They landed amid another motley of strange vehicles and stranger races. The buildings along the wharf were blackened by smoke-stacks from the Seven Seas. A sun-blistered race of beings, leaning nonchalantly against pillars and posts, watched, with the deep tolerance of the East, the influx from the West. This calm, which was almost awful, gave Julie an uncanny sensation of human futility.
“One of our fine little mornings on the equator,” Mr. Calixter declared, remarking her wilted expression. “You’ll get used to them.”
As she followed the Calixters to their carriage, a dark-skinned female in scant attire, smoking a cigar as long as a man’s arm, crossed her path. Julie gasped. So many unclothed creatures going unabashed about their business staggered her. Eons of consecratedly covered ancestors suffered violence before this exposure. Mr. Calixter, however, was of the opinion, as he lifted his plump, perspiring person after her into the carriage, that for apparel in this climate the human hide was incomparable. But they should all be colored like Easter eggs, to tell them apart; he could seldom distinguish one nude brown person from another. It was just possible that we were dependent to a certain extent on our clothes for individuality.
They drove up into the city through ancient streets blazoned with sun-lit, vivid houses, quickened with picturesque and unfamiliar activities, and flowing with a humanity that lived its whole life open to the universe.
Ceaselessly, strangely, contrastingly, this amazing humanity throbbed along the thoroughfares like creatures out of Arabian Nights’ Tales: carters with their carabaos—monstrous beasts of fearful calm, drawing primitive stone wheels through the dust of ages; turbaned East Indians with bushy beards, offering ivories and tapestries to the fantastic houses; brown women in pineapple fabrics, balancing on their heads baskets of Ylang-Ylang for the manufacture of perfume; a dwarf negrito, enslaved from the forests of the north; water-carriers; Chinese rice-peddlers; children playing with absurd, short-tailed cats; babies taking in life at the curbstone from their mothers’ breasts. Down these streets in poverty, disease, and cheerful blindness of soul, marched all the races of the East.
Julie gasped at what she saw. The riddle of the universe seemed to be unfolding before her wondering gaze.
She turned from that strange stream of people with their enigma, their insoluble mystery, to the houses: such startling houses, intoxicatedly painted like the sunsets over in the sea, and decorated with all manner of things—orchids pure as souls; crimson-crested parrots screaming for the jungle; rain-bow glass; and little dragons’ wings.
These were the state chambers of this existence: their chromatic splendor was reserved for the ceremonies of birth, marriage, and death; but it was down in the streets that these children of the sun lived their lives.
There were flashes of queer open shops, cabinets of the curiosities of the world; showers of wooden shoes suspended from the ceilings; pink satin coffins; Chinese ginger jars painted with peacocks; brass church-bells; unleavened bread, universal red pillows, ornamental brooms that looked like Cleopatra’s palm sunshade. Julie passed them in ecstasy.
Farther on, she had a vision of old walls and moats, and little stone gates with ancient coats-of-arms above them, and a surprisingly great number of old stone churches. They were passing now, Mr. Calixter told her, through the ancient walled city that Legaspi had built. She saw the priests in their white robes, pacing their high airy galleries, saying their prayers in the sunlight, above the world. She drew in with a deep breath the fragrance of the sacred tree of India that flowered in the monastic gardens.