CHAPTER XX
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.
I suppose we all know Borneo. That island is sufficiently familiar to cause mirth in any London music hall by the mention of its name. As for New Guinea, so many sensational books are now appearing about it that our nerves no longer respond. But Celebes has been overlooked; and that, when you come to think of it, is not at all a surprising fate to befall what is entirely and freely original. It has received less critical attention than Laputa. We are much less certain about it than we are of such evident things as the subconscious self.
The fact that the old and famous port of Macassar stands at its southwest corner makes no difference. Macassar is not Celebes. Probably few of the natives of Macassar know that their city is Celebesian. There is a steam tram, which it is polite to call a railroad, that goes out of Macassar for about sixty miles, nobody knows why and few people know where. If I had met a dinosaur I should not have been more startled than when that train accosted me while sauntering one day outside Macassar. I had never been warned of it. Its snorting was unnatural. Heaven knows where the Macassarenes stable it when the queer creature comes home at night. Macassar is merely a convenient meeting place for traders to sort out the gums, spices, copra, tortoise shell, mother-o’-pearl, and bird skins which have been collected in the multitude of islands east of Java.
Celebes must have bewildered the early navigators with its odd and infolded shape. They could rarely have been sure whether they were still there, or had found another island. The very appearance of its shores, you would think, ought to have prompted in some modern explorer that feeling which drives the curious to wander mystified till they discover the center of a maze. I know how it worked on me. Yet there do not appear to have been any famous journeys through the island. I kept my own foolish impulse under prudent control; yet one day, when leaning with a young Dutch naval officer on the rail of our trading steamer, both of us staring at Celebes, he became suddenly mad or ecstatic, though he was a shy and quiet man, with pale hair and questioning blue eyes.
“One of ’Em Looked at Me As He Came Aboard”
“Let us land,” he cried aloud; “let us go there!” He pointed to a dark inlet in which nothing had happened, by the look of it, since it was made, except perhaps some trifling piracy and murder. “Let us walk on from there till we come to the other sea!”
That was it. A lovely, seductive, and most likely a deadly coast. You couldn’t keep the eyes off it. If, growing limp and weary with the heat and the uneventful day and a sea which appeared to have lapsed into the notion that we had at last reached the Age of Gold and that the lion and the lamb were reconciled and sentimental, you went to your cabin to read, you never stayed there more than ten minutes while the ship was cruising along Celebes; before ten minutes were up you were on deck again. Why pretend we don’t know what song the sirens sang? We know quite well. We have heard it more than once. But the song looks so idiotic when we set it down literally. We are forced, therefore, to make an academic mystery of it, a method which preserves for our edification in idleness so many of the classic topics which help bookmen to a bare living. God forbid that I should deprive them of an item of it. I will omit a transcript of the sirens’ song for that reason, and also because it would cause Ulysses, Mungo Park, and many others, including the Dutch naval officer and myself, to look so embarrassed. Why do we ever listen to the sirens’ enticement? Well, why do men put feathers in their hats and go to war? Why do some of us love wearing regalia and making secret signs? Why are men abstemious when there is wine about, and smugglers when there isn’t? And above all, what is it we find in Beethoven or in Christobal? Nothing that can be quoted on the Stock Exchange; nothing which can be stated explicitly without arousing mirth in our enemies and indignation in our friends; for it would involve the whole mystery of the arts and the philosophic reduction of beauty to its elements. Nevertheless, Ulysses did well when he tied himself to a mast.
I tie myself to a mast, as it were, while Celebes is in sight. Our ship all day moves past a tumult of crenellated ridges, heights often so sharp and aberrant that how the forest stands upon them is a mystery. Those hills are unexplored. Dense jungle darkens them from the clouds to the shore. 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. The sea is empty. There is nothing living in sight but the frigate birds, black shapes high over the water with long angular pinions outspread and motionless, soaring and circling in the slow leisure of timeless spirits. There is nothing else at sea except the purple shadows of clouds and the stippling of beryl where the coral is only just submerged. Once Drake passed this way; but it looks as though nobody has been here since. Our steamer idles along, apparently without a purpose, as in a frivolous escape from scheduled and consequential duties. We are acquitted and released from all that makes men feel serious, active, and important.
At sunset one day the sea was a fathomless mirror because the hulls of cumulous clouds had sunk in it beneath the inverted violet peaks of Celebes. Celebes floated athwart two heavens. Over Borneo, where the sun vanished, the basaltic horizon clouds were the broken ramparts of a world wrecked and lost. The fires of the final calamity were nearly out. Only from the base of that wall did the last day of earth burst in one thin explosion of scarlet. It spread no distance. Night quenched it at once. I stood at the ship’s rail, watching the place where the forlorn hope had failed.
“Mr. Tomlinsohn,” said a voice beside me, “will you have a gin and bitter?” It was our chief engineer. He comes from Amsterdam.