CHAPTER XVIII
When the morning is very young and the light has but little heat in it, Macassar’s native dock, with its quays of coral rock, and a gathering of schooners and canoes, is almost merrily absurd with a fabulous beauty and a suggestion of wild and secret adventure. The little schooners are gypsies for color, their names are stars and flowers—Bintang this and Buroh that—their brailed sails are sheets of light, and their reflections on the languid water, which is an uncertain blue mirror, are slowly dissolving flakes of lightning and rainbow. The Malays sit on their decks, cooking breakfast. There is a smell of dry fish, copra, and wood smoke. They look so frail, those little antique models, with their tripod masts, their sweeps, and low bows and upstanding galleried sterns. But it happens that once I saw one driving in the dangerous currents, a breeze chasing her from the Indian Ocean, in the channel between the islands of Sumbawa and Lombok, and the impulse was to cheer.
When it is better to find some shade you can turn into Macassar’s main street, its bazaar, and then discover, looking into the bags, boxes, casks, and baskets, for how few of the commodities in this part of the world you have even a name. Some stuff it is possible to guess at, though who eats desiccated frogs and dried cuttlefish? But most of it is mummified and enigmatic. The irregular buildings have roofs of red tiles which cast a good shade from widely projecting eaves. They are of timber and stone, lime-washed in blues and yellows, and if you chance to look up out of the stream of dark humanity you see dim figures in upper balconies who are watching the street below, as grave and still as decorative images.
A stranger might hesitate about entering the great market on the outskirts of the town. The crowd there is so active, so alien, so intent on its private affairs, that some courage seems necessary for pushing into it. But the Malays are the politest people on earth. You will be hardly conscious that you are seen. There will be no importunity to buy; and if you understand bazaar Malay, any stallkeeper will cheerfully lose customers to explain to you what his wares are and what has to be done with them; what, for example, the name of that curious fish is, where and how it can be caught, and what to do when preparing it for the pot so that it may nourish and not cause death with convulsions. After a time, too, you will not be startled by what on the floor looks like the evidence of a recent bloody affray. Here, as elsewhere in Indonesia, the people chew areca nut, and those sanguinary blotches are only the spittle of a multitude. Presently you will get almost used to it. In any case, the Malays, men and women, will go on smearing sireh leaves with a little lime, put in some areca nut, and some rose petals or other aromatic herb, leisurely chew their packets, and change the sensitive mouths of their youth into the semblance of an accident.
No port in the Indies has much to show that is more interesting than its fish market. That is but fair. Not many visitors may find entrance to its best clubs, or may know the joy, even at long last, of meeting its superior people. But we all may go to the fish market. The choice fruits of the tropics, and its solid vegetables, may suggest that home is, after all, only about the third or fourth turning round the corner. But the fish! What crude and vulgar creatures cod and halibut would look in the company gathered from the submarine gardens of the tropics! Nothing is vulgar there, nothing crude; though there are many creatures which look terrifying, or instantaneous, or unnamably wicked, or are shaped and enameled in a way which suggests that they escaped at midnight from the designs in the Chinese temple or an Oriental jeweler’s workshop.
To learn what hardly credible living things may come from the reefs and atolls, it is better to go to the fish market in the early morning. That the fishermen dare to handle such objects is surprising. Often enough one would as soon experiment with the unknown mechanism of a bomb. Even the fishermen regard a number of these creatures as of the devil, for some of the spines, gill covers, and skins are as venomous as an adder’s fangs; and the sea serpents, those brightly colored ribbons common enough among the waves, and all as deadly as cobras, cause a surprising number of deaths to those whose business is with fish net and traps. One morning in Macassar’s fish market there was a man who seemed to have supposed that the fish he had caught was too awful or too bulky to allow him to bring in more than the head, as a trophy. He showed me that head. It was as big and heavy as a mastiff’s. It had the same expression of sullen interest and ready hostility, but with larger teeth. It was olive green in color, with yellow spots. Its name its captor did not know. He had not seen one before. He knew only that it was ikan—fish. After all, it was just as well to inform a stranger that what he saw was ikan kapala—the head of a fish. It was not a case for mere guesswork.
There were cuttlefish that day looking like opalescent lamps in which the light was hardly yet extinct; and the crabs might have been an astrologer’s imaginative effort at Cancer. The perch, of course, were a host, and more varied than tulips because they differed so in size and color. One of them is famous in these waters, a superb fellow in scarlet, ikan merah. The common fish were mackerel, the bonito the most noticeable, for it is often of the size and rotundity of a small pig. There were young sharks, and several species of rays and skates, a few of them too big for one man to lift. The coryphene was there, the dolphin of sailors, which expires prismatically; though that fellow must be witnessed when just caught, for a mere description of his display when dying would never be believed. In the market place the coryphene is remarkable only for its suggestion of immense speed, and the vicious upturned lower jaw and teeth designed to take the flying fish as they drop back into the sea after a flight which was not swift enough to carry them from pursuing calamity. Many of the creatures were unknown to me, and I fancy some might have surprised an ichthyologist.
Yet each morning the display in Macassar’s fish market is differently ordered. The program is never repeated. I could never think of it as a market place, or that I was looking at mere provender. It was manifest the sea was still experimenting with life and was in no hurry. It was dissatisfied with its work each day as soon as the designs were finished, and so threw them out to us as waste. Then it began on other effects. That place in Macassar, therefore, was hardly a market. It was less that than the studio of an artist resembles Billingsgate. Macassar was merely getting daily what the rich and vast workshop outside considered was not quite what it meant to do. And that workshop has, of course, plenty of time and light in which to satisfy itself. The sun and the warm seas have all eternity in which to play with life, to shape and color it to the likeness of whatever perfection was once hinted. The Italian jeweler of the Renaissance never approached the easy opulence, the merry variety of ideas, and the wild ornamentation, which can be seen any bright morning on the slabs of that fish market of Celebes. There I saw the ocean’s last hilarious but puzzling jokes. Fun was being poked at us—derision made of our own dull and monotonous efforts at creation.
But when you look out from Macassar’s beach to the place where those wild forms and vivid dyes are native, they are the less surprising. Anything might happen out there. Out by the Spermode Islands it is not the sea. It is a blue radiance, as still as the ecstasy of an intense passion, and the areas of coral rock betray in blinding incandescence what secret energy is at work.