The Forbidden Kingdom

by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff

  I landed on the island and started walking. I should have liked to sit very quietly somewhere against a wall. But when I sat I could feel the ground blazing under my body and my body catching fire. I had to walk and went where I did not want to go. And so it happened.

  I stood quietly resting in front of the stone summerhouse, since there was a little coolness there. Gradually it became fresher, cooler, chillier, darker and within it lightened to yellow twilight. Apart from that it was empty inside, I thought, until I saw a man sitting there; I could not see his face, and his clothes were the kind worn centuries ago. He was sitting writing, and on a tall black chest lay rolls of parchment, which sometimes moved to and fro, like scraps of birch bark or wood shavings when there is a breath of wind in a deserted corner of the wood, or a neglected workshop. For the man writing the world seemed no longer to exist. I only saw him occasionally clench his fist and seemingly shiver with pain; he paused for a moment and then went on writing. What concern was the writing man of mine? Come on, I must be going, but I noticed that I was no longer myself. I had disappeared. I was no longer standing there or on my way to the beach. Where was I then? Surely I wasn’t that writing man, not that! I wanted to shout, drive him away, like an animal that leaps across our path at night, but I had no tongue and no limbs. Yet the sweat kept dripping on the ground—but wasn’t it my blood, colourless with extreme old age? Wasn’t I standing there catching up with the backlog of dying, wouldn’t I soon be a little pile of dust in a narrow-necked urn? Rather that than be him, who in a fate, in a fate…

  He rose and came very slowly over to the window, very close to it; I couldn’t see his face, but in a moment he would touch the green glass and I would see him, then he would withdraw and I would be him. The glass tinkled and I stared down at my bloody hand. Inside, beyond the broken pane it was dark, there was only a hand moving up and down over grey parchment, another that hung down limply, an eye that stared at that hand, and next to it a hollow cash box with red edges. I was able to escape; my body dragged itself through the garden; it was as if the landing stage had been reached in a bound… Fearfully slowly, the rescuing sampan rowed nearer, picked me up and took me aboard. I saw the black, filthy ship lying in the water as the only safe place on earth, the same ship that—for how long? a few hours?—I had fled in disgust. A jump onto the gangplank, a dollar in an astonished hand, and the escape had been successful!

  Yet panting in my cabin, I felt that nonetheless a part of myself had already been stolen from me and transformed, just as the effect and secretion of a malignant tumour, once established, changes an organism. True, I was still the radio operator, who did his work, sending off and receiving telegrams, who talked with the other crew members in time-honoured ways, but my thinking was conducted in long convoluted sentences concerning the consequences of adventures that were alien to me: disappointment, banishment, love of a woman, for a country, both unworthy, both unattainably far away and for that reason attractive.

  What country, what woman? I didn’t know and didn’t want to know, because if I knew that too… But then why was I not released from that unbearable existence on board ship?… Yes, and banished to an even more unbearable one. Not that, not that! Rather remain the man, the creature, who sits in his cubbyhole, with the hood on his head, who drifts across the wide, hot, hated water, together with a filthy ship.

  Work rattled on under arc lamps. There was a dim light on in the cabin, everything was in its place, so wasn’t it safe here? Wasn’t I free? There was no spot, no person on shore I longed for, I could sign off wherever I wanted. After an hour the loading stopped and all the lights went out. The ship would leave tomorrow at first light. I lay between the silence of the hot iron and the wood, without sleeping. What I had feared did not happen; I felt lucid and free, more than I had for years. Everything would come right, I would be content with my life, and no one would be able to force their way into it and then it would not be bad, then it would be better than anywhere on land. If only one could accustom one’s head not to think and one’s body not to long for movement, then it was all right, it was a good life. I was excited; I stroked the edges of my bunk, into which I fitted so well. I was floating on air and halfway through the night I fell into a light, dreamless sleep.

  The next morning my intoxicating sense of freedom had gone. I was once more the radio operator on a tramp steamer, the lowest of the low. My right hand was out of action, so that I had to signal with my left, and now in broad daylight, while the ship was at sea, I was still afraid. After a few days, when my hand was better, it passed, especially once I had firmly resolved never to go ashore in China again, except in Hong Kong, which was still tolerable. In the past China had seemed to me only filthy and disgusting, as I knew nothing but the coolies, the docks and the port areas, and then I suddenly saw what lay beyond them: the vast country with its endless arid fields, which people had to fertilize with their own manure to produce a yield, living, that is, from their own excrement; in the fields the millions of graves, the cities where the overpopulation spilt over into the surrounding area, where the stench of food and corpses competed with miasma emanating from the sick living, and among them were the grimacing dragons and statues of idols, the gnawing, never-ending antiquity of it all.

  Now I was far removed from this wretchedness, as resigned and grinning as the Chinese themselves, and I could despise it. It had been my experience that the greatest misery lies not in a starving, fatally ill body, but in a tortured mind. Desperately I clung to what was left of the old life, and sought, in order to strengthen it, the company of those who shared my fate, my fellow-mariners, as if I wanted to surround myself with their din, and joined in their conversations and drank with them.

  At first I was warmly accepted into the small circle: just as the pious rejoice at the conversion of a Christian, so the drunks rejoice at the fall of a moderate man. But later they started mocking me, since I did not really belong with my past, which I used arrogantly as a barrier between them and me. I could not do it. It is difficult to assume a cultured personality, and it is even more difficult to appear coarse when one is not. After that they began to avoid me. Life on board became hell, a thousand times more unbearable than the real one, because of its very smallness.

  But it became a thousand times worse when I was back in my cabin at night. At the beginning all that happened was that it shrank, becoming narrower and narrower until I was nearly stifled; it became a cell that was detached from the ship, and the immensely deep base of the Chinese mainland pressed against the walls. Sometimes I broke out, went to the radio cabin, was alarmed by the instruments, which had become instruments of torture, primitive and refined. I escaped the narrow cell like a bullet fired from the barrel, and collapsed onto an open, wide, yellow, cruel plain. The only problem was that there was nothing on earth but scattered dots, immovable boulders and grey vultures soaring in the sky.

  In the morning, awake, I felt increasingly hopeless; I would become a prey if I could not oppose them with a stronger being, but what was I, the most rootless, most raceless person alive, to do? And then it also came when I was sitting on watch with the headphones on. Signals that cannot have been sent by any transmitter kept intervening between my listening and the other signals. I did not dare write them down, though something sometimes came through that resembled a word, but fortunately I knew only English and French. Two words formed themselves quite often, but I managed to forget them. The dream of the cell and the plain became worse.

  After three months we put into Hong Kong, and in all that time I had not set foot on shore. I was summoned to the company office. I was unused to walking, and had become like the others: after ten paces I got into a rickshaw, and without saying or asking anything the coolie rode me to the red-light district, where I spent half an hour in one of the houses with a Japanese woman. For the first time in months, a moment’s life. Would it be the last? Softness, melancholy and the bitter, wry aftertaste it all leaves. At the office, I was offe
red a position on a ship bound for England: the Captain had reported that that I was mentally disturbed. I reflected for a moment and refused, and made out that it was nothing. It was too late: a few months ago I would have seized that chance of saving myself, but now I could no longer escape, being pursued at a great distance was worse.

  I was kept on the ship. It moored in the bay for two nights, close to Stonecutter’s Island; I slept soundly and well, as do many condemned men, the night before. I still had time.

  III

  IN THE EVENING we steamed back out of the bay. The weather was bad, and a mixture of foam and rain blew over the bow, and sometimes over the bridge. The white patch of Waglan Island was like a ghost in the dark and as we passed it, the buoy that always sounds there let out, at long intervals, a bellow like a slaughtered cow. Then came the Lingding rocks, then the Ladrones islands, and we were out in the open sea, in the dead of night.

  I was able to get four hours’ sleep and had to take down the weather reports. I woke up on time, but it was as if I had been asleep for months and for the time being would need no further sleep, so completely rested was I, so certain was I that a new life was about to begin, although we were in the middle of the ocean. I switched on the power and waited, with the headphones inevitably round my head, for the weather report from Zi-Ka-Wei, where the Jesuits observe the atmosphere of the Yellow and South China Sea and warn shipping of storms. They watch over the ships, as others do over the welfare of souls. They have many sins to expiate. It took some time, and I read while I waited, but finally the introductory signals came, and I was ready: typhoon originating north of Luzon, moving south-westwards, speed…

  I felt something cold on my forehead. I tried to brush it away, still absorbed in receiving the signals, but my hand was grasped, and another claw grabbed me round the neck, while yet another pulled my hand off the signal key and several at once tugged at the headphones.

  How did all those hands come to be on me at the same time? I was able to look up for a moment, and then my head was forced down again. The radio cabin was full of Chinese: I had never realized so many people could fit into it; less than half the number of white men could have done so. Even without a revolver against my temple I would not have been able to resist. I could not move, the cabin was so full. They tied me up, then some of them left the cabin, leaving four behind, who smashed the dynamo; they knew what they were doing. I had to show them where the elements were and they were destroyed too. Then I was carried outside. The bridge was full of Chinese, and the Captain stood among them. We were thrown into a cabin together. Some of us were injured and at first were able to lie down, but the engineers were also stuffed into the cabin one by one, so that everyone had to stand up again.

  There was no great problem if one did not resist and waited calmly: the ship was steered into a shallow bay until it ran aground. Then the pirates left the ship with the valuables, went ashore somewhere among the mountains and immediately disappeared, while we stayed on board until a torpedo boat with a shallow draught came and took off the rest of the crew, or a storm finished us off. The pirates could not be caught, and the ship could not be refloated. That was the normal outcome. If the torpedo boat came quickly and one had kept one’s possessions, one could just sign on for another ship. The company’s losses were covered by the insurance.

  This time it was different, frighteningly different. Usually about twenty men attacked the ship, whereas this gang numbered at least a hundred, as many as there were crew. And then the way they acted proved that there were as many leaders as foot soldiers. Normally one of the officers has to steer the ship with a couple of revolver barrels trained on him. This gang did not need a helmsman. The third different thing was… the typhoon, which only I knew about. If we kept heading straight for the shore, we were bound to encounter it, as we would be heading straight for it.

  Fortunately the Captain was standing next to me, so that I could whisper news of the approaching catastrophe in his ear without causing panic among the others. He went pale, motioned me to be quiet and wait until one of the Chinese came by and then ask to speak to the man in charge. It was morning before they brought us some food, which was actually to make a mockery of us. We did not have a hand free, or the room to raise it to our mouths. It was put on the corner of a cupboard, to taunt us. I tried to signal that I wanted to speak to their chief, as did the Captain, but they didn’t understand us.

  Fortunately they had also taken the Chinese contractor or comprador prisoner. He was probably part of the plot, but even if he was they obviously wanted to save his face. To that end the comprador endured hunger, thirst and near-suffocation with us, and I must say with great composure. So he was still subject to the Captain’s authority and translated his request.

  A quarter of an hour later I and the comprador were untied and taken forward to the Captain’s cabin. Five Chinese were sitting there. On the table revolvers lay among whisky bottles. Four of them were sitting on the bunk, while the fifth occupied the Captain’s office chair. Beneath a black mask hung a grey moustache. The man was very fat and scarcely moved. I had a suspicion that he was a white man. The Chinese fired questions, the comprador translated, and one of the four retranslated. I told them about the last signal I had received and warned them that we were heading for a typhoon if we kept on this course. The chief muttered incomprehensibly, and we were grabbed again and taken back to the cabin where we were being held. The comprador whispered to me: “Because of his superior wisdom he knows all about currents and typhoons, and doesn’t need the Westerners’ machines.”

  Fine, I thought, if that’s how you want it. I hope he’s caught in the middle of it with his superior wisdom. But actually I expected him to use our advice to his advantage, and have them change course. I was wrong, but I’m convinced that he, and he alone, realized the importance of the warning, but could not pay any attention to it in front of the others without forfeiting his authority.

  At first, though, the chief’s wisdom seemed superior to the sensitive instruments of Zi-Ka-Wei. For two days we sailed across a calm sea. We were tied a little less tightly, and the sickest of us could lie in the two bunks, and we could eat food. The Captain and the second engineer suffered worst, as we were given no alcohol at all. The Captain especially was going visibly downhill, shivering, stuttering and weeping.

  On the third night it arrived after all, despite the fat chief’s wisdom. We saw nothing of the storm. Now no one could lie down any more and still we were thrown on top of each other at intervals. It went on for two days. Three men died. The Captain went mad and started biting; all his teeth were knocked out. The rest could scarcely breathe. If it had lasted a few hours longer we would all have suffocated. But the door opened, and the wind had dropped, though the waves were still splashing up sky-high. But things soon improved. In the afternoon we were laid out on the deck, and buckets of water were thrown over us till we got up, and then we had to drag the bodies to the railings; we refused to throw them overboard, and they lay there for hours, until another high wave came and did the job for us and washed them away.

  How could it be so calm the following day? The sea was no longer a swirling mass of water, we were floating in a soft blue mist, with a few brown islands beside us and a few ragged clouds above us. We no longer felt our bodies, and pain and exhaustion were forgotten. It was as if the hurricane had abolished gravity. We sailed on, and the clouds faded into a complete blur, but the islands were becoming more numerous; in the evening hosts of them lay off a low, hazy coast. The sky above seemed like the real world, where between vertical cliffs wide fissures opened onto azure seas.

  Between them the Loch Catherine drifted like a foreign body, a meteor, hurled down onto a still fluid planet that had come to rest but not yet found solidity. The ship floated into the bay.

  The next morning we lay a hundred metres from the sandy shore. This time the pirates seemed not to be content with carrying off cash and precious possessions. All tools, all the iron
and copperware, loose equipment and provisions were landed and carted off by hundreds of coolies to a large shed further inland. The lifeboats were lowered and pulled up onto the beach. All the indications were that the pirates had had enough of going on board as passengers and as in the old days wanted to fit out pirate junks for themselves. It was possible that those on board were on a mission to obtain materials.

  IV

  AFTER THE LOCH CATHERINE had been thoroughly plundered and looked like a stripped wreck, we were also taken off. We were tied by the arm two by two and taken ashore escorted by four Chinese soldiers. Then the ship’s engines were started and it was freed from its moorings. It swung rudderless across the bay, and quickly ran aground. The engines went on churning for a while, then grated to a halt, and the ship formed a new cliff at the entrance to the bay.

  The black iron cauldron in which the food for the deck passengers was always cooked had also been brought ashore. The cook was busy preparing a meal for us. Then the comprador distributed the portions as we moved past him in a line. He had now finally discarded the mask of a fellow-prisoner, and handed us the bowls with a grin. He saw the humour of the reversal of roles with an almost Western sensitivity. But he gave a kick to a few of us whom he hated especially, and he spat in the engineer’s face.

  We did not have much time to empty our bowls. We were soon kicked to our feet, blindfolded and led away. Were we being taken to our deaths? If so, why had they given us food? Or was this an extra refinement? We walked for four hours in uncertainty, and probably only a few of us were seriously afraid of death, and perhaps a few longed for it. But we were all filled with fear of torture—no one was too jaded for that. Anyone stepping out of line, through stumbling, was immediately pushed back, which proved that we were surrounded by a sizeable escort. We stumbled on like this for hours. It was becoming hotter, and the sun was blazing down more fiercely on our uncovered heads. If only the blindfolds had been tied over our skulls, that would have been a relief.