But for the durian, the spell of Ternate might not have been broken. I
should have lost count of days and nights. I might have imagined that
I had been cast upon a place beyond time and storms and was living on
another plane. There is much to be said for the lotus. It is a benign
gift. What happens when we neglect it is seen in the anxious and haggard
aspect of morally superior communities. But the durian is different.
I did not know that, however, when I mentioned it to my companion,
the padre, as a famous Malay fruit I had not experienced. Nor did his
answer forewarn me. He became alert and eager at once. He confessed he
was greedy when he saw a durian. He said grandly that it was the king
of fruits. Other men, I remembered, have been as extravagant over the
durian. What is it Russel Wallace told us? “Its consistence and flavor
are indescribable. A rich butter-like custard highly flavored with
almonds gives the best general idea of it, but intermingled with it
come wafts of flavor that call to mind cream-cheese, onion sauce, brown
sherry, and other incongruities ... rich ... glutinous ... perfect ... a
new sensation, worth a voyage to the East to experience.”
What a fruit! The padre assured me most earnestly that he would get me
a durian. I must eat one, and my soul would be made gracious. However,
he must have forgotten it. No durian came. Then late one afternoon I
returned from an attempt upon the mountain, and was light-hearted after
losing myself in a forest above the clouds which refused to let me pass.
I had seen crimson lories flying in solitude like pigeons. A great
bird-winged butterfly, one of the gold-and-emerald _ornithoptera_ which
till that day had never been more than a colored flash in the distance,
that afternoon paused overhead, planed down to a flower which was near my
face, and pulsed its vivid body so near that I could see the quivering
of its antennæ. We may call mind the aim of life, if that flatters us,
but the tense life which vibrated that superb creature evidently was
obeying a command which we have never heard. No sooner had it gone than a
swallow-tail even larger, a very folio butterfly in black, crimson, and
primrose, alighted on the same white trumpet, weighted down the pendulous
and swinging flower, and danced to its movements. Overhead an eagle was
poised, surveying the mountain seaward. He knew I was watching him. His
bright eye kept meeting mine severely. The sea was even more remote below
us than some of the clouds. I got back to the veranda of the rest-house,
tired but pleased, and was going to my door, but stopped.... What was
that? I forgot the crimson lories. My memory had gone straight back to an
old German dugout with its decaying horrors. I thought I must have been
mistaken, but advanced cautiously. Nothing could be there, I told myself,
that was like the trenches of the Flers line. Confidence returned; the
suggestion had gone. Then the ghost passed me again, invisible, dreadful,
and I clutched the table, looking round. At first I could determine
nothing, but presently on a wall bracket I saw resting a green and
spinous object as large as a football, and tiptoed to smell it.
It was!
The padre appeared, but was not dismayed. Instead, he called a native
with a knife to open the durian. The man performed this on the green
porcupine most expertly from one end, disclosing soft and creamy
contents. I tried to forget the smell, took a portion, and, as they used
to say in France, went over the top in daylight. But I knew at once
this was my last durian. Facing the foe, I fell. That indelicate odor,
and the flavor of a sherry custard into which garlic had been slipped,
overshadowed Ternate for some hours afterward. The smell shamelessly
wandered about, and the taste of the garlic remained after the sherry was
forgotten. Only sleep interposed to stop my bewilderment over what Russel
Wallace could have meant by it.
And in the morning there was something else to think about. With the
Assistant Resident, a young Dutchman who talked like a boy from an
English public school because that indeed was what he was, I was to
attempt the crater of the volcano. It was two hours before dawn. Sirius
was blazing over Gilolo. We wished to be well up the slope before the sun
was there. But our two Malay porters had another opinion about the need
for an early start, and Sirius was paling into a sky of rose and madder
before we got away. Our men, father and son, were not so interested in
that mountain as the other two in the party. The father was the guide,
and carried a _parang_, a bright Malay weapon of such weight and balance
that it is good for either agriculture or homicide. Not one of our party
knew the mountain above the upper forest, and only the guide and myself
had been as far as the forest; for Ternate, even official Ternate, though
its interest in its crater is acute, yet is satisfied with a distant
prospect from the beach. This oceanic volcano is 5,200 feet high at
present, and in the sun which is usual to the island the summit may be
said to look out of sight. Why go? One need not.
But if one goes, the beginning is made in elation. The gardens of spices
and the cocoanut groves are traversed with ease. The gardens are cool
and scented. The ascent is gradual. You feel that such a journey could
be continued forever and that any material refreshment would profane
it. But suddenly and brusquely the slope is not gradual. It is quite
otherwise. For a few minutes, while a fierce light beats upon you—no
more nutmeg trees—and the ground is rough which rises within a foot
or so of the nose, you suppose that this interlude is only a playful
gesture by the mountain. It wishes to test your devotion. In this it
succeeds. When you pause, the thumping of the heart is like the pulse of
the silence. The perspiration drips from the fingers. You are surprised
and a little dashed. Every mirthful thought has deserted and gone home.
When the uplands are surveyed to see if they are any nearer, sweat runs
into the eyes. And they are not any nearer. The slope is immediate,
continuous, tractless, and tropical, and the summit has vanished behind
that overhanging forest which has yet to be reached. This playful little
gesture of the mountain seems to be its normal attitude, and requires
some thought.
So our party discovered, this morning. With what enterprise the Dutchman
strode ahead, energetically kicking pebbles backward at me! He was as
frolicsome as a goat. He leaped from root to root where they were tangled
in the shady path like cables. I followed meekly, wondering how long I
should last. I hoped his ebullience would be cooled presently. The sun
came up; but we were still deep in the plantations. My companion appeared
to have decided that the British should see what a little nation could
do; and it had clearly dawned on me that, though my flag may have braved
the battle and the breeze for a respectworthy period, I should disgrace
it in a race to the crater against Holland.
While I was still valiantly holding out, determined to go on or drop dead
on the track, I saw my friend stop, take off his helmet, and gaze into it
reflectively. He did not move when I reached him. That was a good chance
to show him the attractive character of the sugar canes growing beside
us, their plumes surmounting staffs which were of chocolate circled
regularly with thin bangles of gold. If one stood in a certain way, I
assured him, the chocolate had a purplish bloom. But my friend wiped his
face and gazed at me with an expression of abject pathos.
We turned aside, while recovering, to a small cluster of native huts.
They were built on a narrow step of the slope, from which we looked out
over treetops to the place where the village we had left was a smudge
on a long serpentining coast. Under a thatch apart were several shrines
to the spirits of the sea and land, and in one of them was a good model
of a sailing canoe, beside which was placed a little rice to prosper
somebody’s voyage. But only the chickens were about; we saw no spirits
of the sea or land, and not even a solid husbandman.
The sun was now above the trees, apparently crystallizing the foliage
into rigidity with its straight glare. We continued our upward toil. The
sun was on our backs. Above a half acre of scratched earth, in which were
hasty pineapples, tobacco, and cassava, the track vanished completely at
a point where an earthquake had flattened three huts. That clearing was
grown over with labiate herbs and a kind of raspberry. Above it the cliff
of the forest regarded the huts and the advancing wayfarers with such
impassive aloofness, as though man were a late and unimportant curiosity
on the earth, that I myself thought it might be as well to erect a shrine
to whatever hamadryads haunt tropical groves. But my Dutchman, though he
affably agreed, did not appear to get more than a misty notion of the
idea, so we continued the ascent.
Our guide disappeared in a canebrake. We stooped and followed him, and at
last were crawling astern of the sound of the Malay’s busy knife. This
original progress began in amusement; at least it was a relief from the
sun; but I could not help noticing, in about two minutes, that a spiky
tunnel, in which the air is like steam, has its disadvantages. Then we
had to stop and wait on our hands and knees, for we could not hear our
guide. Suddenly his _parang_ broke loose again somewhere on my left,
and as suddenly ceased. The guide’s face, after a long silence, pushed
aside the stems near us—how native to the wilderness is a Malay’s face
when morosely it just peeps out of jungle grass!—and he told us he was
lost. It had seemed to me that it might be so, for his knife strokes
had had a wild and erratic ring, as though the obstinate vegetation were
being punished. We crawled back, therefore, in the reverse order, and
the elegant young Dutchman reverted to his native language, as that,
probably, was better equipped for expressing the results of the brittle
but resistant nature of the herbage on the knees. The guide, though, was
a good man. The world is wide, his manner led us to infer, and the day
is young—why not get lost? He turned on the mountain again with a quiet
energy altogether different from his early display. For the first time I
began to suspect that we might reach the summit.
He went to the gigantic grass again, struck it with his knife, and thus
sank into it. We stooped in slow pursuit of him; sometimes crawled, were
whipped in the face by elastic stems, were stilettoed and bayoneted.
I learned, being so near to the earth, why grains and spores turned
at once into such a high tumult, for what was under my hands was warm
and humid, and I should not have been surprised to feel it stir at my
touch. We continued to move carefully on hands and knees, but, excepting
that we were going up, I had no sense of our direction; only a tangle
of dark ribbons could be seen overhead. Why was I enjoying it, as I
withdrew another broken dagger from my trousers, wiped the sweat from my
face on my sleeve, and looked at the blood on my hands? I don’t know.
Perhaps some of the energy which jetted upward in that mass of hard
green fountains was charging me. The smell was strange, and it may have
been the original smell of earth; we may have been close to a young and
salutary body. I had an idea that if I crawled long enough there I
might overtake some lost time. It was while bravely continuing with this
fortifying thought that we emerged, and found ourselves in an open space,
with the jungle at hand. But before toiling up to attack that louring
palisade we thought we ought to pause and recover uprightness, so we
disposed our gear about us, reclined on a fallen tree, and contemplated
the way we had come. The Malays crouched below us. They are very good
at contemplation. They can maintain it, all day if necessary, without a
movement. Our log was situated well on the way to the clouds. It might
have been a seat on the edge of a darker cloud. The log was hot and dry,
being nearer to the sun. I was idle-minded—I felt that I had been excused
from what was necessarily occupying the attention of envious men, who
were now a long way below me. The way we spent time here was no matter,
because it was unlimited and unmeasured. The corrugations of the log were
lanes and alleys for an industrious population of ants, and I watched
them with the calm abstraction of an immortal who was far too great to
understand the reason for so much activity and resolute enterprise that
apparently got the tiny laborers nowhere, except into trouble now and
then. But they appeared to like it. They did not know they were ants.
With what industry and courage they carried particles up and over the
ridges of the log, which were mountain ranges to them, determined to
get their burdens somewhere, however high their mountains! They took
no notice of the contemplating gods above them, and very little of the
commotions and earthquakes the gods made on the log with idle fingers.
Probably that log was too immense for them to know, so how could they
understand that it was only one log of a forest in a small island which,
to the knowledge of the immortals, was insignificant among many islands
of a vast globe? No doubt most of them got their particles safely home by
evening. Success, success!
A little way down the incline, upright on the verge of space, were two
areca palms, but far more distinguished and remarkable shapes than ever
before I had seen those trees. They framed a far vision of Gilolo and
cloudland. It was not easy to say at once which was island and which was
vapor. But then, even the minor projecting sprays and fronds about us
there seemed strangely posed and of more than the usual significance.
The bee which alighted on a labiate flower at my feet was not related
to anything I knew. I was invading his world, which seemed to have been
warned of intruders and was curiously intent and quiet. Nothing moved
there but the bee, and perhaps he had not yet heard news of the invasion.
Immediately below the black figures of the areca palms the eastern coast
of Ternate and the sea reminded me of the indentations of a chart on
which the ocean was symbolized with the usual color. It was not easy to
believe that our mountain top was based on anything more substantial than
a tinted presentment of earth.
[Illustration: _Gathered from the Submarine Gardens of the Tropics_
(_See p. 131_)]
The Dutchman overcame the spell and the silence with a shout, and we
rose to face the rest of the upward journey, which was only half done.
A little climb brought us to the woods, and there we worked at first
along the edge of a ravine the bottom of which was in night. We entered
by a wilderness of bamboos, and the crackling of the dry parchments of
their spathes under our feet made an uproar which startled me, for it
announced us to every dryad on the mountain. And there is no arguing with
bamboo piping. If the pipes are stacked in any abundance in your way,
then you must find a path round them or go back. The forest grew darker
as we worked toward the head of the chasm. It was dank and elfish. The
light was suspect. The shapes of the trunks and boughs were gnome-like.
The way along the edge of the ravine was difficult with wreckage which
looked like fallen trunks, but the shapes collapsed at a touch. They were
only a treacherous semblance. The profusion and variety of the ferns, the
queer tricks of parasitic growth—one decadent climber, its air roots no
more than a spider-webbing, studded a tree with fleshy disks like green
dollars—and an occasional view on the stem or the under side of a leaf of
a shield-bug as brilliant as a black-and-scarlet flower, ought to have
kept us from going farther, but the intelligent curiosity of adventurers
always moves them on from what they see is good to what they know nothing
about.
The slope often rose so steeply that the angle seemed unsafe for so
heavy a load of forest. When we looked upward the trees might have been
falling on us at a noiseless speed. We were always on the point of being
overwhelmed. It was an act of faith when a projection was grasped for
support, because you imagined the vast overhanging weight would at once
begin to revolve with the extra burden. That sense of insecurity made
the shock the greater when a bough gave way. But we did not fall far;
the next tree below checked us and flung us against another tree, and
that one threw us to the ground. Luckily it was much cooler up there. A
full view of the sky was infrequent, even when we looked back. When we
looked down, during a pause to recover breath, instead of the contorted
tentacles of aged roots ridden by fungi and moss reaching toward our
faces and the columns leaning out of the shades, there was an upper
show, in a light which was as fixed and greenish as a rare fluid that no
wind could stir, of giant leaves even more fantastic than the succuba of
roots; banners of wild plantain, pendent epiphytes, and the crowns of
tree ferns which suggested, in that light, that we were lost in time and
not in space, and had worked backward to the Mesozoic epoch.
From the beach of the island, looking toward the summit, above the forest
one sees what appears to be grassland. It seems from below as smooth
as the English South Downs. We got out of the forest at last into this
very upper region, and found the grass. I had been looking forward to
the experience of tramping over bare downs at such an elevation above a
tropical sea. But that smooth grass was elephant stuff ten feet high, and
for another half hour we could not see more than a yard about us. Then
our way began to descend, so that when we crawled from the tunnel we had
cut we were in a great bare depression of the mountain, which from below
would not have seemed to be more than a dimple. To the bottom of this we
had to make our way, with but one brief peep ahead of the terminal cone
to encourage us. The cone was certainly much nearer, but surprisingly
more distant than I had expected to find it from that vantage; and our
outlook was more restricted than we should have found it in most of the
byways of the village below. The ground of that basin, and up the farther
slope of it, was broken and thinly grown over with coarse grass. But I
must confess that I ceased to pay much attention to the details of our
circumstances, for I had the feeling which, I suppose, used to trouble
those who could hear, as they approached him, the grumblings in the very
belly of Moloch. We were very much by ourselves, and the god, although as
yet his face was hidden from us, was immense and powerful. Now we knew
it. We smelled him now and then. His breath was of the Pit. I began to
have premonitions of what was the security of the tenure of those spice
gardens down below. We toiled up to the top of the ridge which veiled the
face of the god.
At last, there he was. He was black and naked, and smoke was drifting
from his head. And he was still some distance away, apart, elevated, and
awful in the serene blue. It was clear that Milton had wrongly reported
his expulsion from heaven. He still dwelt there. In fact, he had it to
himself. He was solitary in the sky, monstrous and fuliginous under
his lovely canopy, with a desolate court about him, and a footstool of
blackened ruin from which the angels had fled.
Before we could mount to his throne we had to make another long descent,
as it were an act of obeisance; and as the Dutchman, who had become very
humble, advanced deferentially over the cinders and clinker, I could see
plainly that, though we might hope to be ignored, divine compassion in
this spot was as absent as the supernal choir. Our only luck would be to
find the god asleep.
This, too, was the worst stage of the journey. We were compelled to
forget our outward prospects. We had to keep our eyes searching for
likely foothold in the tumult of the knives and ax-blades of the slag.
A slip in that chaos of spiked and edged metal would have been ugly. A
few minutes of the exercise made us pause. There was not a sound. The
buzzing of an invisible fly was remarkable. During the pause I noticed
in surprise that our exertions had taken us but a little distance; the
journey to the bottom of the descent and up the final slope had been
prodigiously lengthened since we had discovered what a walk there was
like. The two Malays, I observed, were seated on the top of the ridge
we had left, and were again in contemplation. They were not fools. They
had no desire to look into the gape of a volcano. Their curiosity was
already satisfied. Around us on the litter of broken metal were scattered
numberless great bowlders that had acquired a horrid iridescence and some
flowers of sulphur on cooling; they were the bombs which the god throws
about when he is playful. But at the moment all sound had ceased except
the murmur of that unseen fly, who kept with me for company; and the only
movement was the quivering of the air over the heated stones, for the sun
was magnificent.
By the time we reached the edge of the crater every ten yards had grown
to a mile, and we were in the tired mood to be insulting, even if
challenged by Cerberus. There was no sign, however, that our approach had
been noticed. We were free to gaze into the open mouth of the god. He was
fast asleep, and breathing so gently that his gusts of vapor were slight
and unalarming. Our own foothold was more disconcerting than the crater.
It was not easy to find a standing place that was clear of communication
with the nether fires. Vents and fissures everywhere were exhaling hot
mephitic gases, and when I thought I had found a corner, by a huge
bomb, which gave me a space exempt where I might be at ease, a fumarole
presently became active under my feet and sent up strong sulphurous
blasts. The rocks about me were bright with the lichens of Avernus, lurid
incrustations of chemicals which showed more than anything else the kind
of garden we were in.
The crater itself was halved by a wall, and the half within our view—we
did not visit the other half—was a precipitous hollow the bottom of which
seemed choked with rocks; but as to that I offer no definite opinion, for
I did not climb down far enough to satisfy a scientific conscience, but
only a conscience which is amenable to desire. Those stained cliffs were
not usual. The crags were calcined red and black, and they were blotched
with sulphur and verdigris. There were occasional bursts of steam. That
gape was loaded and charged. The desire to play adventurously inside
such a muzzle vanished at the sight of it. When the natives of Ternate
prudently assemble their canoes at signs more violent than usual, and
even abandon their nutmeg groves, they are not showing timidity, for on
the summit I got the impression that in the belly of the island there was
a power latent which could lift it bodily from the sea.
But where was the sea? As soon as we turned from the crater and looked
outward we forgot the nether fires. There was no sea, however. There
was no sky. There was only a gulf of light which was blue to infinity.
We were central in space. We looked southward for the cluster of the
Moluccas, but in that blue vacancy the islands and the clouds were
all immaterial; the isles of Motir, Makian, and distant Batchian were
mere conjectures, though in that clear and tranquil light I imagined I
could see as far as Paradise and the solution of sorrow. But what is an
island when the clouds float below it? There we saw Motir, the nearest
of those suppositions of land, a frail and pallid wraith which did not
move from its place in the blue, but was constant in the midst of the
traveling islands of cloud. Some of them, in appearance, passed under
it. Gilolo had sunk profoundly. It was only a lower abstraction of bays
and promontories. Beyond it the glimmering sapphire was the Pacific.
Our near neighbor, Tidore, and the lower slopes of our own island, were
occasionally revealed; we had immediately below us at times a far but
vivid memory of the green world we left one fine morning. But that memory
would dissolve under lambent white ranges of cloud, and again we were
marooned on a raft of burnt rocks translated to the neighborhood of the
sun. The clouds of the trade-wind were much more substantial than Gilolo.
They approached us as lunar continents, resplendent and majestic, moved
down rapidly on our meager upper foothold as though to sweep us along,
but divided below us and surged past in shining ranges while our raft in
midway space felt anchored to but the slenderest hope.
It was with reluctance that we began our return. We had a surmise that
we should like to continue forever in that upper light where what was
mundane was reduced to faint symbols and abstractions, but doubted the
value of our intuition. We had but little faith that we could maintain
ourselves in that rare light, in that serene expanse; and perhaps we were
right. We are not ready for it yet. We plunged downward rapidly, once
we were over the slag heaps, and were soon in the gloom of the forest.
The forest seemed more secure, its darkness more homely, its troll-like
shapes more in accord with the heart of man, than a luminous vision of
eternity.
I do not know how long it took us to descend. We fell automatically.
Fatigue flung us, at times, long distances which did not seem to bring
us any nearer to home. The never-ending jolts in weariness destroyed
thought, and reduced the mind to a heavy enduring lump. My personal lump
acquired a measure of intelligence again when at last some inconstant
sparks in the air took my attention, and I found they were fireflies in a
Chinese graveyard. We were nearing sea-level. Then music approached, and
lanterns, and a wedding party passed by, with tom-toms, pipes, and dance.
My friend, the Dutch missionary, stood near. “I’ve been praying for you,”
he remarked, grimly. He was thinking of the nether fires. But he did not
know that perhaps it was his very prayer which had saved me from the
danger of a transcendental mirage of sublimity.