He Sits in Front of His Shop in Macassar
July 13.—This virgin coast of Celebes, which again since Amurang has appeared to be a ghostly conjuration near us, yet not to be verified, has suddenly become solid, humane, and close, and is called Menado. This is the chief port of Minahasa, the northeastern limb of Celebes, and Menado lightly sustains the beautiful name of its province. There is nothing so good on the coast of Java. Mountains surround Menado’s noble bay; and beyond the business quarters of the town, which of course are no better than commerce usually makes of its quarters, the broad roads, shaded by kanary and cassia trees, are bordered by shrubberies in which villas, mostly of timber in the native style, float hull deep in a tumble of leaves and flowers.
It is politic to get lost when you are ashore at a place for the first time, and it was not long before I had to disentangle myself from a native village in which I fancied I was invading screened affairs. Then I found myself lonely on a steep bank of black sand, where in places trees overshadowed the sea. Along the foreshore was a tide line of sea litter, husks of cocoanuts, carapaces of crabs, dried sea-urchins, strayed timbers, and a fragment of a ship’s board on which were the last two letters of her name. A drove of lean and grizzled swine were nosing there. A few catamarans were made fast above the tide to volcanic bowlders. Only the smell of decaying sea wrack was familiar on that beach. While I was sitting on the gunwale of a dugout canoe, over which was a dark canopy of leaves, assured that I could hear nothing of Charing Cross, and wondering why I had not remembered earlier that such beaches may be found if one is both willful and lucky, a voice asked me whether Celebes pleased me. That figure in white had come down behind me unannounced by sand that was as dark and noiseless as midnight. He was a Dutch official, and he had seen London in my hat. (That hat!) Did I know Lake Tondano? No, but I had heard of it. Then would I honor him by going thither in his car? The Dutch are friendly souls, though not often so informal and enterprising as that. I assured him that I would convey my warm approval of Holland to Whitehall.
The rest of Celebes may be waiting for its explorers, yet soon it was clear that Minahasa is not only comely even in Indonesia, but that it would be remarkable among earth’s showiest attractions. Our car mounted, was besieged by flamboyant foliage, was released to vast prospects where a misty lower brightness that was the sea invaded a far vague plain inclosed by mountains; there were dark islands in the sea. We passed through forests to the shrilling of cicadas. When we rose to the coolness of the plateau of Tondano the villages suggested that they had been designed to excite the wonder of strangers. The houses were in the style of the Malay hut, but were larger and were built of solid timber on stone foundations. There was evidence everywhere that the folk here were refined and gentle. Along the ledge of every veranda were porcelain flower pots—not vile petrol tins, as everywhere else in the East, which make even orchids look like molting birds of paradise in cheap cages. Roses, dahlias, sunflowers, and crotons with colored and variegated foliage were neatly displayed under plantations of areca and sugar palms, and the plantains. The cattle resembled the deer-like creatures of the Channel Islands at home. The plain about the great lake was planted with rice and maize. In one hamlet, where the Protestant church was a surprise with its air of placid content and irrevocable decision, the brown nippers were just coming out of school. No procession of young virgins taking the Hampstead air under the eye of a mistress who would stand no nonsense could have improved on the sedate superiority of those girls of Minahasa, bareheaded, barefooted, in white muslin, with prodigious plaited tails of black hair tied with black bows. They carried books in their hands, and they seemed well aware that they were of the best people and must walk home in just that way. They did not look at us, but talked to one another discreetly, and my own feeling certainly was that I belonged to a cheaper suburb.
My Dutch companion noticed my astonishment and chuckled. I learned that no more than a century ago this part of Celebes was inhabited by savages who lived in village communities placed higher on stilts than usual, for they desired to have a chance, if surprised by head-hunters. And all of them were collectors of heads. It was a local pastime, for as they did no work, they had to amuse themselves somehow. Each village had its own dialect, and cannibalism was then a righteous act, conferring virtue and turning men into heroes, as warfare does to-day. The Dutch, who followed the Portuguese into northern Celebes, woke after a hundred years of sleep to the fact that the natives of this part of Celebes were rather different from the other islanders; that they were more active, more intelligent, more comely, and that they were not, by comparison, uncleanly in their ways. So encouraged, the Dutch presented these savages with a few coffee beans and some instruction. To grow coffee it was necessary for the head-hunters to descend from their stilted homes; and to sell the crop in Tondano meant the making of roads. With their homes on the ground, and easy paths between the hostile villages, the hunting of heads became much too serious for a pastime, and it was given up. The present village of Tondano would be an ornament in a petted baronial estate in Sussex, but originally it was built on piles in the great lake. The Dutch officials, however, preferred to meet these people where you were not likely to drop through the floor into deep water just when you were getting the better of an argument with some fine fellows dressed in a few shells. They persuaded the villagers of the propriety of rebuilding Tondano some miles away from the unhealthy lake. And that was where I found it, with its children leaving their schoolhouse and carrying their books with such conscious grace. Why is it we are told with even furious emphasis that it is impossible to alter human nature? Is that emphasis really a symptom of fear? Do our brigadiers really worry because they dread that they may be cured of head-hunting? Do our social parasites secretly fear that they may be cured of greed?
July 14.—At sunset we passed through the Sangi Islands, eyries for the pirates of Sulu a few years ago. Our course is east; we have entered the Molucca Passage. I remained on deck, kept there by a mere name. After Magellan died in the Philippines the survivors of that most remarkable of voyages came south to the Moluccas, the “Islands of the Kings,” and sheltered at Ternate. Ternate is a word, as Milton knew, like Samarkand and Cathay. To the Elizabethan it meant the splendor at the world’s end and the most a sailor could do. At midnight I had the deck to myself, and there I stayed till daylight. The bo’sun-birds, which are said to be the restless souls of dead mariners, mourned around us in the dark. Now and then one of them would pass like a wraith through the beam of light in our foretop. The unseen surge chanted quietly of what men had done and of what men had forgotten. Our ship, I began to feel, was at the end of time, was at the verge of all the seas, and she herself was but the shadow of a memory drifting under strange stars in a quest for what man will never find again.
CHAPTER XXIV
One day the chief engineer of the Savoe was feeding his parrots. He has a noisy display of them on the boat deck. When I spoke to him he turned on me abruptly and peered intently at my face for a clew, perhaps, to what he thought was an English joke. “You cannot stay at Ternate,” he said, doubtfully. I explained that this was easy. One merely left the ship and did not return. It was not possible, the chief replied. And then I learned that the island might vanish at any moment. It was only a volcano. And while it remained above the sea I should be without electric light, intellectual resources, gin, himself, and news of the world. There was nothing at Ternate but barbarians and nether fires. I told him that barbarians would be a nice change and that I had a morbid interest in the infernal.