CHAPTER IX
We are in the Strait of Malacca. I have a fine confused romantic feeling this morning, like that of a child just before the curtain rises on the “Forty Thieves.” My memory is a splendid muddle of the long drama which opened when Vasco da Gama rounded Good Hope, reached Calicut, and found the way to Cathay; and of d’Albuquerque, St. Francis Xavier, Camoens, sultans, massacres, sieges, Drake, Cornelius de Houtman, Sir Stamford Raffles, and the various East India companies, some honorable and some foreign. According to the Malay Annals, Malacca must have been a sleepless city. The Malays themselves, without the expert assistance of the Portuguese, knew how to find amusement. There was the prince who played at Malacca with the son of the prime minister till the prince stabbed his playmate, who had knocked off the royal hat. It was a serious matter in Malacca to knock off a superior hat, or to have a beautiful daughter whom you would not sell to the Sultan. One sultan, finding a rival at the house of his own pretty lady, bestowed a quid of betel on one of his young men. The youngster knew. He krised the rival. The head of the house of the murdered man took a violent interest in this, so the Sultan, in the cause of peace, sent the obedient young assassin to his discontented subordinate chief, naturally expecting a pardon to follow such an act of unnecessary courtesy; but the chief split the murderer’s head with an elephant goad. “The court was thronged with foreign adventurers ... mahouts with Indian names, Afghan bravos, Tamil merchants ready to bribe even the Prime Minister.” Could d’Albuquerque improve on that? Certainly not; though he did his best.
What, then, could I be expected to make of it, with the purple silhouettes of the Dindings a few miles to port against the clearing sky of morning? It is better, with such annals to go upon, to leave the fine confused feeling of high romance where it is, for all the noble muddle of the world is romantic; we have amassed enough to last us to the end. Jarra island was ahead, an inky cone against a wall of thunder. The sea was livid. Our men were busy rigging gear to the derricks; we are nearing port, and I must pack up to-day. Yet those Annals so accorded with that lustrous sea and ominous sky inclosed by the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, as though the scenery were left when the actors departed, that I felt we were only just a little too late for the play, and remained on deck from sunrise to sunset in case a late caravel should pass; but all had gone, and we were alone. When the sun went and my vigil was over, he left with us a glow that was so like day that I thought it might last till he came again. But chiefly that radiance was absorbed in the level apple-green water of soundings that expanded toward Sumatra as far as where a loom of storm was a high cobalt barrier. Ahead of us, toward Malacca, there was a haze, suffused with a light of rose in which the islands were lower embers. After all, sultans and Portuguese adventurers, even with the aid of Camoens, were insignificant beneath the tremendous drama of that sky of the tropics when night invaded day.
Before the next day broke in the Strait of Malacca it looked as though the east was now barred from us by the enormous battalions of tempest. They were camped about the horizon, a sleeping but ghastly host, waiting for day to announce the assault and for the wind to lead them. The sea was stilled, as though appalled by the look of the sky. But no wind came with the sun. The dark impending threat did not break on us. Its smoke and waiting thunder became a purple wall on which the sooty streamers were changed to orange and pearl. Here we were, approaching Singapore.
We might have reached the peaceful end of the sea, or perhaps its tranquil beginning, for that delicate surface might never have been broken by any violence. It was inclosed by a circle of islands, some of them high and solid, with deep reflections in the glass, and others but black tracings of minute trees afloat, growing miraculously upright out of the tenuous horizon. A launch turned a point and projected itself at us. Two black lines diverged from its stem widely over a pallid tide. At its head stood the statue of a Malay in a sarong, holding a boat hook, and the statue became alive as the launch disappeared under our side where a Jacob’s ladder was hanging. And next, a pair of hairy freckled hands appeared at our bulwarks, and pulled up a man in a suit and helmet incredibly white. He had a sandy beard. He looked up at our bridge and nodded to it while brushing his hands together to rid them of our ship’s grit, an act which had the air of a polite visitor’s absent-minded disapproval. He went by a group of us, this pilot, as though he had been meeting us like this every morning for years, and was rather tired of it, these hot days, but hoped we were all right. We came alongside a quay. The Trojan touched land in tentative and friendly way, as though to assure herself that she was really there.
Old and New on the Suez Canal
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. The sun had struck down the long ears of the animal. But no sooner did I note the flies than the bull vanished, or became a Chinaman running silently in front of an austere European lady who was perched high on a pair of noiseless wheels. Then a Chinaman began to run silently in front of me, while I sat behind him much too high on a pair of noiseless wheels, watching the dark patch of sweat expand on the back of his shirt; anyhow, I must suppose it was I who sat there. We nearly knocked over a yellow lady in black-satin trousers and a blue jacket who was smoking a cigarette. Next, so far as I remember, there were a great many masters of ships and perhaps as many cocktails. We came to a spacious black-and-white palace with a myriad propellers revolving on its ceiling—no wonder I was dizzy—and a string quartette regulated our hunger with dance music while a regiment of immaculate Celestial acolytes accurately guessed our wants. I remember, that night, a confusion of narrow alleys, where hanging lanterns disclosed endless and aimless torrents of brown bodies. There were the rank smells of abundant life in heat and ferment, and cries and voices without meaning. Above grotesque cornices were the shapes of monstrous leaves blacking out areas of stars. All this, when I found a bedroom, I tried to resolve into an orderly pattern; but there can be no ordering of the upburst and overflow of life at its source. I gave it up, and watched instead some lizards running after one another upside down on the white ceiling, while they made a noise like intermittent loud hissing.