One morning I escaped from the heat and the bewildering life of Singapore
into a shaded office. Its windows opened south and east to a glowing
panorama of ships, clouds, and islands. The long traffic of that office
with the Orient had settled into a tradition of intent ease which seemed
the same as cool leisure. A mounted telescope projected from an open
window toward the anchorage. A man stood there with straddled legs,
watching a ship coming in. He left the telescope and came to me, and
talked familiarly, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief, of America,
England, China, and Japan; he spoke even of Java. But when I mentioned
such places as Lombok, Flones, Flores, and Gilolo, he picked up a massive
shell which was keeping a pile of papers in one place and examined it
as though he hoped to divine from it what I wanted to know. The shell
did not help him. Only one thing became certain: the Moluccas were as
far from Singapore as that city is from New York. It was easier to get
to New York. I discovered at Singapore that to talk there of Timor and
Halmaheira was as profitless as asking a policeman at Charing Cross the
way to the Faroes. It would be tactless and inconsiderate to embarrass
the friendly fellow with such a question.
I was shown, through the office telescope, a Dutch steamer at anchor in
the roads. She was bound, so I gathered, for Java and the outer blue.
She would be away for months, and she might go, according to fate and
local cocoanuts, to some of the islands I had named. Why not board her
and see what happened? There is much to be said, when traveling, for
keeping a mind as open and doubtful as to where you are going as that
of a great diplomatist when negotiating a peace treaty; and more still
for not caring. I boarded that Dutchman, the _Savoe_, went into an empty
cabin, and waited. Her windlass began at once to labor with the anchor,
as though she had been waiting for me. The picture of distant Singapore
began to revolve across my cabin port. That settled it. Now it was
certain I should have to take whatever came.
There was an instant in this transition from one world to another when
I was alarmed by the notion—it was on the second day out and I had just
waked up—that I was the sport of a bedevilment and was being mocked. My
dream of the clanging of furnace doors and of a roaring in dark tunnels
changed to a Chinese boy in a bright light, who stood silently beside me
with tea and a pleasing but crafty smile. Where the deuce was this? The
roaring continued; the deck was being holystoned above. Beyond my cabin
port-light the world was one I had never seen before.
For the first time since that fateful year when Europe developed a mania
for frantic speed, aërial torpedoes, delirious bankruptcy, and stentorian
broadcasting, I could feel a distinct lessening of humanity’s vibrations.
My own pulse showed signs of becoming normal. We were threading the Rhio
and Linga islands, and the Dutch captain put his head in the cabin to
inform me that we were crossing the line. I knew it, by instinct. But
which line did he mean? Anyone could guess that we were in another place.
Certainly we had already crossed some line or other. You could read that
in both the sea and the sky. They were greatly changed. It was surprising
they tolerated our steamer at all; but perhaps we had blundered
unobserved across this line. The light of that morning might have been
shining undimmed since things began. There was something terrifying in
its exalted and innocent splendor. Even the islands were but tinted
vapors, and whether they were in the sea or in the air it was not easy to
say. The isle of Banka, great as were its mountains, certainly was not in
the sea. The sea was material. It was a floor of turquoise toward Banka.
But that island had light beneath it. It was translated above the plain
of turquoise, and I imagined that under the bulk of its hills and under
the thin peninsula of miniature black trees which was prolonged from the
foot of a mountain over the sea, unsupported, fragile, and miraculous,
I could peer far into profound nothing. But Banka must have been land,
a great island, for over it was a dense and involved region of genuine
cloud, bright enough to be no more than the congealed and undiffused
sunlight of ages.
[Illustration: _This Sea Was Plainly the Setting for Legend and Fable_
(_See p. 34_)]
Now I know quite well, for I have seen ships before and understand their
purpose, that amid all that unearthly light and color my Dutch captain
was going to look for copra, gums, rattans, nutmegs, mace, cloves, and
cinnamon. He looked like the man to find them, too. He was small, but
hard, heavy, and quick. His eyes were pale blue, but I guessed his temper
was quite another dye, and not in the least pale. He was not the sort of
man to whom one might romantically suggest that those islands had nothing
in them but beauty, and nothing under them but immaterial hues—not,
anyhow, while there was so much evidence of wicked reefs almost alongside
the empty ship which he hoped to load with copra and such, at the current
rates, before he turned about.
Yet at times during a long voyage with him I was inclined to suspect that
even he did not know where he was. By what could he judge? For myself,
I lost count of the days in a tranquil immensity of light. We would
swelter at an anchorage, taking in from an islet Heaven only knows what
except mosquitoes which could bite through indiarubber. My cabin having
become filled with flies like devils, and moths like jewels, the _Savoe_
would leave again suddenly and for no apparent reason. But what did that
matter? She was sure to find another island on any course. They were like
the stars in the sky; and three huts in an otherwise abandoned raft of
cocoanuts were sufficient to induce our captain to stand in and lower a
boat.
Where were we then? I got out of the habit of asking that. If I were
given my bearings at all it was by chance, as on the night when our chief
officer, after what sounded to me like a distressing altercation with
our captain (at dinner, too!), but may have been nothing but the most
friendly Dutch, turned to me and began a recital. I stopped the soup and
listened carefully. He was reciting in English, which made the original
poem the more remarkable, Kipling’s ballad of the _Mary Gloucester_. The
recital ended. “An’ now, Mister Tomlinsohn, you will wonder why I do
this.” The Dutch seaman gazed at me earnestly, though not with greater
earnestness than I gazed at him, for he had remembered every word of the
poem, and more. “It is yoost because we are by the Paternosters, where
he drop his wife.” Could hospitality go further? Is there an English or
an American literary critic, not to mention a mere sailor, who could do
that? In the wide world, not one.
By such chance aids I would learn where in the world I was. There was
no other way. All without warning one day our steamer, our placid and
practical Dutch steamer, steered toward what I could see plainly enough
was the sack and ruin of Mount Zion. We were approaching a celestial war.
Battlements were tumbled and in flames, smoke rolled from those streets
of jasper, and the banners of its defeated hosts were sinking to final
confusion and the last night. A native ship was flying from there. Its
urgent sails were spread like wings too big for its body; perhaps it was
bearing away survivors. Nothing else was in sight.
We never reached that city. The _Savoe_ was next at anchor in a little
bay. She was encircled by the gloom of a forest which was older than
Memphis. I asked no questions, but went ashore and entered that forest,
wherever it was and whatever its name. Nothing was there. The trees
were real, I suppose, though they gave no more sign of life than
prehistoric monoliths. A slight noiseless rain and myself had the forest
to ourselves. No doubt rain there was always adding to the gloom; the
rain might have been only the gentle precipitation of the silence.
While peering into the shadows which deepened into a hollow, some lower
branches crashed and an orang-utan swung out to look at me. (Ah yes;
though I hardly believed it myself, even at the time, so you need not
trouble to believe it at all.) We stared at each other for about five
seconds, and then he lurched off in an explosion of breaking boughs. That
settled it. I was in Borneo.