Chapter IV
Iligan
Our first glimpse of Iligan was not assuring, as only the Headquarters Building could be seen from the harbour, and in front of it, reaching to the left for some distance, stood a long, single row of cocoanut-palms, so tall that the green foliage was far above the top of the house, making the trees look like stiff bouquets in absurdly long wooden holders. At the foot of these trees water, blue as indigo on wash day, lashed itself into a white fury against the stonework of the pier.
Before daybreak on the following morning the Signal Corps had its breakfast, and aside from the not always obvious compensation which undeviating good conduct is said to bring, we had a very evident reward for our early rising in seeing Jupiter and Venus in a brilliant stellar flirtation, the Southern Cross as chaperone giving sanction to the affair.
Before the night had really paled into a gray dawn, three life-boats from the ship, each loaded with some six hundred feet of cable, were fastened in tandem and drawn to the shore by a stout rope, which had already been run to the beach, and the two shore ends, one for Misamis and one for Cagayan, Mindanao, were laid with but little trouble. As Iligan’s insurrectionary population was too aristocratic to demean itself by manual labour for any monetary consideration, the soldiers of the infantry company stationed at Iligan were detailed to dig the trench. But, being Americans, they worked with a right good will, completing the trench late that afternoon. The office was also established by this time, after which the two shore ends were laid and buoyed, thus accomplishing a tremendous day’s work.
In the early afternoon we women went ashore sight-seeing, and found Iligan chiefly interesting for what it was not. On paper—Spanish paper, that is—the town is represented as a city of some magnitude, boasting handsome barracks for the soldiers, two beautiful churches, many well-built houses and shops, a railway running from the outskirts of the town to Lake Lanao, a handsome station for Iligan’s terminal of the line, and many other modern improvements, including fine waterworks.
In reality, Iligan is a little nipa-shack settlement, some of the nipa buildings being very pretty, to be sure, but hardly pretentious enough for city dwellings. As for the railway to Lake Lanao, all that is left of it are two old engines and some dilapidated cars in a discouraged, broken down shed on the outskirts of the village, the shed doubtless representing the handsome station aforementioned. Even the rails of the road have been carried away by the Moros to be made into bolos and krises.
As for the barracks, the natives say that the Spaniards burnt them down on evacuating in favour of their American foe, while the churches probably never existed save in imagination, though one place of worship was in process of construction at the time of our visit, the skeleton of its framework being covered by a well finished roof, which, by the way, is a peculiarity of carpentering in these islands. The woodwork of the structure had a weather-beaten air, which told only too plainly how long a time had elapsed since its foundation-stone was laid, and on all sides the houses were deserted and dropping into decay. Board fences rotted under a pitiless sun, and gardens, overgrown with weeds and rank vegetation, encroached on the highway, which seemed to hold the glare of noon in its stifling dust. Degraded, wretched looking pigs wallowed about under one’s very feet, and thin babies scowled at us fiercely from behind the skirts of their unsmiling mothers.
With the exception of two or three very good little shops, run of course by the ubiquitous Chinaman, at which one could purchase Moro turbans, sarongs—the long skirt-like garments in which Moro men and women wrap themselves—petates, or sleeping mats of split bamboo, and other like curios, Iligan is a most unattractive and desolate place, by God forsaken and by man forgot.
Picturesque it could not help being. All Philippine coast towns accomplish that, built as they are of caña and nipa in the midst of luxuriant foliage, and surrounded by palms and bamboos, beyond which spread verdant plains or lofty forest hills on one side, and on the other stretches of sunlit sea and an unobstructed view of the blue and cloudless sky. Lovely beyond description, to be sure, but a loveliness of which one would tire all too quickly, its very beauty becoming monotonous, like the pretty face of an insipid woman; its sunshine and balmy airs but an aggravation to the soul, combining to make one long for rugged outlines, rough east winds, and climatic hardships and privations, anything rather than the enervation of that unending tropic softness.