"Too far for a 'sailor's rest'?" laughed Tunstal. "Pshaw! Come now; are you going to turn me loose on my own or will you steer me up to the local tropic drink, at least?"
Nivin might have been seen to wince a trifle, as one sorely tried, and his melancholy gaze sought the shore. Was there or was there not the beginning of a twinkle in the gray depths? He would have denied it—he afterward did deny it.
"A drink?" he murmured. "A drink? Oh, aye, I could name a drink if that would fill your need. Look over yonder on the slope beyond the Government House, that purple blaze. It's a big bachang tree in bloom, and if you should take the path that climbs beside it you might find such entertainment as perhaps you're seeking. Local I believe it is and quite tropic. Keep always to the left till you reach a pair o' green gates—three turns, or it may be four—and mind your footing as you go, sir—"
So this was the way Mr. Tunstal won his wish in the early morning when he came to the garden of Lol Raman, up from terrace to terrace above that far, that very far Eastern town.
He met his first thrill where Ezekiel met his in the vision, within the threshold of the gate. The high wall he had been following gave suddenly under an arch. There were the double green doors, standing open, and he entered a sort of open-air conservatory. At least he had no better word for the place so crammed with color and scent, and no word at all for the strange flowers and improbable trees that clustered along the walks. Down by the farther end of the inclosure stood a low house almost lost in shrubbery. An arbor with some chairs and tables seemed to invite the passer-by. And just before him, in Buddhistic meditation under a palm, squatted the reception committee of one—a monstrous orang-utan, the true red-haired jungle man, with a face like a hideous black caricature of Death.
Things happened. At sight of a visitor the huge beast reared himself, and sprang abruptly into vehement life, bouncing on bent knuckles. He started out to the limit of his chain until the bright steel links snicked ominously behind him and the leather harness drew taut about his shoulders, pumping and roaring in the great cavern of his chest to top a gale of his own forests. He scurried around the trunk and snatched at something—a packet of leaves. He ran around the other way and retrieved a little lacquer box. Crouching over these treasures with every appearance of the most frantic rage, he began, swiftly and incredibly—to roll cigarettes!
And meanwhile, impassive as a wax manikin, a white-jacketed, white-saronged servitor glided from space somewhere to prepare a table and to offer a chair in the arbor, to set out a square-faced bottle, to pour a glass of golden yellow liquor, and to collect the tiny, fresh cylinders of tobacco which the earnest ape was shedding about him in a shower—all with the gesture of conjuring.
Tunstal sat down hard. He succeeded in lighting one of the cigarettes. Exquisite. He gulped the glass of liquor. Delicious....
"I seem," said Tunstal, mopping his brow—"I seem to have landed as per invoice."
And yet these portents were valid enough too, as Nivin could have told him—the customary welcome at Lol Raman's. For even among the byways a resort must have its features, though it boast no café chantant and hang no battery of conscientious nudes. In the warm, clammy evenings when the fog crept up from the river marshes it was nothing unusual for Lol Raman—whoever or whatever he might be—to entertain as many as a dozen patrons in his garden on the hill. They gathered about his tables and admired his pet orang-utan, they smoked his cigarettes and more particularly they fortified themselves with his private stock, which was arrack. A very potent safeguard against the seasonal fever is arrack, being country spirit of a golden tint and undisciplined taste. But Lol Raman's owned a private recipe, and hither came the initiated—traders, wanderers, officials of the island government, officers of passing tramps. Here they came, and here they often remained until their friends bore them away again, thoroughly safeguarded to the point of petrifaction.