The agent of our steamer at one sleepy coastal station, when I asked him whether it was possible to travel inland away from the usual roads, shook his head. He did not know. He thought not. It was wild and uncertain. Nobody ever did it. He had been there nine years and had not been more than ten miles inland. That overseer of cargoes and manifests looked toward the hills, and I thought for a moment that his glance was half regretful. “No,” he said; “I shall never know what is behind them. I’m too busy. And when I’m finished here I shall go, please God, straight to Dorking. Do you know Dorking in Surrey? That’s where my hills are.”
And his, I think, is the experience of nearly all the exiles from Europe on that coast. Those men are not really incurious. Their youthful ardor, the zest for adventure which carried them out, has been subdued. Commerce caught them on the way, and imprisoned and disciplined them. They have not seen and will never see more than the cocoanut and rubber plantations, estate inventories, poker at the club, tin mines, and coastal go-downs and cargo manifests, of their fate. They do not talk with the natives, but with commercial travelers. The extent of London and New York and their unquestioned control is terrifying. Our maps give no indication of it. They seem to have men everywhere in bondage, and you find the chains are as despairingly stout and reliable on a Siamese beach as they are where fixed to their awful staples in Threadneedle and Wall streets.
So Bangkok, another great city, was the best that I could do. Nobody could help me to anything better. I was free to regard distantly from my steamer the home of the Sakai, the hills where the little forest people use poisoned darts and blow-pipes, and where, in fact, life is still unaware that it is nearly five hundred years since Vasco da Gama rounded Good Hope. I was now no nearer to those hills than if they were in another planet. There was nothing for it but to remain contented as a happy tourist, and not to ask for too much. A week’s journey inland from most of those roadsteads by the mouths of rivers—called kualas on the local map—would get me to where the Malay folk were living in the way which was traditional before the coming of the English, even before the coming of the Portuguese. But if any sedentary person supposes that it is easy to break through the spell of the settled highways of this world then he had better try it. Only good luck will get one through; and I should like to hear how to arrange for the advent of that angel. In another two days we were due in Bangkok. There I should see fantastic temples, smell stale drainage, buy pictures of the place at the hotel office, drink and gossip with cynical exiles to kill the evenings, and then be more than glad to embark again. To feel the spirit of enterprise moving you is not enough; a door must be found, and the key to it. Malaya, however, was closed to me, as in fact it is to all but a few government officials, prospectors, and men who are indifferent to prudence, time, space, and the neat virtues.
A young fellow passenger, to whom I had not yet spoken, that evening at dinner said something to the captain which I did not hear, and the captain thereupon turned to regard him in mild surprise and amusement. “Are you through,” the captain said with a wise smile. “I hope you will like it, but I think not.” An elderly planter next to me chuckled. The young man began to hum a tune, as though he did not hear.
“How will you do it?” said the planter.
“Oh, on an elephant, or walk it, if it comes to that, or take a prahu. I don’t know. But I’m going.”
“And you call that a holiday?” said the planter, smiling bitterly.
“No, I call it a lark,” said the young man.
“I wouldn’t do it for a tenth share in the ship,” the captain assured me.
“Do what?” I asked, in suspicious curiosity.