We are in the Strait of Malacca. I have a fine confused romantic feeling
this morning, like that of a child just before the curtain rises on the
“Forty Thieves.” My memory is a splendid muddle of the long drama which
opened when Vasco da Gama rounded Good Hope, reached Calicut, and found
the way to Cathay; and of d’Albuquerque, St. Francis Xavier, Camoens,
sultans, massacres, sieges, Drake, Cornelius de Houtman, Sir Stamford
Raffles, and the various East India companies, some honorable and some
foreign. According to the _Malay Annals_, Malacca must have been a
sleepless city. The Malays themselves, without the expert assistance of
the Portuguese, knew how to find amusement. There was the prince who
played at Malacca with the son of the prime minister till the prince
stabbed his playmate, who had knocked off the royal hat. It was a serious
matter in Malacca to knock off a superior hat, or to have a beautiful
daughter whom you would not sell to the Sultan. One sultan, finding a
rival at the house of his own pretty lady, bestowed a quid of betel on
one of his young men. The youngster knew. He krised the rival. The head
of the house of the murdered man took a violent interest in this, so the
Sultan, in the cause of peace, sent the obedient young assassin to his
discontented subordinate chief, naturally expecting a pardon to follow
such an act of unnecessary courtesy; but the chief split the murderer’s
head with an elephant goad. “The court was thronged with foreign
adventurers ... mahouts with Indian names, Afghan bravos, Tamil merchants
ready to bribe even the Prime Minister.” Could d’Albuquerque improve on
that? Certainly not; though he did his best.
What, then, could I be expected to make of it, with the purple
silhouettes of the Dindings a few miles to port against the clearing sky
of morning? It is better, with such annals to go upon, to leave the fine
confused feeling of high romance where it is, for all the noble muddle
of the world is romantic; we have amassed enough to last us to the end.
Jarra island was ahead, an inky cone against a wall of thunder. The sea
was livid. Our men were busy rigging gear to the derricks; we are nearing
port, and I must pack up to-day. Yet those _Annals_ so accorded with that
lustrous sea and ominous sky inclosed by the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra,
as though the scenery were left when the actors departed, that I felt we
were only just a little too late for the play, and remained on deck from
sunrise to sunset in case a late caravel should pass; but all had gone,
and we were alone. When the sun went and my vigil was over, he left with
us a glow that was so like day that I thought it might last till he came
again. But chiefly that radiance was absorbed in the level apple-green
water of soundings that expanded toward Sumatra as far as where a loom
of storm was a high cobalt barrier. Ahead of us, toward Malacca, there
was a haze, suffused with a light of rose in which the islands were lower
embers. After all, sultans and Portuguese adventurers, even with the aid
of Camoens, were insignificant beneath the tremendous drama of that sky
of the tropics when night invaded day.
Before the next day broke in the Strait of Malacca it looked as though
the east was now barred from us by the enormous battalions of tempest.
They were camped about the horizon, a sleeping but ghastly host, waiting
for day to announce the assault and for the wind to lead them. The sea
was stilled, as though appalled by the look of the sky. But no wind came
with the sun. The dark impending threat did not break on us. Its smoke
and waiting thunder became a purple wall on which the sooty streamers
were changed to orange and pearl. Here we were, approaching Singapore.
We might have reached the peaceful end of the sea, or perhaps its
tranquil beginning, for that delicate surface might never have been
broken by any violence. It was inclosed by a circle of islands, some of
them high and solid, with deep reflections in the glass, and others but
black tracings of minute trees afloat, growing miraculously upright out
of the tenuous horizon. A launch turned a point and projected itself at
us. Two black lines diverged from its stem widely over a pallid tide. At
its head stood the statue of a Malay in a _sarong_, holding a boat hook,
and the statue became alive as the launch disappeared under our side
where a Jacob’s ladder was hanging. And next, a pair of hairy freckled
hands appeared at our bulwarks, and pulled up a man in a suit and helmet
incredibly white. He had a sandy beard. He looked up at our bridge and
nodded to it while brushing his hands together to rid them of our ship’s
grit, an act which had the air of a polite visitor’s absent-minded
disapproval. He went by a group of us, this pilot, as though he had been
meeting us like this every morning for years, and was rather tired of it,
these hot days, but hoped we were all right. We came alongside a quay.
The _Trojan_ touched land in tentative and friendly way, as though to
assure herself that she was really there.
[Illustration: _Old and New on the Suez Canal_
(_See p. 28_)]
To leave the sea and to land at Singapore is as serious a matter as
taking a man out of a long seclusion and releasing him from a closed
vehicle in Piccadilly Circus. Molten light poured over the swift
kaleidoscopic movements of a street where the first thing I saw was a
large cart drawn by a small white bull with an excusable hump; his eyes
were full of flies. The sun had struck down the long ears of the animal.
But no sooner did I note the flies than the bull vanished, or became a
Chinaman running silently in front of an austere European lady who was
perched high on a pair of noiseless wheels. Then a Chinaman began to run
silently in front of me, while I sat behind him much too high on a pair
of noiseless wheels, watching the dark patch of sweat expand on the back
of his shirt; anyhow, I must suppose it was I who sat there. We nearly
knocked over a yellow lady in black-satin trousers and a blue jacket
who was smoking a cigarette. Next, so far as I remember, there were a
great many masters of ships and perhaps as many cocktails. We came to a
spacious black-and-white palace with a myriad propellers revolving on
its ceiling—no wonder I was dizzy—and a string quartette regulated our
hunger with dance music while a regiment of immaculate Celestial acolytes
accurately guessed our wants. I remember, that night, a confusion of
narrow alleys, where hanging lanterns disclosed endless and aimless
torrents of brown bodies. There were the rank smells of abundant life in
heat and ferment, and cries and voices without meaning. Above grotesque
cornices were the shapes of monstrous leaves blacking out areas of stars.
All this, when I found a bedroom, I tried to resolve into an orderly
pattern; but there can be no ordering of the upburst and overflow of life
at its source. I gave it up, and watched instead some lizards running
after one another upside down on the white ceiling, while they made a
noise like intermittent loud hissing.