There was an instant in this transition from one world to another when I was alarmed by the notion—it was on the second day out and I had just waked up—that I was the sport of a bedevilment and was being mocked. My dream of the clanging of furnace doors and of a roaring in dark tunnels changed to a Chinese boy in a bright light, who stood silently beside me with tea and a pleasing but crafty smile. Where the deuce was this? The roaring continued; the deck was being holystoned above. Beyond my cabin port-light the world was one I had never seen before.
For the first time since that fateful year when Europe developed a mania for frantic speed, aërial torpedoes, delirious bankruptcy, and stentorian broadcasting, I could feel a distinct lessening of humanity’s vibrations. My own pulse showed signs of becoming normal. We were threading the Rhio and Linga islands, and the Dutch captain put his head in the cabin to inform me that we were crossing the line. I knew it, by instinct. But which line did he mean? Anyone could guess that we were in another place. Certainly we had already crossed some line or other. You could read that in both the sea and the sky. They were greatly changed. It was surprising they tolerated our steamer at all; but perhaps we had blundered unobserved across this line. The light of that morning might have been shining undimmed since things began. There was something terrifying in its exalted and innocent splendor. Even the islands were but tinted vapors, and whether they were in the sea or in the air it was not easy to say. The isle of Banka, great as were its mountains, certainly was not in the sea. The sea was material. It was a floor of turquoise toward Banka. But that island had light beneath it. It was translated above the plain of turquoise, and I imagined that under the bulk of its hills and under the thin peninsula of miniature black trees which was prolonged from the foot of a mountain over the sea, unsupported, fragile, and miraculous, I could peer far into profound nothing. But Banka must have been land, a great island, for over it was a dense and involved region of genuine cloud, bright enough to be no more than the congealed and undiffused sunlight of ages.
This Sea Was Plainly the Setting for Legend and Fable
Now I know quite well, for I have seen ships before and understand their purpose, that amid all that unearthly light and color my Dutch captain was going to look for copra, gums, rattans, nutmegs, mace, cloves, and cinnamon. He looked like the man to find them, too. He was small, but hard, heavy, and quick. His eyes were pale blue, but I guessed his temper was quite another dye, and not in the least pale. He was not the sort of man to whom one might romantically suggest that those islands had nothing in them but beauty, and nothing under them but immaterial hues—not, anyhow, while there was so much evidence of wicked reefs almost alongside the empty ship which he hoped to load with copra and such, at the current rates, before he turned about.
Yet at times during a long voyage with him I was inclined to suspect that even he did not know where he was. By what could he judge? For myself, I lost count of the days in a tranquil immensity of light. We would swelter at an anchorage, taking in from an islet Heaven only knows what except mosquitoes which could bite through indiarubber. My cabin having become filled with flies like devils, and moths like jewels, the Savoe would leave again suddenly and for no apparent reason. But what did that matter? She was sure to find another island on any course. They were like the stars in the sky; and three huts in an otherwise abandoned raft of cocoanuts were sufficient to induce our captain to stand in and lower a boat.
Where were we then? I got out of the habit of asking that. If I were given my bearings at all it was by chance, as on the night when our chief officer, after what sounded to me like a distressing altercation with our captain (at dinner, too!), but may have been nothing but the most friendly Dutch, turned to me and began a recital. I stopped the soup and listened carefully. He was reciting in English, which made the original poem the more remarkable, Kipling’s ballad of the Mary Gloucester. The recital ended. “An’ now, Mister Tomlinsohn, you will wonder why I do this.” The Dutch seaman gazed at me earnestly, though not with greater earnestness than I gazed at him, for he had remembered every word of the poem, and more. “It is yoost because we are by the Paternosters, where he drop his wife.” Could hospitality go further? Is there an English or an American literary critic, not to mention a mere sailor, who could do that? In the wide world, not one.
By such chance aids I would learn where in the world I was. There was no other way. All without warning one day our steamer, our placid and practical Dutch steamer, steered toward what I could see plainly enough was the sack and ruin of Mount Zion. We were approaching a celestial war. Battlements were tumbled and in flames, smoke rolled from those streets of jasper, and the banners of its defeated hosts were sinking to final confusion and the last night. A native ship was flying from there. Its urgent sails were spread like wings too big for its body; perhaps it was bearing away survivors. Nothing else was in sight.
We never reached that city. The Savoe was next at anchor in a little bay. She was encircled by the gloom of a forest which was older than Memphis. I asked no questions, but went ashore and entered that forest, wherever it was and whatever its name. Nothing was there. The trees were real, I suppose, though they gave no more sign of life than prehistoric monoliths. A slight noiseless rain and myself had the forest to ourselves. No doubt rain there was always adding to the gloom; the rain might have been only the gentle precipitation of the silence. While peering into the shadows which deepened into a hollow, some lower branches crashed and an orang-utan swung out to look at me. (Ah yes; though I hardly believed it myself, even at the time, so you need not trouble to believe it at all.) We stared at each other for about five seconds, and then he lurched off in an explosion of breaking boughs. That settled it. I was in Borneo.