_August 6._—A cloudless morning in the Java Sea, and the dry monsoon from
the southeast is fresh and strong. In the southwest, at seven o’clock,
the suggestion of the mountains of the island of Baly was high in the
sky, but no land was under that celestial range. At noon our steamer was
passing down the Allas Strait, with the peak of Lombok to starboard, a
dark cone resting on a wide kingdom of cloud, and from under the cloud
the verdure of the island descended to the sea. Close to our port side
were the tumbled uplands of the island of Sumbawa. Sumbawa, like all the
islands of the Lesser Sundas to the east of Lombok—Flores, Sandalwood,
and Timor—is under the subjection of a dry wind from Australia, and its
bare pale hills and bright grasslands are remarkable after the coasts
loaded with forests of the other islands of Indonesia. Lombok, on the
starboard side of the ship, is a much darker green, and has no open
uplands. It is a quite different personality from Sumbawa, its neighbor.
_August 7._—This morning I woke in my bunk thinking a Malay was running
amok. The frightful lamentations of his suffering victims brought me up
at a bound. I peeped out, but could see only a line of palms individual
against the screen of a morning mist. The chief officer then paused at my
cabin door, but he was calm. He always is. That noise? We are at Ampenan.
We shall take here three hundred pigs for Singapore. The horrific
wailings then broke out afresh. The chief officer smiled, and compressed
his nose with his fingers significantly as he went for’ard.
There are already on this ship hundreds of cockatoos and lories from New
Guinea and the Moluccas—the speculations of Chinamen, I believe. Among
the many kinds of lories is a crimson bird with green and gold markings,
but named by ornithologists, with unfailing reason, the Garrulous. If
a Malay does run amok among us now, the cries of the stricken will be
unheard in this maniacal din. Though I should not blame the pigs. I
think, on the whole, it would serve us right. Each pig is stuffed into a
crate of cane, of his own shape and almost of his size, and the crates
are stacked into living barricades with alleyways between. To walk
through one of those alleyways—supposing you are indifferent to wet muck,
heat, and smells—is to arouse the cries of the hopeless sufferers in
Purgatory. The pigs scream at you. They call down a murrain upon you. You
feel shamed by those intent little eyes. But one cried and cried. Its leg
was broken.
_August 8._—We have been crawling since early morning under the coast
of Baly, with Gunong Agdeng itself, 9,500 feet, looking down at us. The
stark and calcined cone is deeply scored; but the _sawahs_, or cultivated
terraces, reach so far up the mountain’s slopes that they appeared to
the eye to be parallel markings on impossible declivities. At one place
on the shore a Hindu temple was distinct, just above the surf. Baly, of
course, has been faithful to Brahma. The Mohammedan conquerors of Java
appear to have left the hot and resentful natives of Baly, the island
next door, to their ancient evil ways; and doubtless the soldiers of the
Prophet were wise, as since then the Dutch have discovered. The Balinese,
one may guess, regarded Mohammed as Orangemen do the Pope, and it
happens, too, that the men of Baly are famous as makers and users of the
kris. The hilts of all their choicest weapons are carved into the scowl
of the Hindu war god. The Balinese are fanatical, as we say of an enemy
when his obstinate bravery becomes a nuisance, and at times during their
affairs with the Dutch a whole community has chosen to die, flinging
itself on the bayonets and bullets. In 1906 the Dutch were at war with
a rajah of the island, who came out with all his court in a sortie, not
with the intention of fighting, but of dying to escape dishonor. Brahma
does not seem to encourage Falstaffs. It was only in 1908 that this
island was brought under the direct rule of the Netherlands. We landed
at Buleleng, on the north of it, in a surfboat, and Baly soon made us
regret that we had not gone there earlier and now had not long to stay.
The island is extravagantly fertile, and after seeing so many other Malay
islands the people of Baly, though of the Malay race, appear foreign.
Their _campongs_ are different. The hamlets are hidden within walls of
mud, and the huts are small and squalid. There are many pigs about, and
fetishes dangle everywhere from trees and the thatches of the homes.
The people are taller than most Malays, lighter in color, upright and
independent in their bearing, and good-looking. The women are bare to
the waist. They have a very beautiful ox, the domesticated variety of
the _canteng_, a biscuit-colored beast with white stockings, a creature
with an action which compels one to watch it as it strides past. There
are shrines and temples, or the remains of temples, everywhere along
the roads, but to me they were only the manifestations of a congested
aberration of reason. At Sangsit there is a remarkable example, built,
like all I saw, of a red stone which somehow was in accord with the
malignant masks that leer from its carvings. These temples are roofless.
There is an outer portal at Sangsit, and beyond it a courtyard with its
walls and stone columns crawling and convulsed with figures of demons
peering from a tangle of leaves, flowers, and intricate symbols; other
portals within lead to more secluded courtyards, and all of them are
piled with stonework so tortured that one recoils, as though from the
pointless intensity of a maniac’s heated and frenzied labors. When once
the human intelligence gets away on an interesting bypath in seclusion
it soon makes the dark and startling mysteries of the beehive and the
anthill look like plain daylight. The “coal sacks” of the Milky Way, as
we call those areas of unplumbed night, are not so awful and admonishing
as the lightless deeps of the human mind.
_August 9._—We are anchored off Sourabaya again, and we are perplexed by
a problem in morals. The chief officer, who flatters me with his innocent
assumption that all Englishmen quite easily find their way about in
morals, supposes that I can help him to unriddle this difficulty. Many
of our crew have deserted; but, as the mate gravely explained, his best
men are loyal. Our mate, whom I respect and admire as an excellent seaman
and citizen of the world, then conducted me to a portion of the forward
shelter deck where our men are berthed. There, I was surprised to
observe, presiding over trays and baskets of stewed fish and red pepper,
matches, sweetmeats, cigarettes, and fruit, were twelve dark but comely
vestals, their shiny black hair maintained in gracious coils with gold
ornaments. Their sarongs would have been envied at a Chelsea Arts ball;
their muslin jackets were frail designs in white mist. Their bangles and
rings were worth many guilders. They lifted their eyes to us—or, to be
accurate, to the chief officer, who is a tall and handsome young man,
with the badge of authority—and were as demure, timid, and appealing as
gazelles.
“What must I do, Mr. Tomlinsohn? Do I want zhese women here? No. I will
not have it. I do not like it. Do zhey zell matches? Yes, and no. I know
zhose matches. But if I pack zhem off, I lose my ozzer crew. Do I shut my
eye?”
His proper distress was manifest. He must keep good order in the ship.
That is his duty. But he must see the ship is worked out of harbor
to-morrow or the day after. That also is his duty. I assured him that
certainly this was a matter which only our captain could decide.
The captain would know what ought to be done, for not only is he an
experienced navigator, but a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, I am
neither.
_August 13._—The captain has had several new orders daily, and for nearly
a week we have moved about the north coast of Java—Sourabaya, Samarang,
Pekalongan, and Bawean. But Bawean is not Java; it is a lump of isolated
forest in the sea between Java and Borneo. Its natives have a good
reputation in Singapore as servants and chauffeurs, and we went there to
get some; they are also famous for their brand of sleeping-mat, a fact
which was of no interest to me till I saw some of those mats, when at
once I coveted them. They are certainly a loving tribute to Hypnos.
At Sourabaya we sweltered for days while waiting for cargo, which was
on the quay, but which we did not get. A fleet of steamers was waiting
for sugar. The go-downs of Sourabaya were full of sugar; but the ships
sail light, nevertheless. The follies of Europe blight even the crops
in far tropical islands. I have seen the price of copra drop on a beach
of Celebes at the bare rumor of another French movement in the Ruhr. We
left that copra on the beach. The natives could not accept the price, and
were frankly puzzled that their labors should have been wasted, and that
now they were unable to give our captain their orders for hardware and
cottons, which would have gone to Europe. From this distance, Europe does
appear indecipherable. Paris and London might be, from their behavior,
provincial villages. Europeans cannot see yet that steam and the
telegraph have made one undivided ball of this planet. Careless makers
of mischief throwing stones from the Quai d’Orsay may smash windows in
the Pacific. That we should love our neighbors as ourselves is too much
to expect of men who, just as compelled by dark thoughts as the masons
of the temples of Baly, are elaborating gases for choking their fellows.
When I read in the East Indies the last telegrams and wireless messages
from Europe, and see the direct consequences on Malay beaches, my
feelings are the same as when I looked at the leers and grimaces of that
stonework celebrating the travail of Baly’s pagan soul. O little town of
Bethlehem!
_August 15._—Singapore was in view in a heat haze at 7 A.M. I was
wondering what now I should do and to whom I could go. That array of
vague buildings, and the crowded shipping of the anchorage, had no place
for me. Everybody else on the ship was energetic and determined and knew
precisely what he must do, and was getting ready for it. Now, I did meet
at Singapore, when first I was there, a principal of an English line of
ships who kept about him in the tropics, by some miracle, the coolness
and divine certainty of an ancient British university; and somehow, by
prescience, by hints, by cunning stratagems, he made the temperature
of that city lower for me than it was for others. If only I could find
him when I landed! But he did not know I was coming. Our ship had not
got way off her when I saw one tug detach itself from the rest of the
indeterminate shipping, and I thought it was making for us. We anchored;
and that tug had to back a bit and then come ahead again on the stream
while our gangway was lowered for health officers, our ship’s agent,
and customs men. And there was my friend sitting in a wicker chair in
the fore part of that tug like a god, cool, directive, with the gift of
tongues, knowing all. And yet it is wondered why half the tonnage of the
world is under the Red Ensign! His foot was on the gangway as soon as it
was fast. The Dutch officers were very annoyed. Even their own agent had
not arrived! Would not my friend wait a little? Wait? He calmly stepped
aboard, stayed there till he saw all my belongings were in the right
order, and steamed ashore with me to breakfast—which was laid—before the
other passengers had done more than wipe their hot brows in a prefatory
way.