A ship should have light when making Macassar. The Spermode Islands dot
the sea about the southwest end of Celebes, and though the blue film of
the waters there seems just tangible enough to float such fairy-like
islands, yet it is best to con them by day, and from a wide berth. So
your ship will approach Macassar either not much before sunrise or while
a memory of the vanished day with a brief exaltation holds away the
night. The approach to its harbor, when the sun is near the horizon,
especially if there is a stillness before or after rain during the wet
monsoon, would make you believe, looking ahead from the ship’s bow, that
“the storms all weathered and the ocean crost,” you were nearing that
“favored isle, where billows never roar, and brighter seasons smile.”
For there is no end to the illusions of travel—indeed, they are the
best of it, and part of the fun is in seeing them break. Half an hour
of the beatific! What more should we expect? It is an experience long
enough for the good of any mortal traveler. At the end of that time you
are alongside a modern wharf and the bunker coal. Macassar is properly
proud of its modern facilities, as they are called. Luckily it is easy to
escape from them.
The city, though old, with all the history of the Malay islands from
the sixteenth century in its streets, native, Portuguese, Dutch, and
English, has still behind it a land of which we know hardly more than
we know of the future of true religion. Macassar is, in fact, only a
market place on a beach where gather the traders and ships from hundreds
of islands about it. With the exception of Singapore—a very much greater
place—Macassar is, I think, the most interesting town in the East Indies.
You soon get tired of Batavia and Sourabaya, sporadic cities where the
distances, which would be very little in a temperate climate, in Java are
almost impassable gulfs of heat and dust. And even native inland cities,
where the Javanese are still listlessly protecting the relics of their
traditions and their native crafts that have not yet been foundered in
the flood of shoddy from Western civilization, soon weary a traveler. He
sees with his own unaccustomed eyes that often what the natives pretend
is their traditional craft was made by machinery in the likeness of the
original at Manchester or Dresden. But tourists do not see Macassar.
It is aside from their track. There is no need for Macassar to deceive
chance visitors, and to deceive its regular visitors, the traders,
requires careful thought and takes all its time.
It has its own atmosphere, which is largely, though not altogether,
caused by the fish which is spread out in half-acres to dry in the sun
near the waterside. Its heat, too, is not a smothering weight, but is
bearable. You can get about on foot. The natives are a lively and sturdy
tribe—its men were active and resourceful pirates in the past—and so
the byways of Macassar are attractive with figures which make drab and
meager a visitor’s memory of his prosperous industrial city of the hard
north. And the Chinese are established in Macassar. But then they
are everywhere. There is not an island in the archipelago without its
Chinese trader; probably an honest one, too. You cannot help liking the
Chinese. Talk of the tenacity, the artless and audacious, enterprise,
the courage, resourcefulness, delicacy in humbugging, and the other
qualities of the Anglo-Saxon which have made him what he is—all that
would tax a Chinaman’s polite resolution to keep his smile well hidden.
He was like that when a child ten thousand years ago. He sits in front of
his shop in Macassar to-day—an open shop, without windows or door—where
there are great paper lanterns pendent, and a red banner with letters
of gold. He smokes his opium pipe. He wears short black trousers and a
blue jacket and a little black cap, and sees Heaven knows what ancient
dream through his horn spectacles. His face is tranquil and benevolent.
His tiny daughter with her long black pigtail and fringe, an incredibly
animated ivory doll dressed in miniature cotton trousers, and his little
son with a clean-shaven poll and dressed in nothing at all, play with
dice at his feet. He can never be beaten or outlived. He is unconquerable
and deathless. He has forgotten more than our culture has had the time
to acquire. He is such a friendly soul, too, if you are sufficiently
cautious when accepting him. He has his own theater in Macassar; a safely
fascinating place once you have subdued the magic of its orchestra. And
his temples! There is in Macassar one which will draw you every day
you are in the port. You will find yourself outside it again, lost in
the attempt to unravel its involuted fantasy, and without knowing you
were going to it, though it is in a back street. To stay a season in
that back street of Macassar, in one of the Chinese houses opposite the
temple, would be greater fun than to explore every tomb in Egypt. Nobody
appears to see you in that street. Not any of the strange eyes which pass
look at yours. You might not be there. And all the doors in that street
are shut to you, spiritually and in fact.
Well, not all. Perhaps not every day. A door there opened to me one
evening. It was not my fault. I was taken by an Englishman who knew that
Chinaman, and who introduced me as a man from Limehouse. The result was
astonishing. I had to refuse all that beer and brandy, and, instead,
desired orangeade. It was good orangeade. It was wonderful orangeade. I
remember that night now only as a bright but distorted dream in which
move the shadowy figures of a fable of Cathay. But an hour came when I
knew, at least, that I must leave my friends; and in the street, alone,
and in the Macassar dark, I assembled my intelligence, which told me
that my Chinese friend, in expansive hospitality, had vastly improved
my innocent drink with cognac. How was I to manage the gangplank of the
_Savoe_? That had to be faced. Anyhow, I argued to myself, you can sleep
at the foot of it. But at the foot of the precarious inclined plane, in
the light of a ship’s lantern, stood a little child, the daughter of a
Dutch passenger, who was just waiting for a man like me to come along.
Her mother ordered me to carry her daughter aboard. Now how did I do it,
and without a fault? I wish I knew.