Tide marks

by H. M. Tomlinson

From the beach of the island, looking toward the summit, above the forest one sees what appears to be grassland. It seems from below as smooth as the English South Downs. We got out of the forest at last into this very upper region, and found the grass. I had been looking forward to the experience of tramping over bare downs at such an elevation above a tropical sea. But that smooth grass was elephant stuff ten feet high, and for another half hour we could not see more than a yard about us. Then our way began to descend, so that when we crawled from the tunnel we had cut we were in a great bare depression of the mountain, which from below would not have seemed to be more than a dimple. To the bottom of this we had to make our way, with but one brief peep ahead of the terminal cone to encourage us. The cone was certainly much nearer, but surprisingly more distant than I had expected to find it from that vantage; and our outlook was more restricted than we should have found it in most of the byways of the village below. The ground of that basin, and up the farther slope of it, was broken and thinly grown over with coarse grass. But I must confess that I ceased to pay much attention to the details of our circumstances, for I had the feeling which, I suppose, used to trouble those who could hear, as they approached him, the grumblings in the very belly of Moloch. We were very much by ourselves, and the god, although as yet his face was hidden from us, was immense and powerful. Now we knew it. We smelled him now and then. His breath was of the Pit. I began to have premonitions of what was the security of the tenure of those spice gardens down below. We toiled up to the top of the ridge which veiled the face of the god.

At last, there he was. He was black and naked, and smoke was drifting from his head. And he was still some distance away, apart, elevated, and awful in the serene blue. It was clear that Milton had wrongly reported his expulsion from heaven. He still dwelt there. In fact, he had it to himself. He was solitary in the sky, monstrous and fuliginous under his lovely canopy, with a desolate court about him, and a footstool of blackened ruin from which the angels had fled.

Before we could mount to his throne we had to make another long descent, as it were an act of obeisance; and as the Dutchman, who had become very humble, advanced deferentially over the cinders and clinker, I could see plainly that, though we might hope to be ignored, divine compassion in this spot was as absent as the supernal choir. Our only luck would be to find the god asleep.

This, too, was the worst stage of the journey. We were compelled to forget our outward prospects. We had to keep our eyes searching for likely foothold in the tumult of the knives and ax-blades of the slag. A slip in that chaos of spiked and edged metal would have been ugly. A few minutes of the exercise made us pause. There was not a sound. The buzzing of an invisible fly was remarkable. During the pause I noticed in surprise that our exertions had taken us but a little distance; the journey to the bottom of the descent and up the final slope had been prodigiously lengthened since we had discovered what a walk there was like. The two Malays, I observed, were seated on the top of the ridge we had left, and were again in contemplation. They were not fools. They had no desire to look into the gape of a volcano. Their curiosity was already satisfied. Around us on the litter of broken metal were scattered numberless great bowlders that had acquired a horrid iridescence and some flowers of sulphur on cooling; they were the bombs which the god throws about when he is playful. But at the moment all sound had ceased except the murmur of that unseen fly, who kept with me for company; and the only movement was the quivering of the air over the heated stones, for the sun was magnificent.

By the time we reached the edge of the crater every ten yards had grown to a mile, and we were in the tired mood to be insulting, even if challenged by Cerberus. There was no sign, however, that our approach had been noticed. We were free to gaze into the open mouth of the god. He was fast asleep, and breathing so gently that his gusts of vapor were slight and unalarming. Our own foothold was more disconcerting than the crater. It was not easy to find a standing place that was clear of communication with the nether fires. Vents and fissures everywhere were exhaling hot mephitic gases, and when I thought I had found a corner, by a huge bomb, which gave me a space exempt where I might be at ease, a fumarole presently became active under my feet and sent up strong sulphurous blasts. The rocks about me were bright with the lichens of Avernus, lurid incrustations of chemicals which showed more than anything else the kind of garden we were in.

The crater itself was halved by a wall, and the half within our view—we did not visit the other half—was a precipitous hollow the bottom of which seemed choked with rocks; but as to that I offer no definite opinion, for I did not climb down far enough to satisfy a scientific conscience, but only a conscience which is amenable to desire. Those stained cliffs were not usual. The crags were calcined red and black, and they were blotched with sulphur and verdigris. There were occasional bursts of steam. That gape was loaded and charged. The desire to play adventurously inside such a muzzle vanished at the sight of it. When the natives of Ternate prudently assemble their canoes at signs more violent than usual, and even abandon their nutmeg groves, they are not showing timidity, for on the summit I got the impression that in the belly of the island there was a power latent which could lift it bodily from the sea.

But where was the sea? As soon as we turned from the crater and looked outward we forgot the nether fires. There was no sea, however. There was no sky. There was only a gulf of light which was blue to infinity. We were central in space. We looked southward for the cluster of the Moluccas, but in that blue vacancy the islands and the clouds were all immaterial; the isles of Motir, Makian, and distant Batchian were mere conjectures, though in that clear and tranquil light I imagined I could see as far as Paradise and the solution of sorrow. But what is an island when the clouds float below it? There we saw Motir, the nearest of those suppositions of land, a frail and pallid wraith which did not move from its place in the blue, but was constant in the midst of the traveling islands of cloud. Some of them, in appearance, passed under it. Gilolo had sunk profoundly. It was only a lower abstraction of bays and promontories. Beyond it the glimmering sapphire was the Pacific. Our near neighbor, Tidore, and the lower slopes of our own island, were occasionally revealed; we had immediately below us at times a far but vivid memory of the green world we left one fine morning. But that memory would dissolve under lambent white ranges of cloud, and again we were marooned on a raft of burnt rocks translated to the neighborhood of the sun. The clouds of the trade-wind were much more substantial than Gilolo. They approached us as lunar continents, resplendent and majestic, moved down rapidly on our meager upper foothold as though to sweep us along, but divided below us and surged past in shining ranges while our raft in midway space felt anchored to but the slenderest hope.

It was with reluctance that we began our return. We had a surmise that we should like to continue forever in that upper light where what was mundane was reduced to faint symbols and abstractions, but doubted the value of our intuition. We had but little faith that we could maintain ourselves in that rare light, in that serene expanse; and perhaps we were right. We are not ready for it yet. We plunged downward rapidly, once we were over the slag heaps, and were soon in the gloom of the forest. The forest seemed more secure, its darkness more homely, its troll-like shapes more in accord with the heart of man, than a luminous vision of eternity.

I do not know how long it took us to descend. We fell automatically. Fatigue flung us, at times, long distances which did not seem to bring us any nearer to home. The never-ending jolts in weariness destroyed thought, and reduced the mind to a heavy enduring lump. My personal lump acquired a measure of intelligence again when at last some inconstant sparks in the air took my attention, and I found they were fireflies in a Chinese graveyard. We were nearing sea-level. Then music approached, and lanterns, and a wedding party passed by, with tom-toms, pipes, and dance. My friend, the Dutch missionary, stood near. “I’ve been praying for you,” he remarked, grimly. He was thinking of the nether fires. But he did not know that perhaps it was his very prayer which had saved me from the danger of a transcendental mirage of sublimity.