Jessica sewing on Girl Scout badges
Safe in port
Captain Reynolds, Jessica, and Mrs. Reynolds
The highlight of our stay in Indonesia, and one for which we laid over a few extra days, was the eleventh anniversary of the founding of the republic, on August 17. The entire city was decorated for the occasion with archways of greenery across the streets and parades and festivities in every district. We had received invitations from President Sukarno himself, beautifully embossed with the Indonesian emblem in gold, to attend a program of dances at the palace that evening. It was a splendid affair, staged on the floodlit grounds, beneath the high branches of enormous trees. The variety and fascination of the dances, representing many of the islands of the spread-out archipelago, kept us enthralled until well after midnight.
On August 20 we set out once more, bound for the Keeling Cocos Islands, 740 miles out in the Indian Ocean. It was not by chance that we were crossing this ocean in August and September, but because, as I always tried to do, we had chosen the season when, according to the pilot books, cyclones are “unknown.” As far as we were concerned, they could remain that way. We had had our bellyful of typhoons in Japan and we knew that by any other name—whether cyclones in the Indian, hurricanes in the Atlantic, or typhoons in the Pacific—these tropical revolving storms are nasty customers and nothing to fool around with.
Our first two or three days out of Jakarta were quiet, with little wind and frequent rains. The second evening, after passing through the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, we could see the volcanic cone of Krakatoa with a trailing cloud, like a plume of smoke, rising from its tip. As we ate our supper on deck, Ted read aloud the encyclopedia account of that tremendous eruption, source of such widespread devastation, and Jessica eyed the now somnolent peak uneasily.
“Shouldn’t we turn on the engine and go a little faster till we get past?” she suggested, in a whisper.
“Better not,” Ted whispered back. “The engine might wake it up!”
Jessica, who showed a regrettable tendency to “put down roots” whenever she had been given shore leave, was finding it particularly hard to leave the land—and Susan Harris—behind, but she was not the only one who felt a continuing malaise.