Tide marks

by H. M. Tomlinson

“All right,” he said, bitterly, “when we find you again you will ’ave fezzers in your ’air.” He pantomimed with his fingers, to represent quills upright on his brow. He turned to his parrots and refused to converse any more with an ungrateful fool.

But how could anyone approach the Spice Islands at sunrise and not wish to call that his journey’s end? Leave the ship and possibly the world? If Ternate was not the place for which I had been looking, then it was the phantom of it; and in any case it was my duty to stay, if only to dispel an illusion, and then return to become a cenobite who had proved this alluring world to be a dream from which nothing should be expected. We stood toward Gilolo, as it is named on the English maps, though it should be called Halmaheira. That greater and more distant island of the Moluccas was only a definite shadow of lilac. Behind it were monstrous billows of vapor that could have rolled from a fire which had been immense, but was extinct. The volumes of smoke, and that sea of tarnished silver, had been stilled. Nothing had moved there since the last of the old navigators sailed westward. Close to us soared the two imperative heads of Ternate and Tidore. Whether the fires of Ternate were alight, or whether the dawn had merely kindled a cloud at its summit, it was hard to say. Some native craft were about, but I thought they were abandoned, for they did not move, but remained in one place between sea and sky, held fast by their reflections, perhaps.

We passed the small island of Hiera, a rounded lump of forest, and drew abeam of Ternate. At first it seemed merely the perfect and typical cone of a volcano, but soon its summit was seen as a more irregular and complex crater, with embrasures, and the northern side of it reddish with precipitous ash. An old lava flow wound down in black hummocks through the verdure and ran into the sea. Ternate, excepting along its narrow selvedge of plantations, seemed more a place for birds than for men. Its high inclined upper forest was recessed into many dark ravines. Its bare head was in an upper light beyond the attainment of man. Some smoke was constant there, and, we imagined, some reflections; but all was so remote that fancy could do much as it liked with the summit of Ternate, which was not quite of this world. We opened the village, and came alongside a jetty in deep water, where the bottom could be seen in the way we should see fields if the air was a tinted and pulsing lens. I stood on the old planks of that jetty, with the lucky barbaric figures about me—Malays, of course, but these men were more inclined to laughter and energetic talk than the natives to the westward. The hair of some of them was waved, and there were even a few frizzy mops; New Guinea is next door to Ternate.

Between the planks I could see the tide under our feet, but if a swarm of fish had not passed below like blue arrows and like globes of yellow light, the water would not have been there. Crimson lories were perched on the rail of the jetty and on the shoulders of the barbarians. There was an unusual liveliness and sparkle in the air. I knew perfectly well my ship would have to leave without me.

In a lane out of the village, which led up the first slope of the mountain, I found the pasangrahan, or rest-house, in a shrubbery of hibiscus. A Malay lady called her boys, and they showed me to a large cool room, and behaved as though they expected and hoped that I should never leave them again. I sat in the shade of a veranda, looked out at some cocoanut palms overhanging our garden in a blaze of still light, and lit a pipe. My steamer’s siren abruptly warned her loiterers. She was off.

I struck another match. Some one laughed in the next garden. What else would anyone do in a place which appeared to be all gardens in peace in the glow of no ordinary day? Then my ship gave her salute of farewell. Water would be between her and the jetty. I was marooned.

What is luck when we find it? It depends on ourselves, I suppose. It is only a way of looking at things. Luck is not there if we cannot see it; and even if we have no doubt that at last we are looking at it, our exclamation of pleasure, should we be indiscreet enough to make it, may only prove to our saddened friends that we are in reality no wiser than their privy guess.

It was long past noon, and by the look of the rest-house, and the empty lane beyond the garden, and the prospect of the slope of the mountain, Ternate was abandoned. There was not a sound. Nothing moved; not a bird, not a frond. The fronds might have been of enameled metal. Perhaps everybody had departed in the steamer and the island was mine. I felt, as did Robinson Crusoe, that I must go out and make an inventory of my fortune. The lane led up toward the impending declivity, but as though that ascent were far too steep it turned lazily northward among the easy groves parallel to the beach. There were many smells. One had to stop and try them again. Once it was frangipani, and once it was vanilla, and once it was cloves. There was a somber plantation of small and unfamiliar trees. They had glossy leaves and a fruit like green plums; but their fragrance, which was only a faint and occasional air, was familiar. My memory was slow, and I wondered why it was I knew the smell of trees I had never seen before. On one tree a number of the green plums had opened at the bottom, and disclosed within each was a heart overlain with a scarlet filigree. In that twilight the opened fruit were as bright as glow lamps. What are the Spice Islands for but nutmegs?

The great breadfruit tree with its extravagant leaves, the slight and delicate areca palm under the crowns of stalwart cocoanuts, and the translucent emerald pennants of the plantain, may all some day get the verses they demand. But not here. When I looked at them that afternoon I felt in the mood for singing them, yet singing is another matter. To feel impelled to sing in praise, though that is a mind commendable in a man, may result in notes having but slight harmonic relevance to the genius of the impulse, a sad truth which poets often regret to observe is known to their critics. Sometimes I saw a house, looking in its frailty within an arbor but the afterthought of a lotus-eater who wanted a thatch for his sleeping-mat; a ladder led from the ground to its door, which was open to show that only dark silence inhabited it. The trees gave the lane a kind of greenish dusk. There was no sea and the mountain was invisible. Occasionally the path crossed the dried bed of a torrent, and by the water-worn bowlders of such a miniature ravine I turned off through a plantation of palms to find the sea. By the look of it that grove was eternal. It had no end. The gray aisles of inclined trunks gave only an illusion of space. I could not surprise the columns into granting any deep vista. They closed round me as I passed, though I did not see them move and could not hear them. But suddenly they opened, and left me in the sun on a beach of black sand.

Even the sea was asleep in the heat. It was only breathing. There across the water of a narrow strait soared the peak and forests of the neighboring isle of Tidore. Tidore’s sharp crater reached as high as a white cloud. I stood in an effort to understand this apparition. But what could mortal man make of it? Besides, it was all as surprising as that brief but unexpected revelation of the earth’s virtue which shines at times just before the sun goes. But this brightness of the Moluccas did not fade, though I watched it for I forget how long. Tidore remained, a wall of forest diminishing to the sky, seemingly true and close to me, but with that denying strip of sea between us. As for my own island, there were the cocoanuts behind me, and one melancholy bird calling in them. The beach on one hand disappeared among some mangroves, which were wading in the sea. On the other hand, beyond a spit, was a canoe with a stem like the neck of a swan, a frail black shape on a shining tide, and in it the naked moving figures of three fishermen appeared legendary. I attempted to reach the little cape, to look round the corner, but a swamp turned me inland again and brought me to an impassable region of mangroves, an aqueous wood holding only shadows, where grisly stems projected from the sludge like the elbows and knees of the drowned. The mud of a near pool erupted into life and a crocodile raised its head to regard me. Moreover, night was not far off.