H. M. Tomlinson

“ Travel is delightful in the morning, with a young sun giving the sparkling sense that all is new and for the first time, and that shadows are, after all, but a sport of happy light. By the afternoon that freshness has gone, and one suspects the ship is uselessly rocking without progress, fixed in the clutch of some sleeping but eternal power which has forgotten, or does not know, that men do not live forever. One would then destroy Time, the tyrant, and with his own scythe, if suddenly he turned into an alleyway bearing his damnable glass. ”

“ The sea, that deceptive sea of tide-rips and reefs, was as radiant and benign as though it had confessed its sins, and peace was now in its ancient heart and not sharks. Gilolo and Tidore were built of lapis-lazuli, but Ternate was of olivine, and about its head were clouds which, after various dyes, became bright gold after sunset, and reflected about us briefly the aura of a day we had lost. Lights appeared in the deeps of the shadow of earth, and stars in the sky. The beach of Ternate, at sunrise and sunset, changed thus every day. ”

“ How faithful and bounteous a spring of original life—common humanity everywhere! It is like rain and grass and the sun. To read the history of Java from the Hindu to the Dutch would lead a distant student to imagine that its people must have had every spark and airy bubble compressed out by the strong governments of fifteen centuries, and that there is left but a flat and doleful residue of homogeneous obedience. ”

“ There is no time. There is no death. This is not only the Indian Ocean. Those leisurely white caps diminishing to infinity, the serene heaven, [51] the silence except for the sonority of the waters, are Bideford Bay, too, on a summer long past, and the Gulf Stream on a voyage which ended I forget when, and what Magellan saw in the Pacific, and is the Channel on our first passage across, and they are the lure and hope of all the voyagers who ever stood at a ship’s head and looked to the unknown. They are all the seas under the sun, and I am not myself, but the yearning eyes of Man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You get the idea that even the rank smells of Singapore are of its fecundity. Such odors are beyond merely ordinary carelessness. The gush of its life is from no failing source. It spurts and eddies in lusty brown swashes unceasingly through every street and alley. That tide is never low; it is always rising higher. China need not be a military nation; she merely overflows into neighboring lands. Yet perhaps humanity anywhere in the mass will not bear looking at for long. It is dominant on earth, but its movements are as unreasonable and incalculable as seismic convulsions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Celebes is upon the equator. But the heat on the ship is only as though halcyon weather were giving a trifle too much to the sun. Our steamer sometimes threads the channels of the skirting islands whose shores, like those of the mainland, are gloomed by forest. Areas of the coast become thin and ghostly when diaphanous vapors are caught on the crags. The bright gauze then spreads and settles below. There is no wind. We draw abeam of an occasional beach, a thread of gold between the cobalt sea and the somber forest. No man ever lands there. ”

“ There are Arab and Chinese quarters, from which women are absent. But the Malays are one big family, unpartitioned. They are asleep on their mats, or they sit in groups, men and women, gambling with cards. There are messes of rice in great pots, strings of fish, melons, red earthenware jars of water, and queer smells. Cabbages and maize hang from the beams. The cocks crow, the parrots screech, and the children squat and stare like infant Buddhas at the ship’s gear, and at myself when I pass. I hear there is never any trouble here through the ladies. Each man knows the other has a knife. ”

“ I began to regret there were other islands of Indonesia to which I was bound. In the midst of huts and foliage which pretended to be real the train would come to a standstill. What was the name of this village which no one applauded? The old sport of hunting for the name of a strange railway station acquired a new zest; but as a rule I could find only the Malay word for a famous soap. To add to my bewilderment everybody there was looking at my train, which clearly was the real event. We had an audience of people so decorative that they must have been attired in our honor. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Beauty was as far as the sunrise and sunset. Conscience was a funny prohibition of freedom. He would have regretted that he had left England, only he began to see that the Orient, London, and the jungle were all driven by the same unknown causes to an undesigned end. Human life had come to the earth just as fungus comes at a certain incidence of moisture and warmth, and as it would slough when the right focus faded. All these movements of life would slow and stop as unreasonably as they began and continued, and nobody would ever know why. ”

“ The approach to its harbor, when the sun is near the horizon, especially if there is a stillness before or after rain during the wet monsoon, would make you believe, looking ahead from the ship’s bow, that “the storms all weathered and the ocean crost,” you were nearing that “favored isle, where billows never roar, and brighter seasons smile.” For there is no end to the illusions of travel—indeed, they are the best of it, and part of the fun is in seeing them break. Half an hour of the beatific! What more should we expect? It is an experience long enough for the good of any mortal traveler. ”

“ Before he had more than half vanquished his array of dishes I felt it better to creep silently away, leaving my own dinner unfinished; for who could tell what divine wrath might not be loosed in a time of food shortage if a human creature were detected buried up to the neck in boiled rice and spiced comestibles, and still was burrowing into it deeper with every mouthful? Heaven may be tried too much, and a Rice Table is the kind of dinner which might cause astonishment at the distance of the Milky Way. ”

“ It is something like a miracle that another human soul, without knowing what it is doing, should change the look of the world to us, turn a steaming forest full of unknown dangers into an exhilarating pleasure, and make even the loathsome leeches, hunger, and the thought of fever only the jokes of the place. ”

“ We were told there was a path by which we could reach some upper falls, and we found it, though occasionally it left us without guidance in a dark cave, or on a bowlder with the water heaping past, or waist deep in the herbs of an inclosure to which there seemed no way out. The sky was but a narrow road of blue above us. In one smooth pool on the opposite side a party of natives were bathing, but so dim was the water under the overhanging cliff that even their bright Malay dresses were indistinct. ”

“ Whether I looked at the grotesque shape of Celebes on the chart, or leaned on the ship’s rail to watch the unfolding of its coast, I could hardly believe it. The map shows the island as a bundle of peninsulas tied in the middle and flung anyhow on the ocean. There Celebes sprawls, with none of its long limbs straightened out. It lies between Borneo and New Guinea, and is akin to neither. For that matter, it is like no other island in any of the seas. It is big enough to be noticeable—its area is greater than that of Java—yet few people seem to have heard of it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ An astonishing butterfly was hovering over the scarlet blossoms of a shrub by the foreshore; a group of children by the shrub, no less surprising with their colors, were as indifferent to the creature as though they knew all the wonders of Paradise. Our own Malays were wading up to their middles from beach to boats and back again, carrying bags of copra, till the hot air was loaded with the oily smell of it.
I sat on a beam at the end of a jetty, waiting for the steamer to warn me to board her again. Near me a canoe was anchored by a large stone and a cable of rattan. ”

“ That was the gate to all that romantic folk with a meaning eager but scarcely articulate call the Orient. Yet which of us is not romantic when we see it for the first time? I watched that gate heighten and become material as our ship insensibly approached it, till I could read on the seaward brow of this entrance to romance the famous legends, “Topman’s Tea” and “Macgregor’s Whisky.” Port Said, you soon discover, is just like that.
If it is anything at all it is more West than East. ”

“ A wind, an eddy from a distant thunderstorm, brought the scent of a tree in flower from the forest behind us, and carried away the heavy heat down to the river. The coffee had a flavor notably good. That was the way coffee ought to taste. A dog sat next to me, waiting for scraps. As I spoke to him I saw a leech uncoil from inside his nose and elongate and retract. One must accept such things along with sunsets and sonatas, but they do seem like insults to truth and beauty. The leech, for his part, might ask what did we suppose men and dogs were for, in a world of good leeches. ”

“ You think you can forget it, but it won’t let you.”
“Why was that temple ever dug out of the jungle to which it belonged? A fixed tangle of dark and incurable thoughts!”
“I cannot discuss this with you, sir. There is nothing else like Borobudor in the world.”
“This poor world is overloaded with Borobudors. We struggle beneath them, yet nothing will satisfy you but you must dig out another from the forest which had fortunately hidden it. There it is, to distress any wretched traveler who passes it with the idea that man will never escape from himself. Borobudor is a nightmare.” ”

“ That romantic seaport town of the Orient made him uneasy. He wanted to get away from it. Yet how it had attracted him once—but that was when it was only a fine name on the map of the coast where the Indian Ocean meets the China Sea. Its upheaval of life startled him with a hint that it was without mind and did not know its power and what it was doing. This life seemed to have no intelligence; it was driven by blind impulse, even to its own destruction. Humanity would go on, without knowing why, and without getting anywhere, till its momentum failed. ”

“ Some of the alleys, those where the [183] women sit on the ground before their garden wares, are sheltered from the sun with white awnings. A group of Malay women, when dressed for everybody’s eyes, make a finer display than any summer border in full bloom. Flowers, even masses of larkspur, roses, marigolds, peonies, and hollyhocks, could never equal that market place of Ternate, for flowers never turn their heads, and do not smile with such art. The women of Ternate sit in rows facing each other, and the pathway is carpeted between them with plantain leaves. ”

“ To leave the sea and to land at Singapore is as serious a matter as taking a man out of a long seclusion and releasing him from a closed vehicle in Piccadilly Circus. Molten light poured over the swift kaleidoscopic movements of a street where the first thing I saw was a large cart drawn by a small white bull with an excusable hump; his eyes were full of flies. ”