Old and New on the Suez Canal
To leave the sea and to land at Singapore is as serious a matter as taking a man out of a long seclusion and releasing him from a closed vehicle in Piccadilly Circus. Molten light poured over the swift kaleidoscopic movements of a street where the first thing I saw was a large cart drawn by a small white bull with an excusable hump; his eyes were full of flies. The sun had struck down the long ears of the animal. But no sooner did I note the flies than the bull vanished, or became a Chinaman running silently in front of an austere European lady who was perched high on a pair of noiseless wheels. Then a Chinaman began to run silently in front of me, while I sat behind him much too high on a pair of noiseless wheels, watching the dark patch of sweat expand on the back of his shirt; anyhow, I must suppose it was I who sat there. We nearly knocked over a yellow lady in black-satin trousers and a blue jacket who was smoking a cigarette. Next, so far as I remember, there were a great many masters of ships and perhaps as many cocktails. We came to a spacious black-and-white palace with a myriad propellers revolving on its ceiling—no wonder I was dizzy—and a string quartette regulated our hunger with dance music while a regiment of immaculate Celestial acolytes accurately guessed our wants. I remember, that night, a confusion of narrow alleys, where hanging lanterns disclosed endless and aimless torrents of brown bodies. There were the rank smells of abundant life in heat and ferment, and cries and voices without meaning. Above grotesque cornices were the shapes of monstrous leaves blacking out areas of stars. All this, when I found a bedroom, I tried to resolve into an orderly pattern; but there can be no ordering of the upburst and overflow of life at its source. I gave it up, and watched instead some lizards running after one another upside down on the white ceiling, while they made a noise like intermittent loud hissing.
CHAPTER X
He had skimmed about Singapore in a jinrickshaw all the morning. He wanted to find Mr. Kow Watt Loon. That Chinaman was as elusive as the glamour of the East. And he was not used to ’rickshaws. He was sure he looked a lazy fool when being dragged about in the heat on a high perch and a pair of silent wheels by a sweating fellow creature. It had been nearly a week before he could summon the courage to travel in a little cart drawn by another man. It made him feel like the hated subject of a revolutionary cartoonist’s satire.
He could not find Mr. Kow Watt Loon, who kept a pawnshop somewhere in Singapore, so he had been told, where Kelanton sarongs of silk were to be found occasionally, rare krises, and silverware from the Linga Islands. Not that Mr. Loon would be sure to sell those things if his shop were found and if he had them, for he was reported to be suspicious and morose; an embarrassing shopkeeper who would forget all his English and decline to sell to you if he misliked your appearance. But Mr. Loon could not be found; and a city near the equator is much more extensive, relatively, than a city with a wholesome climate. Singapore’s streets in their heavy and slumbering heat seemed to his despairing eye prolonged to an impossible distance. Oh, Heaven! Where was this Mr. Loon?
This coolie was the third experiment that morning with a ’rickshaw. Young Bennett from London, in his quest of the romance of the East, watched below him the old man’s back muscles playing under the glistening drab skin. He ought to tell the old fellow to walk—to stop. It was too hot for this game. Besides, the coolie didn’t know where to go, though he pretended he did; no doubt he was merely running about. They always did that. The first, picked up near Raffles Place, was a bronze giant, a wonderful youngster, whose hat was a round straw thatch with a pinnacle. As soon as he was spoken to he made cheerful noises of understanding, lifted his shafts in confident play, took a strange side turning promptly (how lucky—this fellow knew!), loped off swiftly, and they were completely lost in ten minutes, though Bennett did not know that at the time. His coolie loped along swiftly but leisurely. That running figure and its style would have inspired the poets of old Athens, but in the romantic East it was only a blob of life. The sun and the easy gait infected the passenger with a haughty languor. The coolie’s pale-blue cotton shorts and shirt became dark and limp with sweat; but the fellow ran on, deliberately, unerringly, taking unlikely byways into queer seclusions where brown life poured in noisy streams. Evidently this fellow knew where to go.... But did he? Or did he just run on? Where the devil were they? Brente! Stop! As cheerful as ever, sweating but fresh, that coolie did not appear to know where he was, and evidently his glad smile would be unchanged even in death. He was an imbecile.
The second coolie, who had stopped to be entertained by the language thrown at the first, was a lean and elderly man, and big veins corded his arms in a mesh. His torso was bare. He ran his ’rickshaw elsewhere, occasionally looking back over his shoulder doubtfully at his fare. He was shy of any street in which he saw the khaki uniform of a Malay or a Sikh. That journey came to nothing in a strange market place in the middle of a horrible smell. The coolie walked to a curb; there he gently rested his shafts, turned and shook his head dolefully, and held out his hand for largess.