CHAPTER XXVIII
But for the durian, the spell of Ternate might not have been broken. I should have lost count of days and nights. I might have imagined that I had been cast upon a place beyond time and storms and was living on another plane. There is much to be said for the lotus. It is a benign gift. What happens when we neglect it is seen in the anxious and haggard aspect of morally superior communities. But the durian is different. I did not know that, however, when I mentioned it to my companion, the padre, as a famous Malay fruit I had not experienced. Nor did his answer forewarn me. He became alert and eager at once. He confessed he was greedy when he saw a durian. He said grandly that it was the king of fruits. Other men, I remembered, have been as extravagant over the durian. What is it Russel Wallace told us? “Its consistence and flavor are indescribable. A rich butter-like custard highly flavored with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but intermingled with it come wafts of flavor that call to mind cream-cheese, onion sauce, brown sherry, and other incongruities ... rich ... glutinous ... perfect ... a new sensation, worth a voyage
to the East to experience.”
What a fruit! The padre assured me most earnestly that he would get me a durian. I must eat one, and my soul would be made gracious. However, he must have forgotten it. No durian came. Then late one afternoon I returned from an attempt upon the mountain, and was light-hearted after losing myself in a forest above the clouds which refused to let me pass. I had seen crimson lories flying in solitude like pigeons. A great bird-winged butterfly, one of the gold-and-emerald ornithoptera which till that day had never been more than a colored flash in the distance, that afternoon paused overhead, planed down to a flower which was near my face, and pulsed its vivid body so near that I could see the quivering of its antennæ. We may call mind the aim of life, if that flatters us, but the tense life which vibrated that superb creature evidently was obeying a command which we have never heard. No sooner had it gone than a swallow-tail even larger, a very folio butterfly in black, crimson, and primrose, alighted on the same white trumpet, weighted down the pendulous and swinging flower, and danced to its movements. Overhead an eagle was poised, surveying the mountain seaward. He knew I was watching him. His bright eye kept meeting mine severely. The sea was even more remote below us than some of the clouds. I got back to the veranda of the rest-house, tired but pleased, and was going to my door, but stopped.... What was that? I forgot the crimson lories. My memory had gone straight back to an old German dugout with its decaying horrors. I thought I must have been mistaken, but advanced cautiously. Nothing could be there, I told myself, that was like the trenches of the Flers line. Confidence returned; the suggestion had gone. Then the ghost passed me again, invisible, dreadful, and I clutched the table, looking round. At first I could determine nothing, but presently on a wall bracket I saw resting a green and spinous object as large as a football, and tiptoed to smell it.
It was!
The padre appeared, but was not dismayed. Instead, he called a native with a knife to open the durian. The man performed this on the green porcupine most expertly from one end, disclosing soft and creamy contents. I tried to forget the smell, took a portion, and, as they used to say in France, went over the top in daylight. But I knew at once this was my last durian. Facing the foe, I fell. That indelicate odor, and the flavor of a sherry custard into which garlic had been slipped, overshadowed Ternate for some hours afterward. The smell shamelessly wandered about, and the taste of the garlic remained after the sherry was forgotten. Only sleep interposed to stop my bewilderment over what Russel Wallace could have meant by it.
And in the morning there was something else to think about. With the Assistant Resident, a young Dutchman who talked like a boy from an English public school because that indeed was what he was, I was to attempt the crater of the volcano. It was two hours before dawn. Sirius was blazing over Gilolo. We wished to be well up the slope before the sun was there. But our two Malay porters had another opinion about the need for an early start, and Sirius was paling into a sky of rose and madder before we got away. Our men, father and son, were not so interested in that mountain as the other two in the party. The father was the guide, and carried a parang, a bright Malay weapon of such weight and balance that it is good for either agriculture or homicide. Not one of our party knew the mountain above the upper forest, and only the guide and myself had been as far as the forest; for Ternate, even official Ternate, though its interest in its crater is acute, yet is satisfied with a distant prospect from the beach. This oceanic volcano is 5,200 feet high at present, and in the sun which is usual to the island the summit may be said to look out of sight. Why go? One need not.
But if one goes, the beginning is made in elation. The gardens of spices and the cocoanut groves are traversed with ease. The gardens are cool and scented. The ascent is gradual. You feel that such a journey could be continued forever and that any material refreshment would profane it. But suddenly and brusquely the slope is not gradual. It is quite otherwise. For a few minutes, while a fierce light beats upon you—no more nutmeg trees—and the ground is rough which rises within a foot or so of the nose, you suppose that this interlude is only a playful gesture by the mountain. It wishes to test your devotion. In this it succeeds. When you pause, the thumping of the heart is like the pulse of the silence. The perspiration drips from the fingers. You are surprised and a little dashed. Every mirthful thought has deserted and gone home. When the uplands are surveyed to see if they are any nearer, sweat runs into the eyes. And they are not any nearer. The slope is immediate, continuous, tractless, and tropical, and the summit has vanished behind that overhanging forest which has yet to be reached. This playful little gesture of the mountain seems to be its normal attitude, and requires some thought.
So our party discovered, this morning. With what enterprise the Dutchman strode ahead, energetically kicking pebbles backward at me! He was as frolicsome as a goat. He leaped from root to root where they were tangled in the shady path like cables. I followed meekly, wondering how long I should last. I hoped his ebullience would be cooled presently. The sun came up; but we were still deep in the plantations. My companion appeared to have decided that the British should see what a little nation could do; and it had clearly dawned on me that, though my flag may have braved the battle and the breeze for a respectworthy period, I should disgrace it in a race to the crater against Holland.
While I was still valiantly holding out, determined to go on or drop dead on the track, I saw my friend stop, take off his helmet, and gaze into it reflectively. He did not move when I reached him. That was a good chance to show him the attractive character of the sugar canes growing beside us, their plumes surmounting staffs which were of chocolate circled regularly with thin bangles of gold. If one stood in a certain way, I assured him, the chocolate had a purplish bloom. But my friend wiped his face and gazed at me with an expression of abject pathos.
We turned aside, while recovering, to a small cluster of native huts. They were built on a narrow step of the slope, from which we looked out over treetops to the place where the village we had left was a smudge on a long serpentining coast. Under a thatch apart were several shrines to the spirits of the sea and land, and in one of them was a good model of a sailing canoe, beside which was placed a little rice to prosper somebody’s voyage. But only the chickens were about; we saw no spirits of the sea or land, and not even a solid husbandman.
The sun was now above the trees, apparently crystallizing the foliage into rigidity with its straight glare. We continued our upward toil. The sun was on our backs. Above a half acre of scratched earth, in which were hasty pineapples, tobacco, and cassava, the track vanished completely at a point where an earthquake had flattened three huts. That clearing was grown over with labiate herbs and a kind of raspberry. Above it the cliff of the forest regarded the huts and the advancing wayfarers with such impassive aloofness, as though man were a late and unimportant curiosity on the earth, that I myself thought it might be as well to erect a shrine to whatever hamadryads haunt tropical groves. But my Dutchman, though he affably agreed, did not appear to get more than a misty notion of the idea, so we continued the ascent.
Our guide disappeared in a canebrake. We stooped and followed him, and at last were crawling astern of the sound of the Malay’s busy knife. This original progress began in amusement; at least it was a relief from the sun; but I could not help noticing, in about two minutes, that a spiky tunnel, in which the air is like steam, has its disadvantages. Then we had to stop and wait on our hands and knees, for we could not hear our guide. Suddenly his parang broke loose again somewhere on my left, and as suddenly ceased. The guide’s face, after a long silence, pushed aside the stems near us—how native to the wilderness is a Malay’s face when morosely it just peeps out of jungle grass!—and he told us he was lost. It had seemed to me that it might be so, for his knife strokes had had a wild and erratic ring, as though the obstinate vegetation were being punished. We crawled back, therefore, in the reverse order, and the elegant young Dutchman reverted to his native language, as that, probably, was better equipped for expressing the results of the brittle but resistant nature of the herbage on the knees. The guide, though, was a good man. The world is wide, his manner led us to infer, and the day is young—why not get lost? He turned on the mountain again with a quiet energy altogether different from his early display. For the first time I began to suspect that we might reach the summit.
He went to the gigantic grass again, struck it with his knife, and thus sank into it. We stooped in slow pursuit of him; sometimes crawled, were whipped in the face by elastic stems, were stilettoed and bayoneted. I learned, being so near to the earth, why grains and spores turned at once into such a high tumult, for what was under my hands was warm and humid, and I should not have been surprised to feel it stir at my touch. We continued to move carefully on hands and knees, but, excepting that we were going up, I had no sense of our direction; only a tangle of dark ribbons could be seen overhead. Why was I enjoying it, as I withdrew another broken dagger from my trousers, wiped the sweat from my face on my sleeve, and looked at the blood on my hands? I don’t know. Perhaps some of the energy which jetted upward in that mass of hard green fountains was charging me. The smell was strange, and it may have been the original smell of earth; we may have been close to a young and salutary body. I had an idea that if I crawled long enough there I might overtake some lost time. It was while bravely continuing with this fortifying thought that we emerged, and found ourselves in an open space, with the jungle at hand. But before toiling up to attack that louring palisade we thought we ought to pause and recover uprightness, so we disposed our gear about us, reclined on a fallen tree, and contemplated the way we had come. The Malays crouched below us. They are very good at contemplation. They can maintain it, all day if necessary, without a movement. Our log was situated well on the way to the clouds. It might have been a seat on the edge of a darker cloud. The log was hot and dry, being nearer to the sun. I was idle-minded—I felt that I had been excused from what was necessarily occupying the attention of envious men, who were now a long way below me. The way we spent time here was no matter, because it was unlimited and unmeasured. The corrugations of the log were lanes and alleys for an industrious population of ants, and I watched them with the calm abstraction of an immortal who was far too great to understand the reason for so much activity and resolute enterprise that apparently got the tiny laborers nowhere, except into trouble now and then. But they appeared to like it. They did not know they were ants. With what industry and courage they carried particles up and over the ridges of the log, which were mountain ranges to them, determined to get their burdens somewhere, however high their mountains! They took no notice of the contemplating gods above them, and very little of the commotions and earthquakes the gods made on the log with idle fingers. Probably that log was too immense for them to know, so how could they understand that it was only one log of a forest in a small island which, to the knowledge of the immortals, was insignificant among many islands of a vast globe? No doubt most of them got their particles safely home by evening. Success, success!
A little way down the incline, upright on the verge of space, were two areca palms, but far more distinguished and remarkable shapes than ever before I had seen those trees. They framed a far vision of Gilolo and cloudland. It was not easy to say at once which was island and which was vapor. But then, even the minor projecting sprays and fronds about us there seemed strangely posed and of more than the usual significance. The bee which alighted on a labiate flower at my feet was not related to anything I knew. I was invading his world, which seemed to have been warned of intruders and was curiously intent and quiet. Nothing moved there but the bee, and perhaps he had not yet heard news of the invasion. Immediately below the black figures of the areca palms the eastern coast of Ternate and the sea reminded me of the indentations of a chart on which the ocean was symbolized with the usual color. It was not easy to believe that our mountain top was based on anything more substantial than a tinted presentment of earth.
Gathered from the Submarine Gardens of the Tropics
The Dutchman overcame the spell and the silence with a shout, and we rose to face the rest of the upward journey, which was only half done. A little climb brought us to the woods, and there we worked at first along the edge of a ravine the bottom of which was in night. We entered by a wilderness of bamboos, and the crackling of the dry parchments of their spathes under our feet made an uproar which startled me, for it announced us to every dryad on the mountain. And there is no arguing with bamboo piping. If the pipes are stacked in any abundance in your way, then you must find a path round them or go back. The forest grew darker as we worked toward the head of the chasm. It was dank and elfish. The light was suspect. The shapes of the trunks and boughs were gnome-like. The way along the edge of the ravine was difficult with wreckage which looked like fallen trunks, but the shapes collapsed at a touch. They were only a treacherous semblance. 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. When we looked upward the trees might have been falling on us at a noiseless speed. We were always on the point of being overwhelmed. It was an act of faith when a projection was grasped for support, because you imagined the vast overhanging weight would at once begin to revolve with the extra burden. That sense of insecurity made the shock the greater when a bough gave way. But we did not fall far; the next tree below checked us and flung us against another tree, and that one threw us to the ground. Luckily it was much cooler up there. A full view of the sky was infrequent, even when we looked back. When we looked down, during a pause to recover breath, instead of the contorted tentacles of aged roots ridden by fungi and moss reaching toward our faces and the columns leaning out of the shades, there was an upper show, in a light which was as fixed and greenish as a rare fluid that no wind could stir, of giant leaves even more fantastic than the succuba of roots; banners of wild plantain, pendent epiphytes, and the crowns of tree ferns which suggested, in that light, that we were lost in time and not in space, and had worked backward to the Mesozoic epoch.
From the beach of the island, looking toward the summit, above the forest one sees what appears to be grassland. It seems from below as smooth as the English South Downs. We got out of the forest at last into this very upper region, and found the grass. I had been looking forward to the experience of tramping over bare downs at such an elevation above a tropical sea. But that smooth grass was elephant stuff ten feet high, and for another half hour we could not see more than a yard about us. Then our way began to descend, so that when we crawled from the tunnel we had cut we were in a great bare depression of the mountain, which from below would not have seemed to be more than a dimple. To the bottom of this we had to make our way, with but one brief peep ahead of the terminal cone to encourage us. The cone was certainly much nearer, but surprisingly more distant than I had expected to find it from that vantage; and our outlook was more restricted than we should have found it in most of the byways of the village below. The ground of that basin, and up the farther slope of it, was broken and thinly grown over with coarse grass. But I must confess that I ceased to pay much attention to the details of our circumstances, for I had the feeling which, I suppose, used to trouble those who could hear, as they approached him, the grumblings in the very belly of Moloch. We were very much by ourselves, and the god, although as yet his face was hidden from us, was immense and powerful. Now we knew it. We smelled him now and then. His breath was of the Pit. I began to have premonitions of what was the security of the tenure of those spice gardens down below. We toiled up to the top of the ridge which veiled the face of the god.
At last, there he was. He was black and naked, and smoke was drifting from his head. And he was still some distance away, apart, elevated, and awful in the serene blue. It was clear that Milton had wrongly reported his expulsion from heaven. He still dwelt there. In fact, he had it to himself. He was solitary in the sky, monstrous and fuliginous under his lovely canopy, with a desolate court about him, and a footstool of blackened ruin from which the angels had fled.
Before we could mount to his throne we had to make another long descent, as it were an act of obeisance; and as the Dutchman, who had become very humble, advanced deferentially over the cinders and clinker, I could see plainly that, though we might hope to be ignored, divine compassion in this spot was as absent as the supernal choir. Our only luck would be to find the god asleep.
This, too, was the worst stage of the journey. We were compelled to forget our outward prospects. We had to keep our eyes searching for likely foothold in the tumult of the knives and ax-blades of the slag. A slip in that chaos of spiked and edged metal would have been ugly. A few minutes of the exercise made us pause. There was not a sound. The buzzing of an invisible fly was remarkable. During the pause I noticed in surprise that our exertions had taken us but a little distance; the journey to the bottom of the descent and up the final slope had been prodigiously lengthened since we had discovered what a walk there was like. The two Malays, I observed, were seated on the top of the ridge we had left, and were again in contemplation. They were not fools. They had no desire to look into the gape of a volcano. Their curiosity was already satisfied. Around us on the litter of broken metal were scattered numberless great bowlders that had acquired a horrid iridescence and some flowers of sulphur on cooling; they were the bombs which the god throws about when he is playful. But at the moment all sound had ceased except the murmur of that unseen fly, who kept with me for company; and the only movement was the quivering of the air over the heated stones, for the sun was magnificent.
By the time we reached the edge of the crater every ten yards had grown to a mile, and we were in the tired mood to be insulting, even if challenged by Cerberus. There was no sign, however, that our approach had been noticed. We were free to gaze into the open mouth of the god. He was fast asleep, and breathing so gently that his gusts of vapor were slight and unalarming. Our own foothold was more disconcerting than the crater. It was not easy to find a standing place that was clear of communication with the nether fires. Vents and fissures everywhere were exhaling hot mephitic gases, and when I thought I had found a corner, by a huge bomb, which gave me a space exempt where I might be at ease, a fumarole presently became active under my feet and sent up strong sulphurous blasts. The rocks about me were bright with the lichens of Avernus, lurid incrustations of chemicals which showed more than anything else the kind of garden we were in.
The crater itself was halved by a wall, and the half within our view—we did not visit the other half—was a precipitous hollow the bottom of which seemed choked with rocks; but as to that I offer no definite opinion, for I did not climb down far enough to satisfy a scientific conscience, but only a conscience which is amenable to desire. Those stained cliffs were not usual. The crags were calcined red and black, and they were blotched with sulphur and verdigris. There were occasional bursts of steam. That gape was loaded and charged. The desire to play adventurously inside such a muzzle vanished at the sight of it. When the natives of Ternate prudently assemble their canoes at signs more violent than usual, and even abandon their nutmeg groves, they are not showing timidity, for on the summit I got the impression that in the belly of the island there was a power latent which could lift it bodily from the sea.
But where was the sea? As soon as we turned from the crater and looked outward we forgot the nether fires. There was no sea, however. There was no sky. There was only a gulf of light which was blue to infinity. We were central in space. We looked southward for the cluster of the Moluccas, but in that blue vacancy the islands and the clouds were all immaterial; the isles of Motir, Makian, and distant Batchian were mere conjectures, though in that clear and tranquil light I imagined I could see as far as Paradise and the solution of sorrow. But what is an island when the clouds float below it? There we saw Motir, the nearest of those suppositions of land, a frail and pallid wraith which did not move from its place in the blue, but was constant in the midst of the traveling islands of cloud. Some of them, in appearance, passed under it. Gilolo had sunk profoundly. It was only a lower abstraction of bays and promontories. Beyond it the glimmering sapphire was the Pacific. Our near neighbor, Tidore, and the lower slopes of our own island, were occasionally revealed; we had immediately below us at times a far but vivid memory of the green world we left one fine morning. 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.
It was with reluctance that we began our return. We had a surmise that we should like to continue forever in that upper light where what was mundane was reduced to faint symbols and abstractions, but doubted the value of our intuition. We had but little faith that we could maintain ourselves in that rare light, in that serene expanse; and perhaps we were right. We are not ready for it yet. We plunged downward rapidly, once we were over the slag heaps, and were soon in the gloom of the forest. The forest seemed more secure, its darkness more homely, its troll-like shapes more in accord with the heart of man, than a luminous vision of eternity.
I do not know how long it took us to descend. We fell automatically. Fatigue flung us, at times, long distances which did not seem to bring us any nearer to home. The never-ending jolts in weariness destroyed thought, and reduced the mind to a heavy enduring lump. My personal lump acquired a measure of intelligence again when at last some inconstant sparks in the air took my attention, and I found they were fireflies in a Chinese graveyard. We were nearing sea-level. Then music approached, and lanterns, and a wedding party passed by, with tom-toms, pipes, and dance. My friend, the Dutch missionary, stood near. “I’ve been praying for you,” he remarked, grimly. He was thinking of the nether fires. But he did not know that perhaps it was his very prayer which had saved me from the danger of a transcendental mirage of sublimity.