CHAPTER XXIX
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.