Round the Bend

by Nevil Shute

  We walked over to the hangar together for me to show him the Tramp. We got up into it and stood in the great empty cabin, floored with duralumin, with bare stringers and formers supporting the outer skin of the walls, innocent of any upholstery. I showed him the toilet that my mother had admired so much, back in distant Eastleigh; that was about all the passenger accommodation that there was. “As an alternative,” I said, “I can arrange for him to charter a York from B.O.A.C. That would have a crew of five or six, probably with two stewards in uniform, with proper arrangements for serving meals. It would be warmer for him, and much less noisy. I can’t say quite what it would cost; probably between five and six thousand pounds for the return journey.”

  He said, “The money is not important.…” He looked around the inside of the Tramp. “Could we put a carpet on the floor, and a couch for my master to lie on?”

  I said, “Of course we can, Wazir. If he would like to use this aeroplane we can do anything like that, only limited by the amount that we can carry, which is five tons.”

  He said, “I think my master would prefer to go in one of your aeroplanes. He would not want to go upon his pilgrimage in luxury and carried by a crew of unbelievers.” He glanced around him at the bleak functional utility of the metal cabin. “This is more suitable.” He turned back to me. “My master would prefer to be carried by devout men.”

  “Of course.” I thought for a minute. “If he wishes,” I said, “I can arrange for the whole crew to be Moslems. I can arrange for Hosein and Kadhim to go as first and second pilots; they’re both Iraquis. Then I should send two of my Bahrein men who are accustomed to travelling by air to act as servants—Tarik and Khail, I think. But frankly, I should like my chief pilot to go with your master upon such a journey—Gujar Singh. He’s a Sikh. If your master has no strong objection, I should like to send Gujar as chief pilot and Hosein as second pilot.”

  “It does not matter that the crew should all be Moslems,” he replied, “El Amin himself is not a Moslem. My master knows Gujar Singh, and everybody trusts him.”

  As we walked back to the office I told him that the Arabia-Sumatran had first call upon the Tramp under their contract, and that I would see Johnson at once and see if I could get him to release the aircraft for one trip. I told him that I was going down to Bali on the next flight myself, and we arranged that the Sheikh’s journey should be the trip after that, so that I should be at Bali to meet the aircraft when it arrived, and could make arrangements for the accommodation of the party. Then I would travel back with them to Bahrein on the return journey.

  He was staying with Sheikh Muhammad, with his master, the Sheikh of Khulal, at the palace just outside the town. I told him I would see Johnson at once and call on him at the palace later in the day. Then he bowed to me and said, “May God protect you,” and got into the back of his maroon Hudson, and was driven away.

  I went and saw Johnson and got him to agree to stand down for one trip; as I had thought, he was very ready to oblige the Sheikh of Khulal in this way. I went to the palace and drank coffee with the party and confirmed the arrangements with the Wazir, and told him how much it would cost him, and got away from there after only an hour and forty minutes—good going in those parts. Then I went back to the aerodrome. Gujar Singh was there, and I had a talk to him about it in the office. We rearranged the pilots’ schedules to send Arjan on the next trip with Kadhim since Gujar was to pilot the old Sheikh, because I didn’t want my chief pilot to be away from the home base too much.

  As he got up to go, Gujar said, “This is the next phase, then.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He said, “This is the first pilgrimage to visit Shak Lin.”

  Nadezna was in the room, taking some papers from the basket on my desk. I felt her check and stiffen. “This is exceptional,” I said uncertainly. “This won’t happen again.”

  He smiled. “We can’t do anything to stop it, if it does.”

  He went out, and Nadezna was still standing there, motionless by my desk. “It is exceptional,” I said gently. “It doesn’t mean anything.…”

  She said dully, “Only that an old man who is dying thinks it worth while to go six or seven thousand miles to get Connie’s blessing.”

  I tried to cheer her up. “Perhaps Madé Jasmi’s done her stuff by this time.” And then I said, “You’re sure you wouldn’t like to come down with me?”

  She sighed a little. “No,” she said, “I couldn’t help. You go alone, Tom, and do what you can.”

  I left with the Tramp two days later, and travelled like a passenger, resting in a long chair in the cabin with the load. The pilots were getting the hang of the journey by that time and were making longer stages. We were circling the airstrip of Den Pasar on Bali by midday of the fourth day, half a day ahead of time. The Dakota from Darwin wasn’t due until the evening; I made a note to put its times forward by a day.

  Connie and Phinit were on the aerodrome to meet us, and began work at once to check the aircraft and the engines, and to refuel. We had two Australian scientists and a Dutchman with us to go on as passengers to East Alligator River, and for courtesy I had to stay with them and not go off alone to Pekendang. Moreover, it wouldn’t have benefited me to do so, because Connie and Phinit would be working very late upon the Tramp, perhaps all through the night, to get it ready for the trip back to Bahrein. Probably they wouldn’t get back to Pekendang themselves that night.

  I sent my passengers into the Bali Hotel in the K.L.M. car, and set to work with the pilots and the engineers to get the aircraft serviced and the load ready to tranship to the Dakota when it came. It turned up just before dusk and taxied in, and as we were all there and working we changed loads that night. It was most of it light stuff that could be carried over from one aircraft to the other, all except one motor generator set that the Dakota had brought for us to take back to Diento; this weighed over a ton and we had to rig the sheer legs for it. It was nine o’clock by the time we could leave for the Bali Hotel, and Connie and Phinit were still working on the engines of the Tramp when we went.

  They were there when we got out to the airstrip next morning at about half past seven. Connie said that they had finished about one o’clock and had slept for a few hours on charpoys in the hangar; they had the engines running and the machines all ready to go when we got there, so they had probably been working again at dawn. The crews and passengers got into their respective aircraft and made ready with the usual deliberation; then the machines taxied out and down the strip together. The Dakota took off first and headed straight out from the strip towards the east. The Tramp followed and climbed straight ahead till it was at about five hundred feet, slowly raising flaps; then it turned in a wide circle and flew past north of us, climbing, and set a course to the northwest for Sourabaya and vanished up the coast.

  Connie, Phinit, and I were left upon the ground, tired, they with a night’s work and I with four days’ flying. Connie said, “Where are you going to stay? Will you stay in Den Pasar or come with us?”

  “I’d like to come and stay in Pekendang, if that can be arranged,” I said. “Would they mind having a European in the village?”

  “Not a bit,” he said. “I thought you might want to come there, for a day or two anyway. I’ve fixed up a room for you to yourself, and a bed, and a mosquito net. But it’s all a bit primitive, you know.”

  I nodded. “If I get fed up with it I’ll go back to the Bali Hotel. But I don’t suppose I shall.”

  “They’ve got very interesting techniques of wood carving,” he said. “There’s quite a bit to see.”

  I had brought my bag with me to the aerodrome, and he sent one of the Balinese labourers to get it; we locked the workshop and closed the hangar doors, and started off walking across the airstrip towards the village. We went slowly because the sun was getting up and the heat increasing, but when we got off the aerodrome the track led through scrub and palm trees, and it was shady and cool and pleasant. After
about half an hour we came to the walled family enclosures that made up the village, and turned into the one that I remembered, and into the internal square with the shrines round it.

  Connie and Phinit, I found, now lived separately. Connie was alone in the one-roomed atap house that I remembered, but Phinit had moved out and had gone to live with one of the families of the village, the family of the girl Ktut Suriatni who looked after him. He was, in fact, living happily and openly in wedded bliss. Connie was living alone. He had got another single-roomed house for me a few yards away and he took me there; a little place with a thatch roof and atap walls, the floor raised about three feet off the ground. There was no door, and not much privacy except what would be provided by the darkness when night fell.

  “People will come in and have a look at all your things,” he said. “They won’t take anything.”

  A girl came up as he was showing me the little house, Madé Jasmi, that I remembered from my previous visit. She had her long black hair gathered behind her head and hanging down her back; she wore a little cotton jacket which represented her best clothes in deference to me because I was a stranger, open down the front for coolness. I smiled at her in recognition and she smiled at me, and then she asked a question of Connie.

  “She wants to know if we want food,” he said. “I’d like to rest this afternoon, if you don’t mind. I was up most of the night. Shall we eat something now?”

  I said that that would suit me. “What do you eat here?”

  “Rice,” he said. “Always rice. Usually with something curried on top—dried fish or meat. They eat a good many vegetables, and a certain amount of fruit. I leave it all to Madé here, and she feeds me very well.” He spoke to her and she smiled shyly, and went away.

  She brought us food to Connie’s house presently; he had a table and two rickety chairs. She brought two wooden bowls filled with rice, and two spoons, and a number of broad leaves upon a tray each with a small portion of curry or dried fish upon it. “I’m teaching her Western ways,” he said. “The people here eat everything off leaves so there’s no washing up. I told her that I had to have a bowl and a spoon, and you’d want one, too.” He had two glasses, and Madé brought water in an earthenware jug with a curious long spout. “If you’re a Balinese you can drink out of that by pouring it into your mouth. Very hygienic. I can’t do it without choking, though.”

  “It looks as if you make quite an unreasonable amount of work for her,” I said.

  “I don’t think she minds that,” he said. “She wants to learn how people do things in the West.”

  The girl settled down upon the edge of the small balcony or floor before the hut, and watched us while we ate. The food was good, well cooked and appetizing. As we ate, Connie asked me how Tai Foong was settling down into the job at Bahrein, and I told him about that, and about the new Liaison Officer, and how the work had been going generally. He was interested in the proposal of the R.A.F. to build on to the hangar. “It would be better if they didn’t build just there,” he said. “It’s not very important, though. It’s only sentiment, because I took our people there to pray after work, and then the others from the souk got into the habit. But that could very easily be changed. If the R.A.F. really need that bit of land, let me come back there for a week, and I’ll see that they start praying somewhere else.”

  “It’s not necessary,” I said. “There’s all the land in the world there. The R.A.F. can put their hangar on the north side of the long strip. They’ve got to have a civil aviation hangar, anyway.”

  “If it’s going to make any trouble,” he said, “we can easily put it right.”

  He spoke to the girl, and she smiled, and got up and went away. “I asked her to get fruit,” he said. “They’ve got some quite good things like grapefruit here.”

  “You’ve learned the language very quickly,” I remarked.

  “I never have much difficulty with that,” he replied. “I was brought up to speak Canton in Penang when I was a boy, and I speak Malay, of course. These languages are all very much the same.”

  The girl came back with a wooden bowl full of fruit and put it on the table, and went back and sat on the edge of the floor again. “Phinit eats in his own place, I suppose,” I said.

  He nodded. “He’s gone to live with the other girl’s family just over there.” He smiled. “Quite a married man.”

  “That’s all right, is it?” I asked.

  He said, “I think so. Madé here tells me that it’s a very good idea.” The girl, hearing her name spoken, looked up and smiled. “But I’m afraid she’s got an axe to grind.”

  I didn’t follow that one up, and presently I got up and went to my own hut, and dropped off my two garments, and blew up the air pillow that I carry on these journeys, and lay down on the charpoy. From where I lay I could see out into the brilliant sunlight across to Connie’s hut; he also had gone to bed, and the girl had carried away the remnants of our meal. I lay dozing before sleep while the sweat slowly ceased to run, and presently she came back with a flat basket of palm leaves, and sat down on the corner of his hut in her usual position, and began doing something with her hands. Later I found that she was making lamaks, woven panels of dark green and yellow palm leaves in a chequer design, and stylized artificial flowers of the same craft, for offerings at the shrines of the house temple. I fell asleep and slept for about an hour in the heat of the day. When I woke up she was still sitting there making her offerings, waiting, perhaps, to be ready to fetch Connie anything he wanted when he woke.

  I got up presently and put on my khaki drill trousers and bush shirt, and a pair of sandals, and went to the entrance of my little house. Madé saw me and got up, and moved softly into the room behind where Connie was asleep. I crossed over to where she had been sitting to look at her basket and examine what she had been doing; she had been using a crude knife of hoop iron to split the fronds of the green leaves, and her basket was half-full of her offerings. She came out of the room, and she was carrying her earthenware pitcher of water and a glass, and she poured out the cool water for me. It was no good trying to talk to her, so I smiled at her and took it from her, and drank, and she smiled gravely in return, and put the pitcher back in the shade and the draught.

  She offered me the bowl of fruit, but I refused that and strolled slowly through the village. There was a girl weaving at a loom, and a young man roasting a pig upon a spit over a wood fire, and a very old man carving an elaborate wooden sculpture of a girl dancer, a very advanced and refined piece of artistry, or so it seemed to me. I stood and watched all these for a time, and then I went out into the road and down towards the sea. Two or three children followed me at a safe distance, quiet and a little timid, watching everything I did.

  There were fishing boats on the beach, and a few children bathing. The boats were beamy, well-built vessels with one big lateen sail; there was a lighter type also, a sort of dug-out canoe stabilized with an outrigger formed of a large bamboo log. I sat in the shade of the trees at the head of the beach for a time watching the boats come in and go out; women were washing and gutting the fish near by and salting them, and spreading them out to dry in the hot sun. Both men and women on this job were less crude in their manner than fishermen and herring girls in other countries; it seemed to me that they must make their living more easily, permitting greater attention to the arts and graces of their lives.

  I left the beach presently, and went back into the village in the late afternoon. There was a temple there, an enclosure of brick walls with facings of a soft white limestone, most elaborately carved with fruits and gods and gargoyles. Inside there were a number of platforms with thatched roofs, and a number of shrines, but the shrines were all empty and unattended, and the whole place was swept and clean and empty. I learned later that there was a festival there three or four times a year, when the whole countryside came to make offerings and pray, but at other times it stood empty and unused, the daily worship taking place at the shrines in each
house.

  I came out of the temple and looked around. There was another one a short distance away, and here I was brought up with a round turn at a statue before the door. It was a stone figure, more than life-size, of a hideous old woman, perhaps a witch. She had huge, pendulous breasts, and the face of an animal; her body appeared to be covered in hair. In the talons of her hands she held a baby, and she was about to eat it.

  The children were still following me. I stopped and stared at this monstrosity, and they gathered around me. One little girl went and patted the stone figure and said, “Rangda.” Whatever the thing was, it didn’t seem to worry them a bit.

  I left the enigma, and found my way back to my own place. Connie was up and sitting at the entrance to his house in a deck chair; Madé Jasmi was still sitting at the corner of his house weaving her offerings. He said something to her and got up to meet me, and she came back in a minute with another deck chair and I sat down beside him.

  I told him where I had been and what I had seen, and I asked him about the hideous statue outside the temple. He laughed. “Oh, that’s Rangda,” he said. “That’s the Death temple, where they do cremations. Rangda symbolizes death, and evil—all the bad things of this world. To make it perfectly clear, she’s usually shown eating a baby.”

  “Well,” I said. “That doesn’t seem to leave much doubt.”

  He smiled. “No. The opposite to Rangda is the force of Good, or Life. He’s the Barong. The Barong’s an animal that’s a cross between a lion and a bull, very fierce. At one season of the year mummers go round every village and act a sort of play. They have a pantomime Barong with two men in it, and this has to fight a pantomime Rangda. It goes on for hours. I’m not sure who wins, but everybody gets very excited about it, specially the children.”