfort and boredom my voyage up
the Gulf of Siam.




CHAPTER XXXII


We landed next morning at Tumpat, thus far justifying faith, for nothing
noteworthy was visible from our anchorage. Tumpat is on the present main
channel of the delta of the Kelantan, a river which changes its mind
about its channels now and then; and from Tumpat crossed the river to
Kota Bharu, the capital of the native state of Kelantan, where its Sultan
resides. To have such a name, and a Sultan, and to be placed on the
shore of the China Sea in such a light, should be enough for any town.
From what I could see of it, one might do well at Kota Bharu. It has a
rest-house, a rambling and capacious building of timber, where I thought
it would be easy to stay for so long that one might forget to go. Near
my bedroom wild bees had a home behind a beam, and I could sit and watch
a living brown fresco moving its pattern on the planks of the wall. Next
door to the bees was a colony of wasps. No courtesies were exchanged.
The bees never went to the wasps, though the wasps occasionally came to
look at the bees, but never stayed long, for the disapproval of the bees
was instant, though they did not appear to resent some little tricks I
played on them. While watching the bees one afternoon a chichak, a small
gecko who lives on the walls and ceilings of every house and attends to
the flies and moths, slid out of a crack about a yard from the bees. He
seemed astonished by so great a number of flies, and lifted himself on
his hands to get a better view of them. He was obviously puzzled, and
instead of his usual lightning dash he made a slow and careful approach
to within a few inches of a bunch of the bees. Then he remained as still
as the graining of the wood, till a bee happened to walk toward him. He
fled back to his crack like the flick of a whip.

My friend I had found in the ship, whose name may be Smith, told me,
however, that this was no time to watch flies. I must go to a Chinese
shop and buy frying pans and provender, while he went to the Sultan’s
prime minister, or chancellor, or caliph, to obtain a mandate which would
require the local chiefs to regard us friendly-wise.

That afternoon, by invitation, we saw a bull-fight, at which the Sultan
and his court were present. The Malays of Kelantan, their disposition
being entirely happy, delight in the fighting of bulls, buffaloes,
rams, cocks, and fish. The Sultan, it was whispered, keeps registers of
all the fighting animals in the state, is regularly informed of their
condition, and arranges the tournaments. This was one. It was a sparkling
festival. But for those fighting bulls, I should never have seen so many
of the ladies of Kota Bharu. The massed colors of their silk _sarongs_
and head scarfs were emphatic and influential. Each bull seemed to be
hidden within the ambush of a rainbow; from his happy seclusion he sent
out his distracting shrill challenges. They were humped cattle, small
but athletic, with brass or silver guards to the points of their horns.
Their hoofs were polished. Their coats played like satin with the light.
They were haughty. To the caresses which would have won the coldest
rajah they were massively indifferent. They appeared to know that their
part in the show was not love, and to sternly reject it. The favorite
was a little black animal. He was quiet, even sleepy. He submitted to
the shampooing of his coat and the massaging of his limbs with the proud
nonchalance of a popular champion. Children might play with him, and
they did. And while the children played, the bookmakers gave the picture
a familiar touch of Epsom Downs. Malays are dour and irreclaimable
gamblers, and I found that to share this human failing no knowledge of
the vernacular is necessary. The betting was two to one on the champion.

The two bulls for the first round were led by their men into a large
inclosure. There for a space they were fondled in opposite corners,
while, so far as I could see, good advice was whispered earnestly into
their ears. The guards to their horns were removed, and a man from each
went over to inspect the sharp horns of the other animal, probably for
poison. Then a gong droned, and the comely gladiators were marched to
face each other at a distance of about fifty yards. The gong crashed, and
the crowd raised the shrill and fearful Malay war cry. Each bull exploded
in a cloud of dust.

[Illustration: _The Fighters Stood with Horns Interlocked, Waiting for
Each Other to Move_]

I felt at that moment a spasm of apprehensive indignation at the cruelty
of it; but the bulls understood each other. It was all right. Anyhow, one
bull understood the other. The little champion appeared to be outmatched.
He kept carefully his front on feet as nimble as a cat’s, but was pushed
about the field. I felt I could only wait for his end. There were sharp
convulsive onsets, or the fighters stood with horns interlocked, waiting
for each other to move. But I noticed each time that it was the big
aggressive fellow who moved first. Once the two fighters separated—gazed
round calmly at us while their flanks heaved—ignored each other—showed
clearly that this was fun and that they had had enough of it. But the war
cry aroused them, and the cry rose an octave when they met in the shock
of another charge. The champion stumbled at the impact. His opponent
instantly became distinctly savage and more active, and the bookmakers
thereupon raced round the inclosure, offering three to one on the
champion, which I thought was ridiculous logic. The champion was bleeding
at the shoulder. He was tired and was in retreat. Once or twice now, when
their horns were mingled and they stood with their muzzles to the ground
for a breathing space, like statues, watching each other, I thought I
observed that the little fellow experimented with his challenger. He
appeared to test him with a modest feint or two. Yet this only inflamed
to fury his enemy, who drove him backward again straddle-legged over a
dozen yards or so.

This happened once too often. At the end of one of these retreats the
little champion played some caper. I do not know what. I could not see
it. It was instantaneous. But there the big bull was, on his ribs, and
his enemy’s armed front was prodding his belly, daring him to move. The
beaten bull, lately so aggressive, did not move. Once he raised his head,
and if there was not in his eyes a pathetic appeal to let him off, then
I do not know that expression. The champion understood it, like the
gentleman he was. He turned away his head, as though he had forgotten
something, and on the instant the defeated gladiator was on his feet and
trotting away briskly to his corner.




CHAPTER XXXIII


With our possessions assembled into six small packs roped in rubber
sheets, next morning at daybreak Smith and I took train for Rantau
Panjang, a village on the right bank of the Golok River, twenty miles
from its mouth—this is mentioned just in case there should be any
curiosity to discover exactly where we were. The Golok is the division
between Malaya and Siam. At that little village the headman, on reading
our mandate, found three men for us without parley. And the chief
of police, who happened to be an Englishman, was so alarmed by the
inadequacy of our preparations and the puerility of our plans that he
forced on me also a rifle and ammunition. I understood from him that
I might be required to shoot a tiger or a seladang at any moment.
“But don’t shoot an elephant,” he admonished me, “unless you must.” I
assured him that I would resist every temptation to harm a wild elephant
unnecessarily. Thereupon we marched off. The policeman shook his head
over us in mirthful pessimism.

It was ten in the morning; and the spaciousness of the bare and brazen
prospect to which then we set our faces under that sun was a matter for
firm courage. I could have played tennis with the rifle at the start.
In less than an hour it was a worse evil than many tigers, for we had
to cross some miles of padi fields and open land, all of it hard and
rough in the dry season, with the loam of the furrows and ridges as
unaccommodating as granite. We marched toward a line of blue hills, but
the shelter of their woods seemed at a distance no effort could measure.
Smith was ahead of me, so I could watch the dark stains begin on his
khaki tunic, and spread till their boundaries merged and the back of his
jacket was uniform again with sweat. When he turned to me now and then I
saw he was suffering, for he was of a stout and hemispherical habit of
body. Yet certainly this was better than all the motor-cars and steamers,
for at least we hardly knew where we were going, and had no idea where
we should be that night. A spot named Nipong was mentioned; but by
looking, first at the chart, and then at Smith, I judged that Nipong was
best considered as a fond dream. We came to a swamp, then managed to
scramble over a small tree prone across a stream (a rifle is useless as a
balancing pole), and the track became a tunnel in a forest immediately it
left the far end of the fallen trunk.

Nothing could be guessed of that path except that it would get more
illegible the farther it beguiled us from the things that were familiar
and understood. It would please itself, though perhaps not Smith, who
was a little sketchy in his geography. He, indeed, appeared to be sure
only that there was a lot of jungle to be traversed before we reached
Nipong, where folk lived; and we were going to rely on Malay hospitality
for shelter for the night. So I wondered in these circumstances what had
gone amiss with me, because it is odd to feel tired, yet sure you can
light-heartedly continue till the best man of the party has had enough of
it.

I felt I had known the Malay jungle all my life. This place had no
incubus. It was still the first day there, and not even noon. I would not
have used that rifle on any polite tiger, and it occurred to me from the
look of the place that the animals there would be friendly. Besides, the
Malay who had chosen to march near to me had rolled his _sarong_ into a
loin cloth. But for that he was naked. He was a middle-aged man, slender
and tough, and his figure appeared to be so proper to that murky place
where fragments of sunlight had sunk down the deep silence to rest on
improbable and immovable leaves on the floor, that I knew I should be
lucky if the two of us were designed to go on like that till we emerged
from the other side of it, where the Bay of Bengal would stop us at a
beach. I liked the mild but critical eye of that fellow. He did not look
at me, but there could be no doubt he was appraising, by a standard we
should find difficult to meet, the two white men who were with him, and I
am bound to say I desired that that barbarian should not view me in any
miserable, inadequate, thin, faded, apologetic loin rag of civilization.
I did not want my culture to shame me. I will swear that fellow was a
sound judge, whose verdict might be guessed only in the aloofness of his
contempt. When the police inspector that morning had pointed to the far
hills, and peered at us sardonically as we turned to go there, I was a
little dubious of my sanity. Why was I asking for trouble? But something
had happened to me in the meantime. I would have repudiated my past if
I could have done so, denied St. Paul, pretended I had never heard of a
doctor of literature (what on earth is that?), and swopped all the noble
heritage of two thousand years of London for a couple of bananas, only
there can be no escape from what we are. I wished then that Mr. Santayana
had been with us. I would have given even the bananas for a sly peep at
my barbaric Malay as he viewed in that wild our more blanched and tenuous
refinement. I wonder to what it really amounts? An accidental ray through
the roof of that forest had dropped on it, and you could hardly tell
Ancoats from Oxford; yet the Malay’s quick and questioning glance had
been not only revealing, but pleasing to me. There are other worlds, but
we so seldom glimpse them.

We came to the sandy shore of a larger stream. It flowed swiftly and
silently out of the darkness on one side of us and into the shades on
the other. There was no bridge. Quite naturally I looked for it, because
it is our right to cross a river by a bridge, and to find an inn on the
other side of it. Our Malays did not pause. They walked straight in,
somehow kept their feet with the water near their shoulders, climbed the
opposite bank, and vanished within the foliage without looking round. It
began to occur to me that I was expected to get wet, and I followed the
natives with but the briefest hesitation. We are so used to the provision
of bridges and things that at first it appears to be an oversight on the
part of nature, and an affront to our dignity, to have to wet the shirt.
Something was broken in my mind during that pause. On the other side,
as I went up the sandy slope with heavier boots, I saw a footprint not
made by our party. A tiger had been there before us. Crossing that little
stream took me into a quite different region, where the usual counters
of thought were not current. We use the supports of our civilization
without knowing they are there, and even suppose we are supporting
ourselves. Profound philosophers will do this, unaware that without
the favor of the rude tinkers, tailors, and candlestick-makers beneath
them their minds would give way, would sprawl in a most uncultured and
helpless manner next to an earth even ruder and more intractable than a
revolutionary tinker, and that they would perish long before they could
raise a few coarse oats for sustenance. I followed my Malay, as though
I had not gone over a boundary which parted me from all that hitherto
had kept my feet. What my civilization had given me, I realized, was
altogether inadequate and counterfeit. Even my rifle was fraudulent. A
philosopher’s finest thought cannot move with the infernal subtlety of a
tiger.

A little later another stream ran athwart our way. There was no wading
over that. It was wide and swift, and moved with a silent power that
betrayed its depth. There was no passage over it but by a fallen tree.
The huge butt of the tree was on our side, and descended in a nasty curve
to the center of the river, which in places swirled over the partly
submerged hole. I knew I could not do it. “_Buaya_,” warned my Malay,
and trotted over without a fault. And crocodiles, too? Smith essayed the
pass ahead of me, but he began to treat his foothold too punctiliously
just when his daring courage should have entered recklessly both his
feet; paused, and made to look back; tried to go forward again; and fell.
I was at that moment on a greasy length of it, waving the rifle about
helplessly and trying not to judge how many more seconds I should last.
Smith bumped off, but snatched at a projection and hung on desperately.
The current carried his legs downstream.

The Malays had disappeared ahead and what could I do? I cried savagely to
him that if he let go he would have to die. I knew that he was almost at
an extremity with fatigue, but at the shout he became lively, grabbed a
better hold, and at last was aboard again, panting. I have no idea how I
got over.

A tropical rain-forest is an experience which goes far to alter your
conception of the quality of life. Life does not seem to be a tender
plant. In the north, on the exposed ridges and sandy barrens of the
world, life might be a patient but timid invader, grateful for the
stoniest comfort, doing its best against the adverse verdict of fate,
and perishing meekly in adversity. In a jungle of equatorial rains the
earth itself is alive, and there is no death, and not even change. There
are no seasons. Life is visibly as dominant a fact in the universe as
great Orion in a winter sky. It is immortal. It is even terrifying in
its heedless and unscrupulous arrogance, as triumphant as the blazing
sun, and has no doubt that God has justified its ways. You may live
with it, if you can. It has no other terms. This Malay forest varied in
character. Where the ground was high it was more open, yet more dim; the
trees were greater, and their buttressed trunks rose like the pillars
of a cathedral whose roof was night. But on swampy ground, where day
could in some diffused sort reach the earth, we could not step aside
from the track. A lower riot of foliage was caught between the masts of
the forests, spinous, tough, and exuberant. Bare cables were looped and
pendent from above, roots meandered over the earth like flat walls and
like the rounded bodies of dead reptiles of interminable length. Climbing
palms, the rattans, lifted green feathers into every space, and their
barbed and flexible ropes frustrated every pass. Epiphytes and ferns were
posed on all the knots and protuberances of the masts and spars, and one
fern, the elk’s horn, projected its masses of palmated green antlers in
such abundance that it was more remarkable than the hosts on which it
was parasitic. There was no sound. I paused to watch some colored flies
hovering in a lath of sunlight, and their murmuring might have been the
audible energy of the tense and still uprush of life about me. It was
while alone, watching those insects, that I was surprised by my Malay
coming back to me. He was evidently bothered by a difficulty. He told me
that the other _tuan_ was ill, was lying down in the path, and could not
move.

Poor Smith was indeed on his back. He had propped his head on his
helmet, and he confessed that this heat and fatigue were outside his
specification. He was finished. He could not go another step. While
kneeling beside him, pointing out that he was yet too young to give
himself as food for ants, I noticed that my breeches were bloody and had
to touch the leeches off my legs with my pipe. This was our introduction
to those indefatigable creatures. The revulsion was mental, not physical.
It is a shock to see the worms feeding on you before their time. Such
haste is unseemly and not by the rules. I glanced at Smith, and then saw
a group of them attached to his belly. He had not noticed them. How soon
he was up! How well he stepped out! Even leeches can have their good
points.

The day was slanting fast toward sunset, but there was no sign of any end
to the forest. I found myself the leading file, and so discovered that
when one reaches a queer place in the woods, some resolution is required
to take it ahead of the others. For once I came out of the trees suddenly
and unannounced, and found below me an extensive and forbidding inclosure
in the jungle, a level lake of pale reeds round which the gloomy wall of
the forest rose, as though to keep private and secluded what was there.
The afternoon, sure of its privacy, was asleep within that secret bay in
the darkness of the woods. Even Adam must have had some hesitances in the
far and unfamiliar corners of his garden. The grass in this corner of the
forest rose several feet above my head, and I parted it to find a way,
remembering the while tales of the seladang, the bison who weighs a ton,
does not wait to be insulted, but takes the initiative, and can reverse
like a cat. But only the afternoon was asleep in that recess. Then the
forest began again.

Within an hour of sunset, when even the Malays looked as though they had
had enough of it, we came upon a wide clearing. The hills of indigo,
which had been far from us in the morning, were now near. They were part
of the forest. That open sandy space was loosely grown over with shrubs
that were touched with the colors of flowers whose scents stirred only
when we blundered past, as though nothing moved in that place except when
man disturbed it. Its peace seemed as settled as eternal truth. I could
look upon the pale bare stretches there of the sands of old floods as if
this were not only another country, but I had entered another existence.
Tired? I felt I could drop. But why are some moments and some scenes of
such nameless significance that, though all is strange, we feel there is
no need to ask what is truth? The Golok River was near us. It might have
been an upper reach of the river of life. It was of crystal and beryl.
The façade of the Siamese forest opposite was of gracious pilasters of
palms, with cornices and capitals of plumes; the roof was domed. The
clouds of evening were of rose.

But Smith was done. No more of it. The Malays, he said, were deceiving
us. This was Nipong. “There,” he said, pointing, “is a house. I can
see the plantains from here.” Our men stood by disconsolate. They said
nothing. But when I went to inspect this house something loathly stirred
within the rank herbage on its floor; for it had no roof and most of its
walls of palm matting had gone. We got going again. And it was almost
dark when, for the first time in that long march, we came to betel and
cocoanut palms (no doubt of it now) and presently to the huts. There was
a fair cluster of them, all raised on stilts with clear spaces under
them, and the paths between lumbered with the bulky black shapes of
buffaloes. The beasts gave one sullen stare at us, and lumbered off with
about as much sense of direction as runaway lorries. I thought they would
carry the houses off their props and that we should be left shelterless
after all. But, anyhow, the eruption brought out a frowning and elderly
little man, who stood at a distance while he read the Sultan’s letter.

He took us home. It was a larger house than the rest, with an unusual
length of irregular ladder to its veranda. A corner of its bamboo floor
was given to us, and a group of children became intent on our business
of unpacking. The chief showed us the river, where we could bathe. When
I returned from it the day had gone, and I sat cross-legged with the
Malays, dressed like them in _sarong_ and _baju_, and feeling that I
would have gone twice the distance for such a night. The heavy shadows
of that old barn-like structure were hardly disturbed by a little brass
oil lamp. Some men of the village gathered to gossip, and the women and
children vanished I don’t know where, but I could hear their voices
somewhere in the rafters. Brass dishes were placed between us on the
floor, with fruits and nuts, lansats, rambutans, mangosteens, and a
kernel which tasted like walnut. One felt quite at home with these
people. They spoke in low voices. They asked modestly about the outer
world, but said nothing in criticism. Perhaps they believed us. Smith
fell asleep, and I lay on a mat which the chief spread for me, and
pretended to sleep, but was listening, smelling the whiffs which came up
through the flooring of old durian shards, looking at the gossiping heads
of the chief and his cronies and at the grotesque shapes on the wall,
whether antlers and horns or shadows I did not know, and at a star or two
showing through the cracks in the wall. When I woke, the day was entering
the hut in splinters, but all my friends were motionless bundles about
me.




CHAPTER XXXIV


It is as pleasant to travel afoot in the tropics, so long as you keep
intact the curiosity of a newcomer and do not expect life to be buoyant
near towns, as it is in Devonshire; though one ought not to stroll
off into the deep end of the unhelpful wilderness, like Smith, if the
vital organs are lardaceous. To walk is the only way to learn where
you are. Yet perhaps it does not get done so easily as this paragraph.
Trifles that would be disregarded at home may become perilous where
the sun can be an evil-doer. An extra risk should be looked at before
it is taken; and fretfulness when all goes awry is as bad as ptomaine
poisoning, though its effects are not so quickly obvious. Shelter and
food on numerous occasions will be worse than sketchy, yet as to that
it should improve the morals of a civilized man to realize how narrow
is the division between his precious life and what comes after it. That
division between here and hereafter in a tropical wild is so thin that
you might see clean through it if what is behind it were not so dark. I
set out into the woods without a mosquito curtain, because those who had
never been so far advised me that I should not want it. No fever there,
naturally. There never is. Yet later I used good measures of quinine and
aspirin on natives who looked as sad as malaria usually makes a victim.
And one despondent exile to whom I spoke of this replied simply, “I don’t
know why some of ’em make such a devil of a fuss about West Africa, when
there’s this place.” The mosquito net should have been an essential part
of the kit. We slept in native huts, where any lurking _anopheles_ are
almost sure to be infected. Besides the mosquitoes, there are the little
extras. A bug of some kind—the jungle bugs are of many kinds—stung me
the first night, and left a weal which was not as large as a hot cheese
plate, but felt like it. That reminder I retained for about a week. The
little things count, most decidedly. We had floundered, one day, through
the mud and ordure where a herd of wild elephants had rested during the
heat; then we spent some hours in a canoe, and a bare foot, though I
did not know it, was exposed to the sun. The consequent blisters, which
became confluent, were alarming if I looked at them too long.

Then there are the leeches. An injection of the determined character of
these shameless little parasites would carry a broken-spirited man to
fortune against all the laws of the land, unless the gun of an indignant
victim stopped him. The leeches are after blood, and they get it, if a
body comes their way. They confess only to salt or tobacco juice, once
they have attached themselves. A traveler, his mind occupied, may feel
nothing when some leeches take hold of him, but later he is sure to
note the nasty crimson mess he is in. They are small creatures, at the
most not more than an inch and a half in length, and not thicker than
twine before they have fed. Their color is almost black or dark olive,
sometimes with yellow markings. Wherever the woods are moist these
patient creatures sit on their behinds, on the ground, on the foliage,
and wait. At the first tremor betokening an approaching wayfarer, man
or beast, they stretch out eagerly and rotate in the air for a grip.
Should you stand still and watch the track you will see them converging
frantically for your boots, all overjoyed by the lucky chance that you
are waiting for them and fearful of being late. They never miss such a
chance. There are no sluggards among the leeches. And you cannot always
be ready to fence with them. If they reach a boot heel they keep up
their pace; they do not stop to congratulate themselves with a partial
success, but mount desperately till they find a loophole in the clothes—a
pinhole seems enough—and the instant they touch flesh they are fast to
it. On one occasion I picked a leech off my sleeve just as it had arrived
(from Heaven knows where) and it became part of a finger at once. They
are as tough as rubber piping; no good treading on them; that helps them
to a landing. In some places their numbers make a traveler furiously
indignant, and but for the fact that they go off duty at sundown a night
in the forest might become a very long sleep. Puttees do not sufficiently
protect when on the march. It is necessary to carry carbolic soap, and
after wading through a stream to give the wet puttees so generous a
rubbing with it that the movements of walking convert the soap into a
pungent lather. I liked to see that pretty lacework of soap suds round my
ankles. It certainly disheartened the industrious little wretches.

On the chart the place was called Gemang—the usual tiny circle on the
map with a name beside it to show that men had congregated on that spot
of earth. But in fact it was only a large communal dwelling, a raft
of boughs, raised on stilts ten feet off the ground and reached by a
ladder. Round three sides of the raft were cabins. One was given to us.
This dwelling, like all of its kind, was of some substance; the main
beams and props were of fairly heavy boles, and the superstructure of
bamboo. The walls were of flattened bamboo worked into matting, and
the roof was thatched with palm leaves. All was bound together with
rattan. There was no iron in it. Smith felt he would like a rest before
going over the divide between the Golok and Kelantan rivers. We stayed
at Gemang for a day. The novelty of our position sustained me, for the
people were good natured and went quietly about their business, the
women husking rice in a wooden trough with pounders, while the children
chased away the chickens. I don’t know what the men did except that
they crouched by us and talked, though sometimes one would take out a
monkey to climb for cocoanuts. When the monkey was not climbing for our
refreshment it was chasing the cats headlong over the thatch for its own,
which in Malaya is sensational activity.

I felt that night that I should be glad to go in the morning. There were
many ants. A spider like a mouse ran out of my mat when I unrolled it.
Other things were flying and crawling. It was an old and harboring place.
Each bamboo of the floor under me had its separate reminder on my body;
and beneath them a buffalo had taken refuge. When he rose to change his
uneasy couch, then I too rose several inches. The buffalo smell was
adulterated with that of durian—a quaint mixture. One side of our cabin
was open, and so, when not watching the black patterns of leaves against
the stars, I could look at the heads of the gossips round the tripod
flesh-pot, with its inconstant flames. There had been a whisper of a
supernatural creature in this community, of which I took the usual notice
of a tired skeptic. During the night, however, I did hear inhuman howls
and gibbering and some thumping, and put it down, not to a revelation
of the supernatural, but to the monkey, which was a robust creature. In
the morning, from the cabin opposite, the head of a man on his belly
poked out from the interior darkness, and his mouth slavered. The sacred
creature was an idiot, and we learned that he had been there for twenty
years and had never come out of his hut. It was a pleasure to pack up and
go.




CHAPTER XXXV


The forest changed our thoughts as soon as we were in it. We began to
climb southwest of the Golok Valley through a tunnel in the jungle. It
was a day—somewhere, anyhow, it was day, though hardly there, for the
valley was deep and the morning was early. The woods might not have been
there. They looked unbegotten. The trunks were contorted and askew. They
reclined in a watery light, wet and rotting, and rocks like unplumbed
reefs in a submarine deep had to be climbed. One would not expect to hear
a sound there, and in fact there was no sound in that twilight unreality.
I stopped to listen. There was but a noise in my head, which I tried to
shake out. But this delay left me far in the rear. Then I could not hear
even our party, and so could not reach them. They might have floated
upward to the surface out of it. As I crawled on along the interminable
floor, looking for signs of them, I had a distinct inclination to glance
backward over my shoulder to see if anything were following me. But what
could have been following me?

By noon we were near the height of the divide, and paused for a rest.
A stream was beside us, unwinding slowly past hindering trees whose
roots were like outcrops of weathered rock. The water was black, like
the roots, till I noticed spectral fish, vividly dyed, suspended low
down among the buttresses of what could have been a column of basalt.
The water was really clear. Yet the fish could have been an illusion,
so unlikely were their circumstances; but I was too tired for any
verification. One becomes weary to the point of moribundity on rough
ground in a forest of the equatorial rains. You don’t care any more.

By the time the day is mellow you have tripped in fatigue too often to
bother about anything that matters. Nothing matters. Another stream has
to be waded just when you had hoped you would arrive at camp almost dry.
There is a pause to pick off the leeches. When you try to see whether
there are any attached to your person where direct vision is difficult
and in part impossible, you slip in the mud. Impatiently you step out.
The leeches you can’t see may stay where they are, and be damned to
them. Anyhow, the last stream washed off the mud. Then a quagmire made
by elephants is reached, and the muck is returned to you, and more also.
Out of the bog you mount a steep bank, feeling you could move no faster
if the elephants were charging it, and slip; as you fall you grasp
desperately at a rattan full of thorns, which gives way. Then there are
more leeches to pick off.

Some hours before sunset we descended to an upper reach of the Kelantan
River, and came to a hut occupied by two white men. The one who met us
wore a beard, but not much else except a pipe, for his trousers were
useless for their purpose, and his singlet hung from one shoulder. I
understood he was prospecting for gold. I hoped that his cheerfulness was
more than mere ignorance of his fate, for his alabaster pallor suggested
that long exposure to a moist heat had drained the virtue from his
flesh. His companion, an older man, then briskly approached. But he was
dressed so neatly that perhaps he respected the society of the trees. His
bearing reminded me that through mud and leeches a stranger could not
see me at my best. He stood regarding our small party as though it were
a dog on a parade ground; I fancied there was still something remaining
of the sergeant major about him and that recently he had been sardonic
with duffers. He was nursing a Winchester rifle as if it were a delicate
child. He surveyed us steadily for so long that I wondered what he would
say when he spoke. But he only remarked, “My God!” I dare say we were,
too.

This man Ryan showed us where to bathe, and told us what not to do with
our wounds, though his manner implied that probably we would be fools,
nevertheless. Then he listened to the story of our wanderings without a
comment; he merely asked at times what could have been supposed was an
irrelevant question, though he made no use of the answer. When our jejune
recital was over he looked a little pensive and whimsical for a moment,
then rose to place about the platform where we were reclining some dishes
of hot food and basins of coffee. We looked out to the river. It was
deeply below us, in a narrow passage, gliding over shelves of granite.
The forest was a somber wall on the other bank. Above those personal
trees some hills were monstrous and salient, for the sun had just gone
down behind them. Ryan pointed at the hills with his knife. “Only
seladang and Sekai over there.”

[Illustration: _He Began to Treat His Foothold Too Punctiliously_

(_See p. 239_)]

With a friend beside me whose profile was like Ryan’s I should regard the
immediate possibilities of any quite primal savagery with equanimity.
The thought of it was even pleasant. We were going over there, too, in
the morning. The light in the clouds beyond those hills was that of
dread and wonder. A wind, an eddy from a distant thunderstorm, brought
the scent of a tree in flower from the forest behind us, and carried
away the heavy heat down to the river. The coffee had a flavor notably
good. That was the way coffee ought to taste. A dog sat next to me,
waiting for scraps. As I spoke to him I saw a leech uncoil from inside
his nose and elongate and retract. One must accept such things along
with sunsets and sonatas, but they do seem like insults to truth and
beauty. The leech, for his part, might ask what did we suppose men and
dogs were for, in a world of good leeches. The dog took no notice of his
familiar, for he had no fingers to take hold of the thing; the dog was
philosophically resigned. But the leech, by jerking out of sight like a
piece of tense elastic released, proved to me at once that fingers were
of no use against him. Ryan said the worm had had a lodging in the dog’s
nostril for a month, and that it declined to be ejected. Yet it was not
easy for the coffee and food to maintain its flavor with that before me,
so I got a pair of forceps; and Ryan, with exclamations of vicious joy,
presently executed the leech on the platform, beside the tin of biscuits.
If you regard this sort of outrage boldly and steadily, the light in
the sky remains almost unimpaired. The world is what we think it is;
most accommodatingly, it changes with our moods. It is not always easy,
therefore, to maintain a good light in the sky.

Our light failed. The opposite hills merged into the night, though arcs
of them shaped again when lightning momentarily expanded in the clouds
beyond. We could hear the river below, as though the thin remainder of
time were rapidly running out, and we were being left stranded on a high
solitude in eternity. Ryan’s quiet voice made eternity most homely.
His presence on the Plutonian shore, should we have the luck to meet
him there, will instantly cause the awful thought of the lord of that
domain to be of less moment. Some irreverent plot against Doom may even
begin then to rehabilitate the humbled soul of man. Ryan seemed to have
learned, in No Man’s Land in France, a few artful underplots against the
august front of eternity itself, and I found myself chuckling at its
somber presentment, now and then. When a victim regards even his own
extinction as a bit of a joke, can he be extinguished? Even the local
cattle of some Malay settlers who lived near appeared to be aware of the
nature of our hut. I heard, in the dark, grunts and blunderings near us,
snorts and hard breathing. What was this? Well, the animals came around
like that every night, confound them! No good sending the dog against
them. The brutes came back, as close as they could. They came for society
and safety. The tigers never approached _his_ place at night.




CHAPTER XXXVI


It is all very well, but one must pay for blundering carelessly through
the hindrances which discourage most men from the central hills of
Malaya. Yet a reward for being thus fatigued and sickened comes early
every morning in the forest. The light of dawn might be—perhaps it
is—merely the tranquillity and assurance of one’s own spirit. What of
that? The soaring palms, the green jib-sails of the giant arums, the pale
shafts and lofty domes of the great trees, shine as though the radiance
were theirs. Insects glance over the new blossoms in the clearing like
vagrant prismatic rays. But the hills have gone. They have not returned
with the morning. Where they were dominant last, sunset is but brilliant
vacuity, which is regarded with astonishment, for hills certainly were
there, and a river below them. And there the river still glides, past the
wall of the forest opposite, in long inclines of flawless crystal and
breaks of foam, over its shelves of granite; though now it is soundless
because all the world is murmuring. But where are the hills? Where they
rose opposite, standing over the valley in abrupt and gigantic shapes, is
only a glimmering pallor, the luminous depth of emptiness, which thins
upward into the blue of the sky. While surprise still stares at the place
from which the hills have vanished, a fragment of the distant forest
appears in midair, a miraculous satellite of earth, its tiny trees
distinct in the upper blue. That translated wood grows downward as the
jungle mist clears, till a shoulder of a dissolved hill has reformed.

Ryan cried breakfast, and by the time the pipes were lit all the hills
had come back and the ecstatic dog was strangling a snake under the hut.
Then we began to load a canoe—we waded in, guided it down clear canals
between the rocks, brought it in to a steeply shelving beach, and packed
it with pots and pans, a bag of mangosteens, and the provender for a long
journey; enough to sink it to about an inch of freeboard when we had
embarked, with two Malays, and Ryan’s Chinaman to cook for us.

The river seemed much swifter now we were committed to it, and it poured
just under my elbow. The forest, too, mounted over us to an astonishing
height. We were in a narrow chasm. The upper Kelantan is often in
anger among so many thwarting hills. The hills crowded in round us and
sometimes gave the river the semblance of a narrow lake. Precipices of
trees prevented a landing, our way ahead was closed by one bold mountain,
and other heights stood over our retreat. Yet somehow our Malays always
got us out of it. They stood up, one at the stem, one aft, each with
a bamboo, and just when we were charging into the trees they shouted
and poled us round a surprising corner. Or the canoe grounded in some
snarling rapids—tilted and began to fill—and we all climbed out to
persuade her upward against the stream; the stream lay in ambush behind
rocks, sprang at us as we approached, and tried to wrench the long narrow
craft out of our hands. It was while doing this against one barricade of
granite hummocks that some monkeys hooted at us, and the Malays jovially
answered them, sharply clapping their hands. The panic-stricken monkeys
fled, plunged desperately from tree to tree, became frantic and crashed
the boughs when we increased our yells.

More than water flowed through that chasm. The sun filled it with a
sluggish tide of burning air. When the stream narrowed and we moved under
the foliage it was like going into the shadow and coolness of a cave.
Fruits, legumes like scimitars, pale green globes, and clusters of yellow
balls hung in the shade, and were often seen with only just time to duck
the head. There were lenticular banks of bleached sand in midstream,
for this was the dry season, and stranded on them the bare skeletons of
trees, like the towering bones of dinosaurs. On the damp margins of those
sandbanks clusters of butterflies quivered their petals like beds of
stalkless flowers strangely agitated; when we splashed near they planed
over the mirror, with an image below each, or shot up the green wall
of the forest. Sometimes we passed a _rakit_ going downstream, a raft
of bamboos, with its man and wife and family as still as images. Once
another canoe passed us going up, with several gaudy Malay youths showing
off as noisy paddlers. They smiled at us and had a comparison to make
between our load and theirs; their load might have been Cleopatra, a dark
little lady in orange and emerald silk, gold ornaments in her black hair,
and haughtily unconscious, even in that place, that we were present.
Myriads of dragonflies and nymphs interlaced the sunlight just over the
stream, as though the crystal air were being flawed by the heat. They
settled on the edges of the canoe, transitory decorations, with wings
like flinders of quartz and hard bodies enameled in ruby and turquoise.

From behind one mountain, late in the day, a vivid cloud appeared, and
the tops of the trees showed a strange uneasiness. A flock of hornbills,
which had been quiet and unseen on the high roof where a tree was in
fruit—except for chance obliquities you might suppose the forest was
untenanted—suddenly mounted in an uproar, as though exploded from their
tree, soared so swiftly and disorderly that they might have been in the
power of a mad spiral of wind, and were gone.

Ryan began to show activity. He consulted his chart. He energized the
Malays. He ordered us to leap out and help over the bad places. He looked
at the sky. But there was no need to look at it. Its shadow rested on us.
The trees suddenly shouted and turned white, and then vanished in falling
water. It was then that the canoe jammed in some rocks; which made no
difference to us, though we stood up to our middles when clearing her. In
any case the river was warmer than the rain and did not smite so hard.

We landed at a beach and a hut at last, the place for which Ryan had
been making to escape the downpour, but only when the worst of the storm
was over. It was near a strange natural tower of white marble, which
must have risen five hundred feet sheer from a little plain. There was a
forest on its flat summit, and aprons of foliage hung wherever it had a
narrow shelf. As we worked round it and looked up, its mass seemed to be
hollowed with caverns. When a stone was flung at a dark window in a lower
story a cloud of bats unsettled, like thick black dust.

There we left the river and camped; and in three more marches got to
a hut of Ryan’s in the heart of the hills, near a corner where Siam,
Kelantan, and Perak were immediate on the map, but I could see no
difference in the jungle. That land was a congestion of steep hills, with
torrents circling their bases. Here and there in it a clearing let in the
direct sunlight to mortals, who else moved in a lower confused murk lost
to the sight of Heaven. On the way to the hut, Smith, whose indifference
to all but his own suffering occasionally led him into more trouble,
ignored the presence of some inquisitive wasps, which hovered about his
head in the woods while he was reducing his misery with a long drink. He
flapped a hand insultingly at one of them, though they looked as big as
one-pounder shells, and made the same sort of noise in flight. In that
instant I saw we stood close to their fort, from which the first wave
of the attack, having got the signal, was coming over the top. I fled.
Ryan had already gone. But Smith did not seem to know that we yelled to
him because time was short. It was the wasps who really impressed that
on him, and then he came faster than I should have thought he could,
and brought them with him. The enemy had made up their minds, however,
that only Smith had insulted them. They ignored Ryan and myself, though
we used violence to keep them off our friend. For barely ten seconds,
with those heroic insects coming at us like projectiles to repair their
honor, the affair was grave, for we could retreat no more with the thorny
rattans about us, and the only obvious track led back past the nest. But
the attack was called off, in the moment of victory for the wasps, just
as I struck another off Smith’s neck. They could have killed us, but
they let us off, with the exception of the bayonets remaining in various
parts of Smith’s body and even in his scalp. There was no doubt about the
venom of those stings; Smith was really a casualty.

The day was almost done when we reached the hut, and at the moment of
arrival it looked to me the flimsiest vantage that man had ever built
amid the powers of darkness. It had no walls. It was only a thatch raised
on poles, with a floor of rough boughs about a yard above the earth. It
was open to the jungle, which pressed round it and stood over it, so
that, at such an hour, it seemed lost at a fathomless crepuscular depth,
where the light and sounds of a world of men could never reach. A noble
fire of aromatic timber burned at one end of it; Ryan said the smell
of it helped to keep the beasts away. The Chinaman who had been left
to watch the place smiled at this. He shook his head. Last night, he
explained, an elephant, he come. He come there. The Chinaman pointed to
the margin of a stream beside the hut, where certainly something large
had rioted among the shrubs. He come, he stop. No good. He make noise.
The Chinaman curled an arm above his head in the semblance of a trunk,
and imitated a cornet. I go. The man pointed to the thatch. Yet the
elephant, it seems, though he argued loudly about it all night, could not
make up his mind to cast the sticks and grass of which the hut was made
back into the forest; and at daybreak the Chinaman thought of some festal
crackers he had secreted in a box, got down bravely, lit one, and threw
the serpentining firework at the elephant, which fled.

As the man finished his tale the cicadas began theirs. They did that
every evening. When from our place by the stream we could see the
declining sun glance for the last time on the top story of the forest,
where there was a break in the tangle, it was as though his straight
beam, like a plectrum, struck the silent life of the place into an
immediate chorus. The solitude woke. The cicadas and crickets shrilled,
whirred, made the sound of a wind through wires, the sound of cutlery
being ground, of circular saws singing through logs, the humming of
dynamos. It all came suddenly, and I thought I could hear at last the
very note of the high tension of life there. Yet it put me apart. I
heard, but the triumphant chorus was not for me. My own life was not at
that terrific pitch and confidence. That sound antedated the chant of the
priests before the Ark, the Eroica Symphony, and the National Anthem. It
may even be heard, some day, by some survivors of humanity, as their Last
Post.

The song ended when night came. Life had made its sign. It was there.
It would sing again in the morning. All dark Malaya contracted down to
Ryan’s hut. Only that was left, except some wavering patches of gold
which our fire threw on unseen trees. That Chinaman was a good cook; and
those nights when we sat in undress, listening to Ryan, and sometimes to
a call in the outer dark, caused me to wonder what had become of all my
other evenings of the past, when these certainly would be remembered.
But my easy confidence went when at last each of us took his place on
the logs, for sleep, having made up the fire. Sleep was not easy. One
listened. There was no sound. Yet that was the worst of it. When would
the sound come? What would make it?

It was two in the morning, and I rested on my elbow and looked out. A
thin filtering of moonlight was making the aisles spectral. The trees,
it seemed to me, had stopped in an advance on us just as I looked at
them. And what was that shape over there? Was it of the moon, or of the
firelight? No, the fire was going out. I got up and put on some logs.
Shadows jumped from rafter to rafter overhead as the flames changed. The
head of the hornbill which was being smoked turned round on its cord
in the sparks. All our fellows were asleep. The forest was asleep; or
else listening. Then, far off, there was a sound, half snarl, half moan.
When I looked out even the trees seemed to be attentive to that call.
There was a long silence, and then it came again. It was nearer. It was
insultingly confident. I had never heard a tiger in his own place before,
and I lost the feeling that man is the noblest work of God; even if he
is, perhaps tigers do not know it.




CHAPTER XXXVII


Alongside Ryan’s hut the stream spread out into a pool with a floor of
white sand. It had a canopy of leaves. A few rods of sunlight, almost
solid in their bright distinction in that shade, rested obliquely on
the bottom, firm in the smooth current. And the interior of the hut,
that outpost of man, with its heartening reminders of the cunning and
knowledge which maintained Ryan so far from his fellows, interested me
more, I fear, than could any library. I liked to read the labels on
his gallipots, and the names of his books. There were a jar of Epsom
salts, and another of carbolic lotion; a bottle of iodine; tins of cabin
biscuits; a few photos; surveying instruments; a cheap alarm clock;
books on mining and geology; and some whisky bottles, empty. Big black
carpenter bees had burrowed in the rafters, and their bolting holes could
have been made by mice. Companies of wasps, of a size to fear nothing,
gathered round the edges of these holes, gathering sawdust; but I noticed
the wasps showed the bee great respect when his ugly head appeared from
within. They went, and did not stay to say farewell.

“If you meet a rhinoceros,” said Ryan as we started out one morning,
“don’t take any notice of him. Walk by him. He’s a nervous old gentleman
and doesn’t like to be looked at.” My friend’s rifle was of the modern
kind which will tumble an elephant, but he never used it except for pigs
and deer. We waded up the stream for a time, and then entered the woods,
the dog buoyantly scouting ahead. Once, when he came back to us, he was
a different sort of dog. It was the habit of that white man’s mongrel to
murder any too inquisitive native dog. That, no doubt, was merely his
snobbery. He would attack an elephant, so Ryan said, and had killed a
hamadryad, the most deadly snake in Asia, evidence which may show that
there is no natural association between intelligence and courage. But
by the look of him at that moment he would have fled from a rabbit,
for his tail was clamped underneath, he was trembling, and he looked
abject enough as he slunk against Ryan’s feet. Ryan posed his rifle and
went ahead warily. Presently he stopped, and stood looking at a hollow
where the dry rushes were flattened. That was where a tiger had slept.
To the dog the smell of the place was so distressing that he whimpered.
In daylight, to me, it was of little more interest than the couch of a
deer, for although I would not at night have wandered beyond the range
of the firelight, after sunrise one usually has the feeling—usually, but
not always—that the time and the place are man’s. The Malays, I noticed,
never went alone into the woods, so my feeling of security may have been
only the presumption of ignorance.

Ryan told me nothing that morning of the mark of his excursion, and I did
not ask him. It was sufficient to be with him. We crawled under thorns,
but did not escape every hook, and sometimes then I lost my leader and
was compelled to be watchful of his track. That was not really difficult,
though once or twice I was surprised to find how near a man may be to
panic without knowing its silly livid face is at his elbow. One mountain
stream, cascading down a varnished slide of rock where the wet ferns were
constantly nodding, gathered into a font, and the drink we had there from
goblets of twisted arum leaves reminded me that at home we rarely know
what it is to eat and drink. The drops of water left on the waxy surface
of my leaf were like globules of silver. Ryan brought out a bag of
mangosteens. This fruit is nearly as large as a cricket ball, and about
the color of it, when the ball is new. It is opened by pressing its thin
rind, and the sections of translucent white pulp within have a flavor
rather like the strawberry’s.

[Illustration: _The Heavy Shadows Were Hardly Disturbed by a Little Oil
Lamp_

(_See p. 244_)]

While we ate them Ryan noticed a near tree, which the Sakai had scored
to get poison for their darts. An ashy gum had exuded and hardened at
each scar on the rough and grayish bark, but it was impossible to see
the leaves of the tree, which were far out of sight. My companion had
met these people, who are simple and harmless folk, elusive nomads who
never leave the forest, and are very rarely seen even by those Malays
whose clearings are on river banks within the forest. It was almost as
unlikely that we should see them there, though they might have been
watching us at that moment, as in Kota Bharu. Even the greater creatures
of the woods move noiselessly, are never more than shadows, something
briefly suspected without apparent reason, unless they choose otherwise.
But for the insects, and an occasional bird, that nocturnal stillness
might be thought untenanted. The leopard here is usually black, and in
such a place he need not be even an apparition. If you look at a section
of the tangle on which some light is falling there is such a confusion
of shapes, all imperfect and unrelated, and so great a contrast between
surfaces brilliantly reflecting the sun and hollows from which night
never goes, that the eye grows weary with the problem, and refuses to see
anything but an insoluble riddle. An elephant might be standing there and
you would not know it.

And the heat itself of noon will dull curiosity in anything that is not
near and clearly visible. You are content with the accidents of the
moment, as when a large dipterous fly, as I thought it, of a bright
metallic green, kept returning to the sweetish pip of a mangosteen at
my feet. I caught it, and discovered with a pain that it was a bee. But
who would have thought a fly of that age was a bee? Large predatory
flies were hawking about, and did not invite handling. There were
infrequent butterflies. Yet the expectation, natural enough after those
ridiculous tours of museums, and the gorgeously colored plates of life’s
variety in the tropics, that you will be even more gratified than by a
perambulation of a zoölogical gardens, will be gravely disappointed in
the equatorial forest itself. There the creatures watch you, but they
are unseen. The occasions when you see them are momentous. Ryan told me
that in his hut one evening, just as he was beginning to eat, he heard a
pig munching nuts some distance across the stream, and went over. A big
boar was making so eager an uproar at his feast that Ryan had no trouble
in shooting him for the dogs, and left the carcass to be cut up in the
morning. In the morning it had almost gone. Ryan was annoyed with the
tiger, and decided to punish him the next evening.

“You know,” said Ryan, “I was a sniper in France, so I’ve had all the
big-game hunting I want. If the tigers will leave me alone and not steal
my dogs’ meat, fine. There’s room here for all of us. But they must
kill their own pigs. That’s fair, ain’t it? Why, he’d only left enough
to disappoint my dogs. Well, I couldn’t find that tiger that evening.
Somehow, though, I knew he was about. The place smelled like it. I
thought, well, he’s behind that bush and if he goes that way I’ve got
him, and if he goes that way I’ve got him, and I waited. Nothing doing.
Then I had a funny feeling run up my neck, and I gave a peep over my
shoulder. There he was, sitting looking at me, ten feet away—I measured
it afterward. Squatting and looking at me. Wondering what in hell I
was doing, I suppose. Well ... I felt bitched. Don’t shoot, camarade.
The best thing, I thought, is to slew round the gun slow, so I began.
Like this. No quicker. That was when he went. He just went, sir. They
can move.” Ryan smiled reminiscently. Somewhere in the forest a bird
continued his song in three notes, as though an idle urchin were learning
to whistle and could not get it right, but was persevering. “One thing,”
continued Ryan, as he rose and began to gather his kit, “you can always
see a tiger here if you want to. Keep quiet for a long time, and then
begin to tap a tree. He strolls up. I don’t know why, but perhaps he
wants to know who the devil has got the nerve.”

We began a long and breathless ascent, at first through a tiresome
undergrowth, then through more open timber, and presently came to an
opening in the foliage on the brow of a hill, like a high window of the
woods. We stood, and neither of us spoke for a long time. Malaya was
below us in the afternoon light, an ocean of looming forest, its billows
arrested, mute, and held as though by a secret conjuration the instant we
appeared. “You and I,” said Ryan at last, “are the first white men to see
that.”




CHAPTER XXXVIII


It was time to leave Ryan, and make across country to the Golok. The
men had made fast the loads. All was ready. I looked round that narrow
well in the trees, into which the sun had just poured the morning, and
wondered why I was going. What was there for me at Charing Cross? Ryan
made no comment when we left him, except to express urgently a desire
that I would secure for him, as soon as I got to London, Bottomley’s silk
hat. “If it’s gone,” he said, “Lloyd George’s hymn-book will do.”

I will confess that when near sunset, a few days later, we came out
by the Golok the sight of that river was beneficial. The day had been
tiring. We were not far from Nipong, where we had stayed on our first
night up country. Yet I had often felt during the journey that we were
getting on too fast, especially when we were in the neighborhood of the
_campongs_, the little communities of Malays. Sometimes we saw a new
homestead, and a patch where the jungle had been only recently cleared.
The burnt stumps of the smaller trees studded the earth, and the greater
beams were still as they fell, too big to be moved, and amid all that
wreckage a Malay pioneer had planted his first crop of dry rice; the
slender blades of young rice were curiously emerald in what otherwise was
a reminder of a sultry wood near Ypres. There would be a heavy barricade
round it to keep out the beasts; yet it was usual, when walking through
it, to see the tracks of the smaller creatures of the forest—for they
were very noticeable in the new soft earth—especially the lace-like
design made by the tiny hoofs of _pelandok_, the diminutive mouse-deer.
And how friendly to us those husbandmen always were! They did what they
could to make our pause longer and to keep the gossip alive. They sent
their monkeys up palms to fetch green cocoanuts for drink, and brought
baskets of mangosteens, lansats, and rambutans. It was our folly to hurry
away from such people, from such peace in life, from such good manners.

If the place which gave us shelter that night by the Golok had a real
name I do not know it, but I could easily adjust a new one to it. Smith
had cheered me with words of what he called a forest checking station,
an establishment of the Sultan’s foresters. We found it in open ground
above the Golok; and there the local headman visited us, and promised
Smith a prahu for the morning to take us downstream to Rantau Panjang,
and boatmen, too, if they could be got. In the meantime, though its
outward prospect was worth some days of heat and fatigue, yet the hut
inside did not suggest that we should have new bodies by the morning.
Bats had chosen one corner, and of course the best corner, for their
droppings. The rest of the poles which made the floor were young and
old, new and rotten, large and small, and some were raised and some
depressed. Some were firm when they took our weight, and others groaned
and sank. The earth was ten feet below, and there many frogs were honking
and krexing differing tunes and with varied pitch. That meant swamp,
and in fact the place looked too much like mosquitoes. I thought we
had better build a fire under it, and smoke it out, and was cherishing
an awkward armful of cocoanut shards and sticks when the first buffalo
bull appeared. My sticks suddenly lost their value. This buffalo was
not the usual inert bulk of black rubber. He moved under the stress of
excitement. His eyes had an alert and inquiring glance, and his horns
were yard-arms. I thought I had better get up the ladder. When on the
middle rung another buffalo bull appeared on the other side of the house,
and as the two met rather instantly at the foot of the ladder I finished
the rest of the rungs in a stride. It was easy at the time. Then Smith
and I had a good view of it, spoiled by an alarming doubt that if the
two explosive tons below us touched our props then our shelter was done
for. It astonished me that pensive buffaloes could show such passionate
energy, and the shocks of the charges were chilling with clash and dull
drumming. Which would die first? Then a child appeared, a morsel of brown
innocence without even a clout of self-consciousness. He approached the
battleground and severely reprimanded the bulls. They stopped, and were
obviously embarrassed, with their lowered heads caught in the very act of
misdemeanor. They could not deny they had been fighting. The child struck
the flank of the first buffalo with a light wand and told him what he
was. The bull turned and shambled off meekly.

This episode took us well toward the dark. I got down to the floor,
and on my back prepared to wait for morning. I began by counting the
hours—there were exactly eleven hours to 6 A.M., or half a day less
one hour. To make sure that this was so I counted again, but found,
unluckily, the same number, less the seconds which the calculation
required to work out. The chorus of frogs now was like an iron-foundry;
then it fell to one blacksmith shaping one horseshoe. The shoe got
finished, and then the shipwrights began to rivet another plate to a
ship. With the electric torch I found that twenty minutes had gone,
and tried lying on the right side. This movement showed me that the
door had swung open and that my head would be the first thing a buffalo
would tread upon when entering the hut after climbing our ladder. The
darkness outside, somehow, seemed very queer. That door was shut, so far
as it could be lifted bodily to fit the opening. The wait for daylight
was resumed. Smith, somewhere else on the floor, groaned unseen, and
the boughs heaved as he changed his position. I wished I had made that
fire underneath, because light wings were now brushing my face, and the
mosquito who sang at one ear was as instantaneous as Gabriel’s awakening
clarion. There must have been clouds of them. I experimented with my head
under the cover, yet that, after ten minutes—ten more minutes gone—nearly
suffocated me. Besides, it left my feet exposed, and the light wings were
brushing them.

A storm began, though at a great distance, and something with large,
leathery, winnowing pinions began flying in the hut; and therefore when
a plank became alarmingly alive under me as Smith turned over again I
sat up in desperation and struck at those silent but draughty pinions,
though I hit nothing. It was time to try the other side. Midnight! We
were getting on. Six hours to go. Possibly I slept, though creatures kept
touching my face or crawling over my feet; but I was instantly awake when
the hut filled with fire. The storm had come. The lightning, bursting a
blue glare through the open timbers of the hut, made me think we were
within the ribs of an immense skeleton.

The next day did come. I was there when it came, and in its light that
hut appeared to be simple and ordinary. It was not bewitched, or else
its unclean spirits went at cock-crow. Our packs were where we left
them on the floor. Our tin mugs, standing yet on an old packing case,
were ridiculously trite. This was mockery. The job of making a fire and
some coffee was a matter for whistling. There was only coffee and hard
biscuits, but I wish breakfast could be always like that. The Golok,
however, had risen at least six feet in the night, and rafts of timber
overturned in the storm were traveling fast on its yellow current. The
sun was not yet above the hills, and so the woods were miraculously
bright and revealed.

The prahu was a long and narrow dugout canoe, with a Malay at each end
handling dexterously a long bamboo. They poled us into the stream, and
the flood caught us and added us to the wreckage of the storm. We fled
toward the sea. At least we had the assurance that we should encounter no
rapids on the Golok. We merely rotated in eddies with the forest high on
both banks, accompanied by floating trees whose submerged foliage was as
dangerous as reefs. For the first half hour, therefore, my interest was
fixed to the level of the Golok where the base of the forest was awash,
so as to be sure that when the canoe at last turned over I should know
of the nearest port. This, I soon saw, was an interest too concentrated
for a day which was already hot, but was only beginning, for the Malays
in charge of us were as apprehensive of signs and ripples and the topmost
twigs which nodded on the water line above wholly foundered snags, as
are spiritualists to messages from a hidden world. I relaxed. There was
nothing to do but to wait for Rantau Panjang.

The jungle on one bank was in Siam, and on the other in Malaya. It had an
aspect of grace. The green plumes of the climbing palms were fortuitous
over the stream, and from the cornices of the woods lianas were knotted
and often trailed in the water. There were, as usual, very few flowers to
be seen, and a rare spray in blossom was notable. The Golok serpentined
so flamboyantly that you could suppose the young sun was playing hide
and seek behind the forest and was trying to surprise us from different
regions of the sky. There were attractive white sandy beaches within
bays of the timber, and long spits which projected into the stream like
thresholds to the woods. The forest was opulent and elegant, and I
remembered, in contrast, the savage majesty of some aspects of the forest
of the Amazon. The Golok was a river beside which one could live, but one
never felt that of the Rio Jaci Parana of the Brazils. It was not yet
noon, but cramp and the heat drove us to estimate the distance we still
had to go and the hours we must remain exposed to the sun on a mirror
reflecting his dazzling light. He had been staring straight at us now for
some time. There was no escape; a change from a thwart to the bottom of
the canoe really took one no appreciable further distance from him. The
weight of a tropical day is ponderable. It must be seriously upborne. The
skin pricks wherever the sweat breaks at another pore, till all the pores
are flowing conduits. One merely sinks the mind, and endures. We passed a
beach to which a party of young Malays had made fast a _rakit_. They were
squatting under the shadow of a shrub while a little fire burned beneath
a cooking pot. An eddy caught us and whirled us away, and that picture of
men in the woods, sudden and illusory, vanished.

The heat relented three hours after midday, but vast inky clouds began to
tower. The evening storm was coming, and our nice calculations, based on
time and the direction of the upper wind, as to whether or not we should
arrive dry, gave us no comfort. In a malarial country rain may release
the fever lurking in the blood. But we left the clouds behind us, with
the sun behind the clouds. The upper rim of the mountain of threatening
nimbus had a broad coast of opal, and this became shot with the colors of
the rainbow, while presently, from the summit of the mass, a great fan of
emerald light projected. A greenish tinge to a belt in a clear sky is not
unusual, but vivid emerald was so strange a phenomenon that when Smith
saw it he said he did not like it, as though it were evil.

The woods became interrupted with the cocoanut and betel palms of
habitations, and women with water-pots stood in the evening light to
watch us pass. Children waited on the banks while the buffaloes wallowed
in the shallows. When the prahu touched at Rantau Panjang, and I stepped
ashore and stretched, it was with the usual sense that I had earned this
feeling of well-being. The evenings of Kelantan arouse no desire for the
peace of the Better Land. This earth can be a good place.




CHAPTER XXXIX


We got out to the coast again at last, and so cheaply, too, for our
foolish intrusion into the wild against which society protects us, that I
had the feeling that we had either stolen about unobserved, or that the
evil genius of the place had craftily slipped the punishment into our
pocket, and that we might find it when we thought the episode was closed.
When, some weeks before, I first saw Kota Bharu I had thought it a
pleasingly barbarous place; but then, coming on it out of the wilderness,
I saw that it was an outpost of London and Peking. Even the primitive
altar in a field, which looked pagan enough when I noticed it on the
outward journey, now seemed not so distantly related to St. Paul’s. We
were all right again, with familiar things about us.

Next morning we boarded a little coasting steamer for Singapore. She
was neat and bright, my cabin was hung with chintz having a pattern of
rosebuds, and the saloon table was as well ordered as that of a good
hotel. The captain, the kind man, listened to the tale of our fun up
country, and then said: “You’d like some news from home. Here’s the
papers by the last mail.” Most certainly, secure within chintz curtains
again, and with poisoned feet already less inflamed, we wanted news of
England. The smiling little sailor re-entered with a week’s bound numbers
of the _Daily Photograph_. I opened the volume.

It had better be confessed. I was anxious to see the news of England,
yet the first sight of leeches hanging to my body did not give me a
worse shock than that opened page. News from England! O my country!
Those blood-sucking worms, those jungle bugs which raised weals, the
warnings of fever, the dark forests and the cataracts, the night call of
the tiger—if all that were savagery, then what was the word for this?
Now the natives we had met, even the peasants far inland, were certainly
not barbarians. One learns to respect and to like the Malays. They are
a quiet, well-mannered, humorous, and hospitable people; and so I felt
I should be disinclined to expose these pictorial representations of
contemporary English life to a Malay gentleman, especially the pictures
showing our ladies playing tennis (useless to explain to a Malay that
such a popular picture is got by holding the camera close to the ground
when the lady kicks) and that page full of bathers and dancers, who might
remind him of the scandalous days when the house of the rajah caused so
much talk in the village. From that newspaper, at a distance from home
where it was impossible to get the counterpoise, you might have supposed
that England, despairing of her wreckage, was abandoned to vulgar
inanities.

In the forest, on some anxious nights when sleep would not come, I had
been sustained by the comforting memory of Waterloo Bridge at midnight,
and a nook in Surrey, and some corners of Devonshire; in this world
things like that, it was strangely certain, did exist, and they were
heartening. But by the China Sea I felt a sudden despair for England
as I turned those pages, and saw the home life reflected only in such
pictures, unqualified anywhere by a word that was not addressed to the
mentally deficient. To open those popular sheets seemed to let fly an
insane and fatuous blare. There was no sense in the packet. It was only
a silly noise. Without a single humorous or serious comment to correct
them, those photographs and idiotic paragraphs gave me the first real
scare I had had in nearly six months’ travel among the Malay Islands. It
was a very subdued adventurer who handed the volume of a week’s news of
home back to the nice captain; for it was unpleasant to realize that,
though out of the jungle, there was that to go back to.

I had become used to the Malays. I had learned to understand, in
a measure, their ways of living and of looking at life. They have
solved successfully the problem of accommodating themselves to their
circumstances. They are a happy folk. You rarely see an anxious face
among them, and never a hungry child. They are not required to regard,
as are Christians, the problem of reconstructing their society because
they have dismantled it in a grand and protracted mania. They need no
old-age pension. Their future is secure, if they will but give a brief
time yearly to rice fields, cocoanuts, and fishing nets. But I felt, even
with the assurance about me of those rosebud curtains, and the knowledge
that the Red Ensign was overhead, a sudden black doubt that I understood
my own people, which was a curious accident to happen so far off as the
China Sea merely through glancing at some illustrated daily papers from
London.




CHAPTER XL


_September 10._—I suppose I am as interested in Singapore as in any place
I have ever seen. It is, sometimes, a fearful interest. Singapore seethes
with human life, and can be as fascinating and repellent as an exposed
formicarium where the urgent streaming of instinctive protoplasm, even
if you are a naturalist, can be worse than the silence of the Sphinx.
In the name of God, why is it, what is it doing? You get the idea that
even the rank smells of Singapore are of its fecundity. Such odors are
beyond merely ordinary carelessness. The gush of its life is from no
failing source. It spurts and eddies in lusty brown swashes unceasingly
through every street and alley. That tide is never low; it is always
rising higher. China need not be a military nation; she merely overflows
into neighboring lands. Yet perhaps humanity anywhere in the mass will
not bear looking at for long. It is dominant on earth, but its movements
are as unreasonable and incalculable as seismic convulsions. The mob of
any great city flattens and nullifies reason, even in reasonable men.
The movements of the herd are more infectious than plague, and can be as
ruinous; for the instinct to self-preservation, so easily moved by fear,
may be the same as social suicide, and may wreck all that fine minds
have accomplished. Of an evening, though, quiet within the bungalow of
some English friends which overlooks the city’s delightful botanical
gardens—a house where I have been sheltered, often to my embarrassment,
as though my desires in Singapore’s broad and undirected flood of human
bodies were of importance—this dread of the inscrutable mass movements
of humanity was lessened. After all, fine minds, I could see, have a
persistence which is as natural as the instinctive movements of the
herd. The lady of the house somehow maintained in that alien place the
repose of an English garden, and the young men, occupied by the problems
of wide commercial and administrative affairs, appeared to me to be as
apart from the trend of mankind’s instinctive movements as though they
were not quite of that stock. (Another dream, evoked by the evening’s
peace and well-being?) After a bewildering day of mine in the alleys at
the back of the city where the enigmatic stream of humanity give no sign
of its destiny, except the temples to Dragons and to Siva, to Buddha and
Mohammed, in that cool bungalow one young man would talk of the English
poets, of the studies of Orientalists, and of Amiens cathedral, as though
a unanimous folly of all mankind that should presently rise to founder
the whole achievement of industrious human hands would still leave high
and immune those peaks from which a few men have surmised a day not yet
come. And his companion, whose habit it was after dinner to get into
Malay dress, appeared to be even unaware that his fellows are liable
to destructive manias—though he himself counted as a survivor of the
first affair at Gheluvelt. As a Malay official, he is now, apparently,
forgetful of Europe; he was silent when we talked of the West; but when
the forests were mentioned, and the language and lore of the Malay
peasants, and the annals of this corner of Asia, you might have supposed
that he was aware of nothing but the jungle and the bazaars. Yet common
humanity remains as unconscious of the thoughts of fine minds as it is
of the eccentricities of the earth’s polar axes—those little wabbles
which are supposed to give this planet its alternating glacial and genial
periods.

_September 11._—Sailed for London at four o’clock this afternoon.
The _Patroclus_ has even a nursery, which reminds me that this will
be my first long voyage in a big passenger ship. I was taken to my
cabin—passing a barber’s shop on my journey—and afterward I had to stop
in an alleyway to think out the route before I knew how to return to my
own address in this community. I did find it, after taking several false
turnings—for I was determined not to ask a steward to take me home—and
was sitting there nursing the conviction that in such a town one could
drop overboard and it would never be known, when a stiff little man came
in and looked at me as if he were determined to be able to swear to me
when the charge was at last formulated. He did not have to admit he was
the master of that ship. I could see he was. And now it seems to me that,
with the nursery and the laundry, I am under a comprehensive eye.

[Illustration: _It Was a Larger House Than the Rest, with an Unusual
Length of Irregular Ladder to Its Veranda_

(_See p. 243_)]

_September 13._—Yesterday at Kuala Lumpor, to which I motored while the
ship was at Port Swettenham, I entered an editorial office, and stood
unannounced over an old friend, now an exile, while he corrected his
proofs. He flung up petulantly a blue-penciled sheet at me, because no
doubt mine was only the shadow of another coolie. His astonishment and
unbelief on his discovery that I refused to take it suggested that the
boundary between belief and doubt can never be drawn in this world. I
felt almost sorry that I could not fade away before his staring and
questioning eyes, and so convince him of the mysterious dimension. But
there is never much in a miracle, when it is explained.

In the next dawn we approached Penang. The day, which was still behind
the heights of the mainland, was announced in old rose and gold. A little
of that light had just touched Penang Island ahead of us; that was a
faint augury of coast, with but one blue-and-white building on a hill
awake and bright, though the yellow eye of its lighthouse on the sea
level still watched us in the night. A junk appeared to be in midair.
There was a smell of spice.

_September 15._—Pulo Way in sight, some distance to port. This time it is
the last of the Malay Islands. Farewell, the East Indies!




CHAPTER XLI


It was not pleasant to be on deck that night, and the promenaders and
gossipers had abandoned it. Spume was shooting inboard. The deck chairs
huddled in the nook amidships were empty. One chair left the pack and
began a stealthy move toward the ship’s side. The darkness surging past
was of immense weight, and at times it seemed to rise above its bounds
and to burst. Somewhere forward a loosened wind screen was giving a
startling imitation of gunfire. He went to look overside, but it was
like staring at fate. Nothing could be seen. His hands had touched the
clammy canvas of a life belt in its rack, and as he wiped them with his
handkerchief he glanced at the belt. An amusing little object! A fat
lot of magic in that hopeful circle of life! He descended to his cabin,
and then the noisy world stood still again, muffled and quiet, under
the glow-lamps. Yet he did not find it easy to read. At times a mass
of water exploded on the forward deck, and then his safe and muffled
world trembled. His mind left his book. Amiel’s intimate _Journal_
became foreign, and dropped to the blanket. He listened to sounds that
were like the echoes of distant battle, to forlorn and nameless alarms
and warnings, to sudden fierce shouting far away in another world, to
despairing and dying cries. Well, all of it was in another world, anyhow.
Outer night and its sounds had nothing to do with him. Men who knew
what to do were doing it. The movements of the ship were like those of a
great living creature. In its long leisurely breathing its body rose and
fell. The faint tremor of the turbines was of the will which repressed an
astonishing vitality and strength. He began reading again....

A lurch of the ship woke him. It was four o’clock. For a moment he
wondered whether something had happened in the world beyond him, or
whether he had been dreaming. But the big creature was still breathing
in a deep and leisurely way. Now and then, though, it growled and shook
itself, for the wind seemed worse and the noises more challenging. He
turned out the lights; and when next he woke it was because the sun had
risen high enough to shine through his port window, and the steward had
rattled the teacup when placing the morning tray where he could reach it
without leaving his bunk.

“Fine morning, sir,” said the steward.

“A bad night, wasn’t it, steward?”

“Oh, nothing out of the way, sir.”

The jolly passenger, who knew the sea and so was always loud and hearty
with the quartermasters, who saw to it that everybody had an interest in
the sweepstake for the day’s run, and pulled the ladies’ chairs briskly
about for them, and fed the gramophone, met him in the corridor as he
was going to the bathroom. The jolly man danced a little greeting in
his dressing-gown. “Dirty work last night,” said the dancer, beaming.
“Thought that even I might be a bit sick early this morning. Does one
good, though, to feel the sea. The old thing actually rolled. Didn’t know
she could.”

The breakfast bugle brought the passengers assembling about the head of
the saloon companion. There were some jokes about breakfast. The ladies
were greeted with mock surprise. They were asked whether they were quite
sure they wanted any. It was better to go easy after a wild night. That
was the jolly man’s voice, followed by his own laughter, the first to
follow his own jokes.

The lady from Hongkong complained at breakfast that her steward had
forgotten to close her port window last night. “I had to get up and shut
it myself. Quite suddenly the wind was terrible, and do you know, my
window was open. I might have got an awful chill. So careless. Now, on
the P. & O.—” She had traveled widely, the lady from Hongkong, by _all_
the principal lines, and she would never travel by _this_ one any more,
you know. Didn’t the bacon taste the least bit queer? Did he think there
was any advantage to be got out of the French exchange? If so, she would
leave the ship at Marseilles and stay in the Riviera. Steward, some more
bacon, well done! “Somebody told me,” she went on, “that the ship lurched
frightfully once last night. I always said it would, if ever it met
really bad weather.”

He trusted she would take no harm from the accident of the open window,
and found himself speculating, while listening politely but without
attention to her complaining voice, whether there was not a more profound
difference between some human creatures, say between a man like Amiel and
the lady from Hongkong, than there was between himself and one of the
lower animals. The passengers at the captain’s table laughed aloud at a
joke secret to themselves. The captain was not with them that morning.
One of the men there turned and called over to the next table: “I say,
Mrs. Taft here says she was just climbing out to shut her window when the
ship suddenly rolled last night, and her husband says—”

“Hadn’t you better let him say it?” asked the young botanist from Java.

“There!” exclaimed the lady beside him. “Now we shan’t hear it. It’s too
bad of you.”

The sun was warm on the promenade deck. Two children, while a sad _ayah_
watched them, were boisterous with cigarette tins in which rattled a few
coins.

The convalescent naval surgeon regarded the noisy children with malignity
and exclaimed: “Not because I hate them, but because I’m sure their
father has put spurious coins in those boxes, I’d like to chuck ’em both
overboard. It doesn’t sound like good money.”

“Surely, Doctor, you can’t mean you’d cast children into the sea for
being playful?” said a lady, leaning from her chair toward him with a
smile inviting him to say more. But the doctor merely mumbled and went on
reading the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini.

At the after end of the deck the captain, waving his hands backward in
good-natured deprecation toward a group of passengers, was making as
brief as possible his usual morning round. But he stopped when he met the
direct look of the naval officer, bent down with his hands resting on the
arms of the surgeon’s chair, and said something which was inaudible. All
the reader of Amiel in the next chair could hear was, “Oh, about four.
What with that and an S O S call, I had one hour’s sleep last night.” He
stroked his nose and walked briskly away.

The reader of Amiel looked seaward. So there had been a call for help!
But how impossible it seemed. The very ship appeared to be enjoying that
sea. She was playful, rearing a little at times, and throwing dazzling,
snow-like clouds. The children jumped and clapped their hands when a
flight of spray leaped higher than usual. The very waves were chanting.
They were running heavily past, with brilliant crests. Not far from the
bows the ghost of a rainbow stood in an invisible mist above the riot
of waters; it would fade, yet glow again, an intangible vision that was
constant and motionless in that boisterous world, as though it were a
symbol of the imperishable virtue of beauty. The radiant clouds moved
in the leisure of eternity. On the horizon, under one of them, like a
model fixed to the clear rim of the world, was a barque under all sails.
He felt that dread and mischance could never persist in the light of
that morning. There were no shadows. He had never felt better in his
life. All was well. He closed the covers on Amiel’s so often melancholy
conclusions, and watched a sailor at work who whistled, while busy about
the falls of a davit. Near the sailor was the life-belt rack, where he
had stood the night before. But the rack was empty.

He flung his book on his chair, stood and filled his pipe, and went up
to the boat deck. The prospect was wider there, and he wanted to see as
much of this beautiful world as he could. He paused up there to watch a
quartermaster chalking the deck for quoits; there was to be a tournament
that afternoon.

“Nasty night, last night, wasn’t it?” he said to the sailor. He meant
nothing particular by that. As a fact, he had almost forgotten the night
before. But one always talks of the weather to a sailor; and one ought to
be polite to these fellows.

“Yes, sir, it was.”

“I could tell that, in my cabin.”

“I expect you could, sir.”

“Wasn’t there an S O S call? I think I heard some one mention it?”

“Very likely. We did stand by.” The sailor stood up, straightened his
back, and jerked his thumb seaward. “One of our chaps went overside.
Young Bob—but you wouldn’t know him—”

“Went overside? Not drowned?”

“What would you expect, sir, on such a night? The ship put about. The
passengers complain of a draught. We got out a boat. Cruised about for an
hour. Nothing.” The sailor turned and gazed aft, then bent down again and
went on chalking for quoits.




CHAPTER XLII


Something had happened. I switched on the reading lamp at the head of the
bunk and looked at my watch. Four in the morning! I could have sworn that
the noise which had roused me was the herald of eclipse and overthrow.
But had I heard anything? My cabin appeared to be a private seclusion in
the hush at the end of time and chance. Had the ship stopped? There was
no movement. She might have been in harbor. Yet when I rested against the
bulkhead I could hear the many tiny mysterious voices speaking everywhere
in the ship: twitters, ticks and tacks, rumbles—a clang, a guggle—a
purring and a humming, but all reduced and far. She was going slow.
Just as I switched off the light the monstrous sound came again, a long
shuddering bellow.

Fog! Well, we were nearing home and it was meet that I should have an
early notice that I had come to the end of the islands, the beaches,
and the forests. As for islands, I had seen as many as would make an
archipelago of myths, islands suitable for all the fables. Only a few
days ago I came out on deck at sunrise by chance, and we were steaming by
Giardino, and Etna was over us. That was the very hour to pass through
the Strait of Messina. We went close to Stromboli, which was vexed with
heavy gusts of smoke, and the Lipari Islands were strung out beyond
in the Mediterranean weather of the legends. Ah, what a chance man
had in that sea, once he had got beyond the worst of his fears and his
stone implements! And at least five times in the long story of his life
there, after he learned to make bronze, he seemed well on the way to an
intellectual light that was equal to the sunshine at his porch. To look
at those lambent shores above that plain of malachite was to see the
clear invitation to him. How could he remain in darkness? There were the
very colors and the radiance to transmute the muddy residue of his mind.
Yet each time that he was near to full achievement his house fell on
him; perhaps because he met the eye of Jove with arrogance, and perhaps
because his pride had made him careless. The sunset of that day when we
passed through the Tyrrhenian Sea was like a pæan to the renown of man;
and so all we latter-day witnesses of Heaven’s tribute to man’s long
effort retired to the saloon, where there was a concert; and an elderly
Scotch passenger, to whom probably not a secret of the visible universe
is unrevealed, and not many of the secrets of God, sang to us something
about the banks of Loch Lomond; or rather, he stated the case for the low
road, and for the high, spectacles on the end of his nose, face slightly
lifted to keep them there and to get a good sight of his notebook, as
though this were evidence and we were in a police court.

There was the siren again! Evidently there was some distance still to
go to the everlasting light. It was shuddering and bellowing when the
prompt little steward came in with the morning tea just after six. That
moment when the tray is put beside you, and the lamp is doused because
now you can see by the light of another day, always seemed to me to be
of miraculous and pleasant significance, as though not one of us can be
forgotten, but in our due time, out of the fog of the vast and impersonal
world not us, will come the knock at our door (come in!) just as if,
after all our doubting derision, the hairs of the head of each of us
really had been numbered.

We ought to have been off Ushant, but from the deck there was no telling
where we were. The air was bleak, the decks were wet, and there was no
horizon. I climbed to the captain’s bridge—by command, brought by the
captain’s messenger; nothing less could induce me to venture there—and
the master’s gray parrot, on seeing me, gave his confusing imitation of
the bo’sun’s pipe, and then in a gruff voice condemned my eyes because I
am a farmer and no sailor. The fog had thinned a little to weatherward,
but in the east it lay in banks and gave a vista of many horizons, and
all of them false. One looked that way, and got the impression that
Europe was mislaid. Yet, no; the master said that during the night he
received three cross-bearings by wireless, and that, in spite of my
dubiety, we were in soundings and fifty miles south of the Lizard. We
should be off Portland in the early afternoon.

There was a rumor, when we were at lunch, that the Start was in sight.
But a retired naval surgeon was telling me about Peking at that moment.
I am not sure that I listened attentively to the news that England was
in view. I did not get up. Then presently it struck me that something
had happened of more interest to me even than the nearness of Devon. I
mean the fact that I did not get up to see it. This so puzzled me that I
attended in but a polite way to the doctor’s further words on China. What
had happened?

Look here—I admonished myself—when you’ve been nearing this particular
island on other voyages you’ve stayed on deck till near sunrise so that
you might see the first English light. What’s the matter now? You know
you don’t want this lunch.

It was clear that I was returning on this voyage a man who was, in some
way, different from the earlier traveler, and I am not sure that I liked
this new character; but I will say for him that he himself was genuinely
puzzled about it, and that he had no other feeling; in fact, he had no
feeling at all, except that he was deeply and comfortably glad to be
near home again. What, then, I exclaimed to myself, is not England home?
What’s the difference?

You may be talking with a friend in a house where the mirrors are queerly
placed, and you know your surprise when you see the reflection of some
one you think you know, and which a steadier glance tells you is indeed
an aspect of yourself you have not seen before. I caught now a glimpse
of a man who did not want to go up and look at the Start. I could make
nothing of him. I had a sight, as it were, of but the back of his head.
He said diffidently that all he wanted was to see a familiar gate again,
and the forms of the shrubs about it, and those who would most certainly
have that gate open before he reached it. He explained that that gate
happened to be in England, and not in Ternate; a distinction, I warned
him, that was outrageous. No, he said. It would have been outrageous ten
years ago, but that he was not responsible for what had come into those
years. The world had been turning round and going on. Our little star
was now in a different region of the sky. He was merely carried with it
and must accept the new phenomena whether he liked them or not. Ternate
might be home; and he quoted from one of his odd books: “Why should I be
lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?”

This new mark in his life so disturbed him that he felt he dare not
reveal it to the English doctor who was returning home after some years
in China and Japan. When both of them reached the deck the Start was
far astern and was all but dissolved in a murk. In overcoats and wraps
the passengers watched the approach of the ship to Portland; a gray sky
and a forbidding coast which enlarged its gloom and made its frown more
ominous till Portland hung over the ship, as though it were a giant that
was not really very interested in the morsel of life that had crept to
its feet. We gazed at it in silence. “Is that the prison on the top of
it?” presently asked the naval surgeon. “Come into the smoke room out of
it,” said he. “Will it never change? That is what it looked like when I
lolloped under it in a destroyer, hunting for periscopes. Where’s that
steward?”

This was more than I could stand. I knew what the doctor meant. But at
times we want more than a mere fellowship in a murk. Were we still only
at the end of an era? Had the new day not yet come?

We got under way again, and night fell on the coast and sank at last over
all the waters. Leaning on the bulwarks and gazing landward, I could
just make out a deeper shadow athwart the seas of night, formless under
the faint glimmer in the meridian. It had no bounds. It was immense and
intangible. Looking at it, I felt an awakening of understanding. I felt
the inward glow of a new and deep desire. I cannot tell you what that
shadow was, for, though transcendently it was there, it was dim and
mysterious, almost beyond vision; England! That shadow was the indenture
on the very stars of an old grandeur, the memory impressed on night
itself, blurred but indelible, of an ancient renown. It was the emanation
of an idea too great for us to know; the dimmering through the gloom to
me in my isolation and misgiving of wonderful things almost forgotten,
of the dreams and exaltations of splendid youth, of the fidelity of
comrades, of noble achievements, of our long-past intimate sorrows, of
precious things unspoken but understood, of our dead. No. Not even old
night could hide that presence. It was indefinable, majestic, severe, and
still. And it may have been resigned and communing, its age-long work
done, in the fall of a darkness which it knew to be ultimate. Or it may
have been retired within the night, dominant on its seas, making no sign,
knowing the supreme test of all its labors was at hand, vigilant but
composed, waiting for another morning to dawn in the hearts of men, when
there should be light to build the City of God.


THE END





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