Fortunately for us, our first rocket had been seen from the ship, else the launch might have been too late to rescue us, and what we had taken for a gleam from the search-light was in fact a Coston signal, our distance from the Burnside not enabling us to distinguish its red and blue lights, the white alone carrying that far.
A good dinner, finished long after midnight, so rested us that, being young and foolish, we went ashore with our host of the afternoon, merely for a farewell glimpse of Bongao, retiring at ever so little o’clock in the morning, and not very long before the engines began to puff and pant, preparatory to our trip northward.
Then followed a month of cable repairing, which took us again to Zamboanga, Iligan, and Cagayan. A little stretch was also laid connecting Oslob, Cebu, with the Dumaguete land line, and later a cable laid nearly two years before on the southeast coast of Luzon was thoroughly overhauled and put into shape. This cable connected Pasacao and Guinayangan, or Pass-a-cow and Grin-again-then, as we always dubbed the towns.
It was on our way to Pasacao from Iligan that we had our last glimpse of old Mount Malindang, or, as the sailors called it, Mount Never Pass, because it was so seldom off our horizon. All day the sea had been oily smooth, and fish jumped out of the water continually, the sea-gulls swooping down upon them and carrying them off in their talons. The sailors had been holy-stoning the decks and painting every bit of available woodwork white, preparatory to our entrance into Manila Bay, and the cable machinery for the nonce was still, the native employees lounging about the lower decks, playing monte or strumming their guitars in idle joy.
At sunset we all went aft to see Malindang for the last time. To the southeast it stood stolidly against the flushed sky, a white cloud about it, reminding one of some old Indian chief wrapped in his blanket, passively watching the departure of the pale-faces who had invaded his mighty solitude. To the north were Negros, Cebu, and Siquijor; to the south Mindanao; and even far-distant Camaguin to the east, with a faint wisp of smoke from its volcano. Then night came upon us suddenly and blotted out Mount Never Pass—perhaps forever.
After our experiences in the far south, we found Oslob, Pasacao, and Guinayangan strangely uninteresting, although at the beginning of our cable trip I have no doubt we should have enjoyed them hugely. There were the same curious natives who dogged our every footstep; the same nipa shacks surrounded by palms and bamboos in the same dazzling sunshine, of which no words or symbols or formulas could give one an idea. There were the inevitable churches with decorations of faded artificial flowers and much tarnished tinsel, the same wooden images with large eyes and simpering little mouths, the same glaring chromos of the Virgin and her angels.
In Oslob the church was further decorated by brown velvet portières being painted at each side of the long windows, an obvious advantage in the event of house-cleaning, while the wooden pillars were also stained to resemble marble. At the time of our visit women knelt on the bare floor at their prayers, all wearing stiffly starched white linen veils, which did not entirely conceal their fleshly interest in ourselves, the while they told their rosaries with busy fingers.
Guinayangan had a wooden belfry to one side of its church, the bells therein being made of metal arms captured from the Moros many years before. We also noticed, on entering the church, a palanquin shaped affair at one side of the door. This, we were told, was used by the priest in processions, when altar boys dressed in scarlet and white robes carry him thus enthroned, two other boys walking ahead of the procession and two behind, all bearing candles in candelabra taller than themselves, and all dressed in scarlet and white like the bearers of the palanquin. It was used as well for a confessional, and to carry the priest to and from visits of extreme unction.
Guinayangan also boasts a shipyard, which is nothing more than a rough shed, the implements being most primitive in construction. Without even ways, not to mention the absence of means, it is said that large sailing ships are made there, two of them being in the harbour at the time of our visit.
For several days we hovered in the vicinity of Guinayangan and Pasacao, cutting and splicing, splicing and cutting, while we idle ones of the quarter-deck unanimously decided that this lower corner of Luzon Island comprised the prettiest landscapes we had seen on the trip, consisting for the main part of wonderful mountains covered with a luxurious tropical growth of trees and shrubbery, these perpendicular forests springing out of the water with scarcely any intervention of beach between their green sides and the sparkling sea beneath them.