At sunset one day the sea was a fathomless mirror because the hulls of cumulous clouds had sunk in it beneath the inverted violet peaks of Celebes. Celebes floated athwart two heavens. Over Borneo, where the sun vanished, the basaltic horizon clouds were the broken ramparts of a world wrecked and lost. The fires of the final calamity were nearly out. Only from the base of that wall did the last day of earth burst in one thin explosion of scarlet. It spread no distance. Night quenched it at once. I stood at the ship’s rail, watching the place where the forlorn hope had failed.
“Mr. Tomlinsohn,” said a voice beside me, “will you have a gin and bitter?” It was our chief engineer. He comes from Amsterdam.
CHAPTER XXI
Our sailors are Malays. My first impression of them was that they were languid and ladylike seamen. No doubt the captain had been unable to get white men for the voyage. He was forced to do what was possible with mariners whose headdress is neat and pleasing millinery, and who sometimes wear attractive lace bodices. One man I saw hauling on a rope, whose jowl itself was as threatening as a bare knife, wore a blouse with an elegant design in birds and flowers. His trousers, which were more or less white, had lavender stripes. But make no mistake about it. There would be fewer lives lost when a ship comes to trouble if white seamen knew how to lower boats and get them away as expeditiously as our Malays. When we see a grove of cocoanuts we stand in. I hear no orders. Our men appear to be loafing. The master is on the bridge. The chief mate is on the forecastle head. The leadsman is in the chains. The leadsman chants, and the bright apple-green water of a reef with its fringe of snow insensibly approaches. And I am still listening to the echoes from the hills of our roaring cable when, as if our boats were sentient and behaved like retriever dogs, they are already away and making for the beach. For our men get plenty of practice. In the Gulf of Tomino alone we called at about fifteen little places in one day, anchored, and got the boats out.
It would be useless to name these beaches. They are known only to the Dutchmen of the K.P.M. (It is easier to write those letters than to say Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatshappij.) These steamers serve all the Malay Islands. They touch at places where there is nothing to mark land but a tree or two upright on universal glass, lost under vast and radiant clouds. What is the use of naming such spots? One sunrise our siren blared when we were idling along Celebes. Another anchorage! I was going to the upper deck and overtook the captain. Where were we? At Paleleh!
But what and where is Paleleh? I had never heard of it. On the map before me now it is not even marked. Yet surely it should be there; I am certain that once I saw it. Why does the map so casually doubt me? I must have been there, and it ought to be fairly easy to recognize the place again. There was a narrow gulf going deeply into the land, and in the pallor of dawn the moon’s ghost had stopped rolling when on the verge of a declivity. As it was, it was hanging only just above the water. An islet was at the entrance of the bay, on a floor of silver. Every tree on it was plain, but as though seen in a dream. The sun came up over a tumbled sea of acute hills, and to them we headed. His rays struck down profound chasms toward us. Over the starboard bow was an immense dark wall, with a threshold of chrysolite athwart the mirror of the bay. That vague band of greenish light at the foot of the wall began to crystallize, and the crystals became the fronds of cocoanut palms. Set within the groves of that beach were the huts of Paleleh.
There cannot be any doubt about it. My map is at fault. I landed at Paleleh, and I remember a shop kept by a Chinaman—on consideration, however, that is not evidence. The shops in all these places are kept by Chinamen. Nor can I pretend that the fact that nothing was happening at Paleleh proves anything. Nothing has got its work cut out to prove Anything. Yet I must insist that the arrival of our steamer caused little interest, even among the children. I thought the folk of Paleleh had passed out of time, and so knew all. They had been through every experience. Their sun announced itself every day to them in just that way above mountain forests; its light fell in great rays from upper embrasures. Their sea was always of the same colors. Men sometimes came to them from the other world and then went again. An astonishing butterfly was hovering over the scarlet blossoms of a shrub by the foreshore; a group of children by the shrub, no less surprising with their colors, were as indifferent to the creature as though they knew all the wonders of Paradise. Our own Malays were wading up to their middles from beach to boats and back again, carrying bags of copra, till the hot air was loaded with the oily smell of it.
I sat on a beam at the end of a jetty, waiting for the steamer to warn me to board her again. Near me a canoe was anchored by a large stone and a cable of rattan. I could see her thin cable oblique in a transparency to where her anchor rested in three fathoms; and it was then I noticed that the water in the shadow of the canoe was a wavering and translucent sapphire. Is it likely that I could have invented such a color as that? The sea might not have been below my feet; only occasional ripples betrayed the division between air and water. A shoal of little fish glanced in electric flashes amid the branches of a bush of coral, and a larger fish, black and gold like a tiger, hovered over them. Pipe fishes ran their long snouts along the surface. A sea snake, banded yellow and black, threaded the submarine garden and serpentined into a hole in some rocks. A score of Paleleh people were sprawled on the old timbers of the wharf. They had nothing to talk about and nothing to do. They could have taken no less notice of me if I had been invisible. I certainly got the feeling myself that there was no reason in such a place why a steamer should ever sound a warning, or that, if it did, one should ever heed it.