Where the Pavement Ends

by John Russell

Merry was none of these sorts, but he had an odd juggling knack of his fingers.

It was a sketchy enough knack at best. Heaven knew where he had acquired it, just as Heaven was left the responsibility of knowing most facts about Merry, anyhow. And certainly that was never discovered—no more nearly than his proper name, nor the meaning of the upright wrinkle between his brows like the dent of an ax, nor what conceivable things he had done or been or wanted that had landed him among the islands.

Only there you were. Give the fellow a wisp of silk and some brass bracelets or mango seeds, or such, and he would squat by the wayside or in the shade of a hut or the cabin flares of a native prau and proceed to work miracles.

He could make an egg to vanish and pluck it again from your left ear, and he could mold a kerchief between his big, soft hands until it produced a live lizard, which presently turned to a tame lorikeet, which sat up and dratted your eyes in good set Malay. He drew chinking coins out of space. He stood a plate on his nose and caught it on his calf, kept six rings accurately flying, grew flowers from a paper spill and butterflies from a kanari nut, and on occasion—if he was not absolutely petrified and could still see the mark—would even undertake to sink half a dozen daggers within the space of a hand print on the opposite wall: and would do it, too, with the utmost speed and precision.

Accomplishments of this kind were his passport, good any day for a lift, a lodging, or a load from the most unlikely people, for they set him apart in cult of conjurers and jesters that has been privileged always and everywhere.

And so, past all the usual land-falls and long past the tables of mortality for persons of his class and condition, he did keep going on. He kept on after his clothes had fallen to ruin and his face had turned the tint of seaweed; after he had lost most of the pretensions of a white man, his shoes and his shirt. And in due course he arrived at Zimballo's, where he lost the little property left to him and the shreds of his pride, which every man has whether aware of it or not and which he loses last of all....

Here again was an eastern city—not Palembang, though between two winks you scarce could tell it from that or a dozen other ports: the same hive of mats and slats, of fishing poles and cigar boxes, like a metropolis devised by ingenious small children; with the same smells which remain the only solid memorials; with the same swarm of pullulating humanity and the same crowding junks and praus, and now and then the far-venturing ships of recognized flags, sometimes as many as two or three at once; with the same yellows and browns and clays against shifting greens and eternal distant blues—all hazed with the same molten light.

But in its own ways the city is different and remarkable. It is a falling-off place. It is the eddy in a stream. At its roadstead the trickle of traffic turns back and sheers aside from a shallow sea of uncharted and unprofitable dangers: one of the big, blank spaces.

It has some scores of Europeans, who linger as official or accidental units in the population. It has some hundreds of Eurasians, who occur as improper fractions of varying hue. It has a season of the east monsoon when there is no longer any steaminess in the heat, nor any muddiness underfoot, nor any escape from pestilential wind and pervading dust: dust of the roads and dust of the seared rice fields, and crumbled refuse heaps and dust of a scorching hinterland; until a man's soul is changed in him, as you might say, to a portion of immortal thirst.

And also by necessary logic it has Zimballo's.