CHAPTER VIII
The voyage down the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean was hot and long enough for me to forget where I was going and why I was there. I let the idea of The Islands blow to leeward. I had no use for it. I saw I might as well expect to reach the Hesperides. As a legend, The Islands were more thin and indistinct, more remote, less verifiable, than when my steamer, against the cruel hostility of an English spring, backed into the Mersey and stood out to sea. The legend each day retired farther, like good fortune when pursued. That delicate line of the horizon was inviolable. It could not be passed. For Magellan and Drake it was all very well to pursue such ideas. Their ships were different. Mine was a high confusion of white boats, black ventilators with blue throats, indeterminate shapes, ladders coming out of nothing and leading nowhere, a cerulean factory stack, and yellow derrick standards holding out stiff arms above a black central structure which appeared to have no beginning and no end. My ship was too big and complicated for me to be reassured by the scientific design which held it together.
And there was the master of our ship. He had grown gray in the East. He knew China and Japan, Java, Sumatra, and Macassar. But he shook his head over Tidore and Timore Laut, as though I were talking to him of a Perfect System or of lost Atlantis. He admitted he had heard of such places. But naturally! We all have heard, as Raleigh once heard, of the City of Gold. Yet where is it? Should we waste the time of a practical seaman on his own navigating bridge with idle talk of it? Raleigh, as we know, found his city. And what was it? Monkeys and trees. My questions to the captain about The Islands, I can see now, were like an eager display of little green apples to a seaman of long experience. My last question he did not even answer. He could not answer it. A cloud, which had quickly made midnight of the morning ahead of us, burst over the ship. She vanished in hissing smoke. My voice was drowned in the roar of waterspouts and the blaring of the siren. Presently she began to take shape again, and through the thinning downpour we could see the figure of the lookout at her head. She fell also most curiously silent as the black squall passed astern with a white foot to its curtain. The captain began to answer me when my last question was twenty minutes old. He took off his oilskins. “You talk,” he said, “as if you were on the Underground Railway. Those Islands”—he waved his arm eastward where there was still only a haze—“you couldn’t see them in a lifetime. Not in two lives. Some are great countries, and some are three cocoanuts, and the ocean is full of them. They are like stars in the sky. There’s thousands of them. Now just look at that!”
The now translucent murk of the storm over our starboard bow remained opaque in one place. Part of the weather there had a pyramidal form and was darker. The weather lifted, but this obscurity remained on the sea. The sun colored and shaped it as we drew near and what had appeared to be a denser mass of the storm was revealed as a forest falling straight out of a cloud to the surf. The summit of the forest was in the sky, and the combers of the Indian Ocean swung into caverns overshadowed by trees at its base. “That is the first of them,” said the captain. “There’s Pulo Way.”
I at once abandoned all my stock of notions about the Malay Archipelago. It was useless. I had only that morning found on the chart, for the first time, the island of Way. It was an idle speck lost beside the magnitude of Sumatra. One might have expected to pass Way without seeing it, or perhaps suppose it was a barrel adrift. Yet for twenty minutes we were steaming beside this oceanic dot whose summit was in heaven. Deep ravines and valleys unfolded in it. The wall of its jungle stood along its water line, or just at the back of an occasional strip of golden beach. I could see but one house, and that was near the eastern end of it, among some cocoanuts. Perhaps it was the illusion of a house. But there was no sign of humanity. Perhaps Way, too, was a mirage. It had suddenly appeared on the empty ocean, born out of a storm. Now it was passing astern, silent and unreal, apparently no more approachable, this first of the Malay Islands, than any other of those bright dreams which we cherish when young, but which pass, and are lost. To starboard all day among the changing continents of cloud one towering shape of dark vapor persisted. Our skipper said that that was a mountain top in Sumatra; but you know what sailors are. Once a nipa palm drifted close to us. It looked much more substantial than Pulo Way, or than any distant Sumatran summit.
At dinner that night the open rounds of our saloon ports were disks of fathomless violet. When I looked up from the yellow glow of the table lamp to those dim circles I thought we were being steadily watched by the enigmatic eyes of a mystery, lovely but awful, and so lost much of the talk. The captain and the chief engineer were in solemn dispute. It is in such adventitious trifles, casual and valueless, that one gets the best things in travel. Now and then the violet changed to a vivid and quivering green light. But there was no thunder. The mystery did not speak.
We came to the coffee. Our captain, taking up his white cap from his bench, a sign that he has had enough of us, leaned back and severely reprimanded the chief. The chief, who is a young man, happens to be an insoluble agnostic. He is quietly and obstinately confident in his denial of everything but experience. Our elderly captain has voyaged long enough to learn, I suppose, that though what men call hard facts must be treated with respect and caution, yet one can never be quite sure. “Look at my charts, my Admiralty charts, covered all over with experience. Do I trust them? No, sir. I reckon they haven’t got everything down on the charts.” You should know that we were discussing whether, when a man dies, he then chiefly lives, or whether, as the engineer put it, “he goes to the bottom, through the ash chute.”
Our captain said he didn’t know. But he was just as sure that no thumb-polluted, condemned, dog-eared, fuliginous pocket book of formulas used by engineers had got it down in plain figures; or some words of a similar import. “I don’t know. You don’t. Nobody knows.”
The engineer looked at the misty electric fan and made bread pills. His face suggested he had heard all this from his youth up; that he knew baffled controversialists invariably escaped from the last corner in such cloudy and sentimental muslin, like an angry woman who is in the wrong, but is pretty. Our chief would no more accept a Christian statement than he would believe the proffered pearl of a Levantine peddler was of great price. But he is a polite young man. He rarely does more than smile faintly at the case you put, as he would at the pearl. He refers you instead to Darwin, or Huxley, or Andrew Lang, or the Golden Bough. He has read widely within his favorite province. He goes over every statement separately, with a fine gauge, to see whether it will fit accurately into his system. If it does not, then away it goes. The captain had risen slowly over us, lean, tall, and sardonic, and with no sign that he was suppressing himself except that I discovered I was now more interested in his hard gray eyes than in the violet eyes of the tropic night. The chief at this moment referred the captain to one of those Victorian iconoclasts whose books load cupboards and chests in his own cabin. The captain instantly recommended him to a more Rabelaisian diet. In this contest of characters it was curious to note the difference between the well-read logician and the man of a literary temperament. The captain has not read the Golden Bough, and, I suppose, never will. But his candid simplicity, nevertheless, had foreknowledge of much that the engineer had to tell him, and was unsatisfied. He still insisted on the need and even the common sense of—as he called it—“a margin to play with.” “After all, what do you clever fellows know? God himself is hidden in what you don’t know. There’s plenty of room. Nobody can tell how much there is beyond the half dozen pebbles you’ve picked up on the beach.”
“Nobody,” said the chief—“nobody has ever come back to tell us, anyhow. They go, and they don’t come back to us.”