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?