After our little coasting steamer had worked clear of the noisy
bewilderment of Singapore’s crowded harbor the reality of the East
dissolved. The East again was only a silent presentiment. For several
days I saw to port the somber hills of Johore, Pahang, and Trengganu,
and behind them each day the sun disappeared in an appalling splendor of
thunder and flames. But those hills by the China Sea and the wrack of
day above them were in the same world; one was no nearer to me than the
other. The weather was heated and calm, and the sea was glazed, for the
monsoon was northeast. I was bound for Bangkok. Yet Malaya was implicit
in that magnificent dread to port at dayfall; though how could I enter
it? How does one reach the sunset clouds? I had come to see that land,
but I had given it up. I was going to Bangkok instead. Singapore is
not Malaya—it is more Chinese than anything else; nor Penang; nor even
Malacca. You may drift about from one anchorage to another in the China
Sea and the Bay of Bengal—voyage along both sides of that strip of Asia
which reaches down to the equator and is called the Malay Peninsula; or
travel leisurely in a railway coach for days past inland stations with
pleasing native names, or career for weeks over excellent roads, through
miles of rubber plantations, jungle, tin-mining districts, old Malay
hamlets, and modern Chinese compounds, and feel all the time that you
will never enter Malaya. I had tried every device in an effort to glimpse
it, but it had eluded me; and soon I must go home. We ought to have more
sense, of course, than to try to touch a dream, or to reach that place
which exists but in the glamour of a name.
The agent of our steamer at one sleepy coastal station, when I asked him
whether it was possible to travel inland away from the usual roads, shook
his head. He did not know. He thought not. It was wild and uncertain.
Nobody ever did it. He had been there nine years and had not been more
than ten miles inland. That overseer of cargoes and manifests looked
toward the hills, and I thought for a moment that his glance was half
regretful. “No,” he said; “I shall never know what is behind them. I’m
too busy. And when I’m finished here I shall go, please God, straight to
Dorking. Do you know Dorking in Surrey? That’s where my hills are.”
And his, I think, is the experience of nearly all the exiles from Europe
on that coast. Those men are not really incurious. Their youthful
ardor, the zest for adventure which carried them out, has been subdued.
Commerce caught them on the way, and imprisoned and disciplined them.
They have not seen and will never see more than the cocoanut and rubber
plantations, estate inventories, poker at the club, tin mines, and
coastal go-downs and cargo manifests, of their fate. They do not talk
with the natives, but with commercial travelers. The extent of London and
New York and their unquestioned control is terrifying. Our maps give no
indication of it. They seem to have men everywhere in bondage, and you
find the chains are as despairingly stout and reliable on a Siamese beach
as they are where fixed to their awful staples in Threadneedle and Wall
streets.
So Bangkok, another great city, was the best that I could do. Nobody
could help me to anything better. I was free to regard distantly from
my steamer the home of the Sakai, the hills where the little forest
people use poisoned darts and blow-pipes, and where, in fact, life is
still unaware that it is nearly five hundred years since Vasco da Gama
rounded Good Hope. I was now no nearer to those hills than if they were
in another planet. There was nothing for it but to remain contented as
a happy tourist, and not to ask for too much. A week’s journey inland
from most of those roadsteads by the mouths of rivers—called _kualas_ on
the local map—would get me to where the Malay folk were living in the
way which was traditional before the coming of the English, even before
the coming of the Portuguese. But if any sedentary person supposes that
it is easy to break through the spell of the settled highways of this
world then he had better try it. Only good luck will get one through;
and I should like to hear how to arrange for the advent of that angel.
In another two days we were due in Bangkok. There I should see fantastic
temples, smell stale drainage, buy pictures of the place at the hotel
office, drink and gossip with cynical exiles to kill the evenings, and
then be more than glad to embark again. To feel the spirit of enterprise
moving you is not enough; a door must be found, and the key to it.
Malaya, however, was closed to me, as in fact it is to all but a few
government officials, prospectors, and men who are indifferent to
prudence, time, space, and the neat virtues.
A young fellow passenger, to whom I had not yet spoken, that evening
at dinner said something to the captain which I did not hear, and the
captain thereupon turned to regard him in mild surprise and amusement.
“Are you through,” the captain said with a wise smile. “I hope you will
like it, but I think not.” An elderly planter next to me chuckled. The
young man began to hum a tune, as though he did not hear.
“How will you do it?” said the planter.
“Oh, on an elephant, or walk it, if it comes to that, or take a _prahu_.
I don’t know. But I’m going.”
“And you call that a holiday?” said the planter, smiling bitterly.
“No, I call it a lark,” said the young man.
“I wouldn’t do it for a tenth share in the ship,” the captain assured me.
“Do what?” I asked, in suspicious curiosity.
“Why, make my own way to Ulu Kelantan, to where that river rises,
somewhere among the rhinoceroses over there.” The skipper pointed at the
night beyond the open ports of the tiny saloon.
After that dinner I forgot my excursion to Bangkok. I did not want it.
The young man assured me that he would not obstinately disapprove of my
society, and that he thought I could furnish myself with what was needed
for the trip up country at a place he called Kota Bharu. We should land
next morning near there, at Tumpat. It was fortunate for me that night
that those places were not on my map and that I could not prove my new
friend did not know what he was talking about, for otherwise I might
still have been prudent and continued in comfort and boredom my voyage up
the Gulf of Siam.