One day the chief engineer of the _Savoe_ was feeding his parrots. He has
a noisy display of them on the boat deck. When I spoke to him he turned
on me abruptly and peered intently at my face for a clew, perhaps, to
what he thought was an English joke. “You cannot stay at Ternate,” he
said, doubtfully. I explained that this was easy. One merely left the
ship and did not return. It was not possible, the chief replied. And
then I learned that the island might vanish at any moment. It was only a
volcano. And while it remained above the sea I should be without electric
light, intellectual resources, gin, himself, and news of the world. There
was nothing at Ternate but barbarians and nether fires. I told him that
barbarians would be a nice change and that I had a morbid interest in the
infernal.
“All right,” he said, bitterly, “when we find you again you will ’ave
fezzers in your ’air.” He pantomimed with his fingers, to represent
quills upright on his brow. He turned to his parrots and refused to
converse any more with an ungrateful fool.
But how could anyone approach the Spice Islands at sunrise and not wish
to call that his journey’s end? Leave the ship and possibly the world?
If Ternate was not the place for which I had been looking, then it was
the phantom of it; and in any case it was my duty to stay, if only to
dispel an illusion, and then return to become a cenobite who had proved
this alluring world to be a dream from which nothing should be expected.
We stood toward Gilolo, as it is named on the English maps, though it
should be called Halmaheira. That greater and more distant island of the
Moluccas was only a definite shadow of lilac. Behind it were monstrous
billows of vapor that could have rolled from a fire which had been
immense, but was extinct. The volumes of smoke, and that sea of tarnished
silver, had been stilled. Nothing had moved there since the last of the
old navigators sailed westward. Close to us soared the two imperative
heads of Ternate and Tidore. Whether the fires of Ternate were alight, or
whether the dawn had merely kindled a cloud at its summit, it was hard to
say. Some native craft were about, but I thought they were abandoned, for
they did not move, but remained in one place between sea and sky, held
fast by their reflections, perhaps.
We passed the small island of Hiera, a rounded lump of forest, and drew
abeam of Ternate. At first it seemed merely the perfect and typical
cone of a volcano, but soon its summit was seen as a more irregular and
complex crater, with embrasures, and the northern side of it reddish with
precipitous ash. An old lava flow wound down in black hummocks through
the verdure and ran into the sea. Ternate, excepting along its narrow
selvedge of plantations, seemed more a place for birds than for men. Its
high inclined upper forest was recessed into many dark ravines. Its bare
head was in an upper light beyond the attainment of man. Some smoke was
constant there, and, we imagined, some reflections; but all was so remote
that fancy could do much as it liked with the summit of Ternate, which
was not quite of this world. We opened the village, and came alongside a
jetty in deep water, where the bottom could be seen in the way we should
see fields if the air was a tinted and pulsing lens. I stood on the old
planks of that jetty, with the lucky barbaric figures about me—Malays, of
course, but these men were more inclined to laughter and energetic talk
than the natives to the westward. The hair of some of them was waved, and
there were even a few frizzy mops; New Guinea is next door to Ternate.
Between the planks I could see the tide under our feet, but if a swarm
of fish had not passed below like blue arrows and like globes of yellow
light, the water would not have been there. Crimson lories were perched
on the rail of the jetty and on the shoulders of the barbarians. There
was an unusual liveliness and sparkle in the air. I knew perfectly well
my ship would have to leave without me.
In a lane out of the village, which led up the first slope of the
mountain, I found the _pasangrahan_, or rest-house, in a shrubbery of
hibiscus. A Malay lady called her boys, and they showed me to a large
cool room, and behaved as though they expected and hoped that I should
never leave them again. I sat in the shade of a veranda, looked out at
some cocoanut palms overhanging our garden in a blaze of still light, and
lit a pipe. My steamer’s siren abruptly warned her loiterers. She was off.
I struck another match. Some one laughed in the next garden. What else
would anyone do in a place which appeared to be all gardens in peace in
the glow of no ordinary day? Then my ship gave her salute of farewell.
Water would be between her and the jetty. I was marooned.
What is luck when we find it? It depends on ourselves, I suppose. It
is only a way of looking at things. Luck is not there if we cannot see
it; and even if we have no doubt that at last we are looking at it, our
exclamation of pleasure, should we be indiscreet enough to make it, may
only prove to our saddened friends that we are in reality no wiser than
their privy guess.
It was long past noon, and by the look of the rest-house, and the empty
lane beyond the garden, and the prospect of the slope of the mountain,
Ternate was abandoned. There was not a sound. Nothing moved; not a bird,
not a frond. The fronds might have been of enameled metal. Perhaps
everybody had departed in the steamer and the island was mine. I felt,
as did Robinson Crusoe, that I must go out and make an inventory of my
fortune. The lane led up toward the impending declivity, but as though
that ascent were far too steep it turned lazily northward among the easy
groves parallel to the beach. There were many smells. One had to stop
and try them again. Once it was frangipani, and once it was vanilla, and
once it was cloves. There was a somber plantation of small and unfamiliar
trees. They had glossy leaves and a fruit like green plums; but their
fragrance, which was only a faint and occasional air, was familiar. My
memory was slow, and I wondered why it was I knew the smell of trees I
had never seen before. On one tree a number of the green plums had opened
at the bottom, and disclosed within each was a heart overlain with a
scarlet filigree. In that twilight the opened fruit were as bright as
glow lamps. What are the Spice Islands for but nutmegs?
The great breadfruit tree with its extravagant leaves, the slight and
delicate areca palm under the crowns of stalwart cocoanuts, and the
translucent emerald pennants of the plantain, may all some day get the
verses they demand. But not here. When I looked at them that afternoon I
felt in the mood for singing them, yet singing is another matter. To feel
impelled to sing in praise, though that is a mind commendable in a man,
may result in notes having but slight harmonic relevance to the genius of
the impulse, a sad truth which poets often regret to observe is known to
their critics. Sometimes I saw a house, looking in its frailty within an
arbor but the afterthought of a lotus-eater who wanted a thatch for his
sleeping-mat; a ladder led from the ground to its door, which was open
to show that only dark silence inhabited it. The trees gave the lane a
kind of greenish dusk. There was no sea and the mountain was invisible.
Occasionally the path crossed the dried bed of a torrent, and by the
water-worn bowlders of such a miniature ravine I turned off through a
plantation of palms to find the sea. By the look of it that grove was
eternal. It had no end. The gray aisles of inclined trunks gave only an
illusion of space. I could not surprise the columns into granting any
deep vista. They closed round me as I passed, though I did not see them
move and could not hear them. But suddenly they opened, and left me in
the sun on a beach of black sand.
Even the sea was asleep in the heat. It was only breathing. There
across the water of a narrow strait soared the peak and forests of the
neighboring isle of Tidore. Tidore’s sharp crater reached as high as a
white cloud. I stood in an effort to understand this apparition. But what
could mortal man make of it? Besides, it was all as surprising as that
brief but unexpected revelation of the earth’s virtue which shines at
times just before the sun goes. But this brightness of the Moluccas did
not fade, though I watched it for I forget how long. Tidore remained, a
wall of forest diminishing to the sky, seemingly true and close to me,
but with that denying strip of sea between us. As for my own island,
there were the cocoanuts behind me, and one melancholy bird calling in
them. The beach on one hand disappeared among some mangroves, which were
wading in the sea. On the other hand, beyond a spit, was a canoe with a
stem like the neck of a swan, a frail black shape on a shining tide, and
in it the naked moving figures of three fishermen appeared legendary.
I attempted to reach the little cape, to look round the corner, but a
swamp turned me inland again and brought me to an impassable region of
mangroves, an aqueous wood holding only shadows, where grisly stems
projected from the sludge like the elbows and knees of the drowned. The
mud of a near pool erupted into life and a crocodile raised its head to
regard me. Moreover, night was not far off.
It was comforting to find the lane again, where now the islanders were
strolling leisurely home. The women balanced pots on their heads, the men
carried fish. Lights began to appear in the shacks. At supper that night
perhaps I might have eaten less _daging babi_ if the Dutch missionary
who occupied the rest-house with me had not displayed so speculative a
mind in philosophy and had not indulged me with stories of neighboring
islands which would have been improbable from any man but a scholarly
missionary. Roast pig, however, when it is eaten late and thoughtlessly
with philosophy, metaphysics, and anthropology, is a revengeful beast,
and I woke with a sweating sense of a calamity that approached. What was
it? Where was it? I could not see even the mosquito curtains, and my
electric torch proved false. I listened for whatever was coming.
Nothing came; but my bed, which appeared to have the same dread as
myself, trembled on its own account. I supposed then that the missionary
might be walking heavily in the next room.