TIDE MARKS

“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

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

TIDE MARKS

Tide Marks

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.