"That's a pretty bit of land," said the doctor lazily. "'Jam medio apparet fluctu nemorosa Zacynthos'. It might be, eh?—Humph!—Virgil and Shakespeare are the only ones who sometimes make poetry endurable. All the others are just little swollen Egos."
This was an unusual excursion, and he quickly returned to practical matters.
"There's a better anchorage over there," he drawled, waving the milk-tin toward Zacynthos. "And less danger of our being caught than here. But no use; we've got to humor the crew, of course. When they say 'pulo burrantu,' that settles it. Haunted islands—ghosts—fatal to discipline. I used to have cruises spoiled by that sort of thing. We must stay here and chance being found."
He shot a stream of Java sugar into the tea, and, staring at the sleepers, rubbed his shaven head thoughtfully.
"Oh, yes, 'superstition,' all very easy to say," he muttered, half to himself. "But who knows, eh? Must be something in it, at times."
His mood this afternoon was new and surprising. Nor was it likely to occur often in such a man. He had brought the Fulmar round the south of Celebes, making for Ceram; but as the Dutch had forbidden him to travel in the interior, saying that the natives were too dangerous just then; and as Sidin, the mate, had sighted the Dutch tricolor flying above drab hulls that came nosing southward from Amboina way, we had dodged behind the Bandas till nightfall. The crew laughed at the babi blanda—Dutch pigs; but every man of them would have fled ashore had they known that among the hampers and bundled spears in our hold lay the dried head of a little girl, a human sacrifice from Engano. If we got into Ceram (and got out again), the doctor would reduce the whole affair to a few tables of anthropological measurements, a few more hampers of birds, beasts, and native rubbish in the hold, and a score of paragraphs couched in the evaporated, millimetric terms of science. There would be a few duplicates for Raffles, some tin-lined cases, including the clotted head of the little girl, for the British Museum; the total upshot would attract much less public notice than the invention of a new "part" for a motor car; and the august structure of science, like a coral tree, would increase by another atom. In the meantime, we lay anchored, avoiding ironclads and ghosts.
Dinner we ate below, with seaward port-holes blinded, and sweat dripping from our chins. Then we lay on the cabin roof again, in breech-clouts, waiting for a breeze, and showing no light except the red coals of two Burmah cheroots.
For long spaces we said nothing. Trilling of crickets ashore, sleepy cooing of nutmeg-pigeons, chatter of monkeys, hiccough of tree lizards, were as nothing in the immense, starlit silence of the night, heavily sweet with cassia and mace. Forward, the Malays murmured now and then, in sentences of monotonous cadence.
"No, you can't blame them," said the captain abruptly, with decision. "Considering the unholy strangeness of the world we live in——" He puffed twice, the palm of his hand glowing. "Things you can't explain," he continued vaguely. "Now this—I thought of it today, speaking of hantu. Perhaps you can explain it, being a youngster without theories. The point is, of what follows, how much, if any, was a dream? Where were the partition lines between sleep and waking,—between what we call Certainty, and—the other thing? Or else, by a freak of nature, might a man live so long—Nonsense!—Never mind; here are the facts."
***