When the morning is very young and the light has but little heat in it,
Macassar’s native dock, with its quays of coral rock, and a gathering of
schooners and canoes, is almost merrily absurd with a fabulous beauty
and a suggestion of wild and secret adventure. The little schooners are
gypsies for color, their names are stars and flowers—Bintang this and
Buroh that—their brailed sails are sheets of light, and their reflections
on the languid water, which is an uncertain blue mirror, are slowly
dissolving flakes of lightning and rainbow. The Malays sit on their
decks, cooking breakfast. There is a smell of dry fish, copra, and wood
smoke. They look so frail, those little antique models, with their tripod
masts, their sweeps, and low bows and upstanding galleried sterns. But it
happens that once I saw one driving in the dangerous currents, a breeze
chasing her from the Indian Ocean, in the channel between the islands of
Sumbawa and Lombok, and the impulse was to cheer.
When it is better to find some shade you can turn into Macassar’s main
street, its bazaar, and then discover, looking into the bags, boxes,
casks, and baskets, for how few of the commodities in this part of the
world you have even a name. Some stuff it is possible to guess at,
though who eats desiccated frogs and dried cuttlefish? But most of it is
mummified and enigmatic. The irregular buildings have roofs of red tiles
which cast a good shade from widely projecting eaves. They are of timber
and stone, lime-washed in blues and yellows, and if you chance to look up
out of the stream of dark humanity you see dim figures in upper balconies
who are watching the street below, as grave and still as decorative
images.
A stranger might hesitate about entering the great market on the
outskirts of the town. The crowd there is so active, so alien, so intent
on its private affairs, that some courage seems necessary for pushing
into it. But the Malays are the politest people on earth. You will be
hardly conscious that you are seen. There will be no importunity to buy;
and if you understand bazaar Malay, any stallkeeper will cheerfully lose
customers to explain to you what his wares are and what has to be done
with them; what, for example, the name of that curious fish is, where
and how it can be caught, and what to do when preparing it for the pot
so that it may nourish and not cause death with convulsions. After a
time, too, you will not be startled by what on the floor looks like the
evidence of a recent bloody affray. Here, as elsewhere in Indonesia, the
people chew areca nut, and those sanguinary blotches are only the spittle
of a multitude. Presently you will get almost used to it. In any case,
the Malays, men and women, will go on smearing sireh leaves with a little
lime, put in some areca nut, and some rose petals or other aromatic herb,
leisurely chew their packets, and change the sensitive mouths of their
youth into the semblance of an accident.
No port in the Indies has much to show that is more interesting than its
fish market. That is but fair. Not many visitors may find entrance to
its best clubs, or may know the joy, even at long last, of meeting its
superior people. But we all may go to the fish market. The choice fruits
of the tropics, and its solid vegetables, may suggest that home is, after
all, only about the third or fourth turning round the corner. But the
fish! What crude and vulgar creatures cod and halibut would look in the
company gathered from the submarine gardens of the tropics! Nothing is
vulgar there, nothing crude; though there are many creatures which look
terrifying, or instantaneous, or unnamably wicked, or are shaped and
enameled in a way which suggests that they escaped at midnight from the
designs in the Chinese temple or an Oriental jeweler’s workshop.
To learn what hardly credible living things may come from the reefs and
atolls, it is better to go to the fish market in the early morning. That
the fishermen dare to handle such objects is surprising. Often enough one
would as soon experiment with the unknown mechanism of a bomb. Even the
fishermen regard a number of these creatures as of the devil, for some of
the spines, gill covers, and skins are as venomous as an adder’s fangs;
and the sea serpents, those brightly colored ribbons common enough among
the waves, and all as deadly as cobras, cause a surprising number of
deaths to those whose business is with fish net and traps. One morning in
Macassar’s fish market there was a man who seemed to have supposed that
the fish he had caught was too awful or too bulky to allow him to bring
in more than the head, as a trophy. He showed me that head. It was as big
and heavy as a mastiff’s. It had the same expression of sullen interest
and ready hostility, but with larger teeth. It was olive green in color,
with yellow spots. Its name its captor did not know. He had not seen one
before. He knew only that it was _ikan_—fish. After all, it was just as
well to inform a stranger that what he saw was _ikan kapala_—the head of
a fish. It was not a case for mere guesswork.
There were cuttlefish that day looking like opalescent lamps in which
the light was hardly yet extinct; and the crabs might have been an
astrologer’s imaginative effort at Cancer. The perch, of course, were
a host, and more varied than tulips because they differed so in size
and color. One of them is famous in these waters, a superb fellow in
scarlet, _ikan merah_. The common fish were mackerel, the bonito the
most noticeable, for it is often of the size and rotundity of a small
pig. There were young sharks, and several species of rays and skates, a
few of them too big for one man to lift. The coryphene was there, the
dolphin of sailors, which expires prismatically; though that fellow must
be witnessed when just caught, for a mere description of his display
when dying would never be believed. In the market place the coryphene
is remarkable only for its suggestion of immense speed, and the vicious
upturned lower jaw and teeth designed to take the flying fish as they
drop back into the sea after a flight which was not swift enough to carry
them from pursuing calamity. Many of the creatures were unknown to me,
and I fancy some might have surprised an ichthyologist.
Yet each morning the display in Macassar’s fish market is differently
ordered. The program is never repeated. I could never think of it as a
market place, or that I was looking at mere provender. It was manifest
the sea was still experimenting with life and was in no hurry. It was
dissatisfied with its work each day as soon as the designs were finished,
and so threw them out to us as waste. Then it began on other effects.
That place in Macassar, therefore, was hardly a market. It was less that
than the studio of an artist resembles Billingsgate. Macassar was merely
getting daily what the rich and vast workshop outside considered was not
quite what it meant to do. And that workshop has, of course, plenty of
time and light in which to satisfy itself. The sun and the warm seas have
all eternity in which to play with life, to shape and color it to the
likeness of whatever perfection was once hinted. The Italian jeweler of
the Renaissance never approached the easy opulence, the merry variety of
ideas, and the wild ornamentation, which can be seen any bright morning
on the slabs of that fish market of Celebes. There I saw the ocean’s last
hilarious but puzzling jokes. Fun was being poked at us—derision made of
our own dull and monotonous efforts at creation.
But when you look out from Macassar’s beach to the place where those wild
forms and vivid dyes are native, they are the less surprising. Anything
might happen out there. Out by the Spermode Islands it is not the sea.
It is a blue radiance, as still as the ecstasy of an intense passion,
and the areas of coral rock betray in blinding incandescence what secret
energy is at work.