There were shoals between Deliverance and Merauke, so that we couldn’t make a bee-line, but had to go due west for fifty miles. The wind was abeam and the ketch rolled horribly, dipping down to the gunwale and righting herself with a jerk. This went on for hours. Then the turbid water showed that we had reached the shoals. We took soundings every quarter of an hour and watched for broken water. The swell was not so heavy and we rolled less. We were far out of sight of land and we passed no other craft. We seemed very small in that desert of waters. The afternoon wore on and the soundings showed that we had eight fathoms; we had passed the shoals and we turned north. The wind was fair and the sea calmer; it was lovely then to sail on an even keel. Twice we saw turtles basking on the surface. The breeze grew lighter and lighter. There were heavy white clouds on the horizon but they were motionless; they might have been clouds in a picture. The sun set, and the light gradually faded from the sky. Night fell and the stars came out one by one. After supper we sat about the deck smoking. The air was balmy. The moon rose slowly, forcing her way through the clouds. It was enchanting to sail so through the night. I slept in snatches and each time I woke it was with a sense of delight. About two in the morning C. had the mainsail taken down and we sailed with only the foresail.
I awoke again at dawn. It was cool but not cold on deck. There was no sign of land. The sun was pleasant as it came up and warmed one. It was delicious to smoke cigarettes in that limpid morning. An hour or two later we saw land. It was flat and low. We sailed on until the outline of the coast was clear, a wooded country, and through the glass we descried little fishing-villages. We ran along looking for the Merauke river. We didn’t know where it was, and it made one feel like one of the old explorers; we took soundings, and tried to judge by the shape of the coast-line where we were. We knew there was a light at the entrance to the river and we kept a look-out for it. We sailed for hours, feeling our way along, and at last we saw weed floating on the water, muddier now, and C. said that must mean we were near the river. We sailed on and then made out an opening in the coast line, very vaguely, and after a bit a thin white streak like a flagstaff which was the light. We saw a buoy in the distance and steered for it. The tide was flowing in, and though the breeze was light we began to move quickly. There was the mouth of the river before us and we sailed up, the tide carrying us, in fine style.
We saw the red roofs of the town, ketches at anchor, and a jetty. We lowered the sails and anchored. We had arrived.
Merauke has a neat Dutch look. It has not the sordid aspect of a similar town in a British colony. The Government offices, frame built, with roofs of corrugated iron, one or two large sheds for merchandise, and the Controleur’s house are on the front. At right angles to this is the one street of the town and there the Chinese traders live. During our stay we had our meals in the store of one of them. It was a treat to eat curry after living for a week on dugong, corned beef, coarse fish and canned fruit.
In the muddy dry creeks there are hundreds of mudfish, from little things a couple of inches long to fat brutes of eight or ten. They sit looking at you with large round malevolent eyes and then make a dash and bury themselves in their holes. It is extraordinary to see them scudding over the surface of the mud on their flappers. The mud is alive with them. They give you an impression in miniature of what the earth must have been in long-past ages when such creatures, gigantic in size, were its inhabitants. There is something uncanny and horrible about them. They give you a loathsome feeling that the mud itself has mysteriously come alive.
Dobo (Aroe Islands). This is a rather sordid little town of two streets with Chinese and Japanese stores. The native Malay village is built on piles at the water’s edge. In the harbour are the pearling cutters. The men of the Celebes Trading Company have a large untidy frame house, but they spend most of their time on the Company’s schooner, coming in to Dobo only when the steamer brings mail.
Cardan. The son of an English remittance man and a Polynesian woman. An enormous fellow, tall and fat, with flashing eyes and very white teeth, rather bald, but with curling hair round his ears and at the back of his neck. He talks eagerly with a kind of spluttering explosiveness. He is very hearty, laughs uproariously, and his conversation is made up of Australian oaths, scatological and obscene.
Tanal. A little town at the water’s edge of houses on piles crowded with Chinese, Arabs and Malays. From the veranda of the rest-house you see the water through the tall casuarina trees, the island opposite, and one or two houses. Flowering shrubs bloom with a wanton profusion. Enormous butterflies, gaily painted, flit from shrub to shrub. Green parrots, with red or yellow heads, ripple, a flash of brilliant colour, across the blue sky. Toward evening the birds burst into loud song. Their notes are wild and strange. In the distance you hear the beating of drums and perhaps the playing of a wooden pipe. At sunset there is a red glow over the island that faces you.
The Kai Islands. You approach through a defile of low-lying, small wooded islands. It is as though you were going through a labyrinth. The sun rises and the sea is calm and blue. It is so lovely, so peaceful, so solitary that it fills you with awe. You have the feeling that you are the first ever to have burst into that silent sea and you hold your breath in anticipation of you know not what.
Banda. It is approached by a narrow inlet between two high islands thickly wooded. Opposite the town is the volcano overgrown with rough shrubbery. In the harbour the water is deep and clear, and at the water’s edge are warehouses and thatched houses on piles.
The streets of Banda are lined with bungalows, but the place is dead, and they are empty and silent. People walk about, the few you see, quietly, as though they were afraid to awaken the echo. No voice is raised. The children play without noise. Now and again you catch a sweet whiff of nutmeg. In the shops, all selling the same things, canned goods, sarongs, cottons, there is no movement; in some of them there is no attendant, as though no purchaser could possibly be expected. You see no one buy or sell.
There are few Chinese, for they don’t settle where no trade is, but many Arabs, some in smart Cairo fezzes and neat duck suits, others in white caps and sarongs. They are dark-skinned, with a Semitic look, and they have large shining eyes. There are a great many half-castes, Malay and Papuan, and of course numbers of Malays. Now and then you see a Dutchman, deeply bronzed, or a stout Dutch woman in loose pale draperies.
The old Dutch bungalows are thatched, with very high, pointed roofs, and the roof juts out, supported by Doric or Corinthian pillars of brick covered with plaster, to make a broad veranda. In the verandas are round tables with stiff Dutch chairs and hanging lamps. The floor is tiled or of white marble. Inside the house the rooms are dark, stiffly furnished in a Dutch way, with bad paintings on the walls. The parlour runs right through the house and on each side of it are bedrooms. Behind is a walled garden. The whitewash of the wall is peeling, and from damp in places green. The garden is wild and overgrown with weeds. There is a confusion of roses and fruit trees, creepers, flowering shrubs, bananas, with a palm or two, a nutmeg and a breadfruit tree. At the back are servants’ quarters.
As you walk about you come now and again upon a long white wall crumbling away and within it are ruined buildings. This has been a Portuguese convent. Along the shore, beyond the Portuguese fort, are the trim new houses of Dutch officials.
There are two Portuguese forts. One is a little away from the sea, surrounded by a moat in which grows a tangle of trees and shrubs; but only these massive walls of great grey stones remain, and the quadrangle is a jungle of tropical vegetation. Opposite the fort is a large open space reaching down to the sea where huge trees grow, casuarinas, kanary trees and wild figs. They were planted by the Portuguese, and here I suppose they took their ease in the cool of the evening.
Higher up on a hill, in a commanding position, is another fort, grey and bare, surrounded by a deep moat. It is in a fair state of preservation. The only door is about twelve feet from the ground, and is reached by a lad
der. Inside the square walls is another fort with a well in the centre. It has large chambers with late Renaissance doors and windows, well proportioned but scantily ornamented, where presumably the officers of the garrison lived.
The forest. Enormously tall kanary trees give shade to the nutmegs. Underfoot there is no tangle of the bush, but only decaying leaves. You hear the boom of great pigeons as large as chickens, and the screech of parrots. Occasionally you come across miserable huts in which live ragged Malays. It is humid and sultry.
They say that in the old days the merchants were very rich and vied with one another in extravagance. They had carriages so that they might slowly drive in the evening along the sea front and round the square. There were so many vessels that sometimes the harbour was full, and the newcomers had to wait outside till the departure of a fleet gave them a chance to enter. They used to bring marble from Holland as ballast and huge blocks of ice, for they came without a cargo to fetch the precious spices from the island.
Afternoon in the tropics. You have tried to sleep, but you give it up as hopeless and come out, heavy and drowsy, on to your veranda. It is hot, airless, stifling. Your mind is restless, but to no purpose. The hours are leaden-footed. The day before you is unending. You try to cool yourself by taking a bath, it serves but little. It is too hot to sit on the veranda and you throw yourself once more on your bed. The air under the mosquito curtain seems to stand still; you cannot read, you cannot think, you cannot repose.
The cool of the evening. The air is soft and limpid. You have an extreme sense of well-being. Your imagination is pleasantly but not exhaustingly occupied with image after image. You have the sense of freedom of a disembodied spirit.
Macassar Harbour. The sun sets magnificently, yellow, then red and purple; and in the distance grown over with coconut trees floats in radiance. You try to think how to describe the dazzling spectacle. Its splendour a little unnerves you and you feel a bit wabbly about the knees, but at the same time it fills your heart with its own glory and if you could sing you would burst into song. The Quintet in the Meistersinger? No, a Gregorian chant. It is a death in which there is no sorrow, but only fulfilment. Eastern cities can best offer you, their harbours with shipping, tramps, passenger-boats, schooners with an exotic air (something in them still of the galleons which first entered those distant waters) and fishing-smacks; that, the sunrise and the sunset.
1923
T. He is a dug-out who after the war came out to Ceylon to be the secretary of a club on the strength of having run a regimental mess. He is a short stumpy man with legs very much too short for a long body. He looks absurd in very wide trousers and a long loose homespun coat, both much the worse for wear. He gives you the impression that he was a cavalryman, but in point of fact he was in the K.O.Y.L.I. His hair is dark and thin and plastered down on his skull, but he has an enormous flowing and luxuriant moustache. He prides himself on playing bridge very well, and criticises everyone with whom he plays. He is fond of talking of the titled persons he has known and of the generals and field-marshals with whom he was hail-fellow-well-met.
The Snatcher. He is a man of little more than fifty, but he looks very old and frail. He is bald and his hair and moustache are white. He has a very red thick nose. When he is seated you have the impression of a little hunched-up man, and when he stands up you are surprised to see that he is more than commonly tall. He is a great fisherman and talks incessantly of his pursuit. He generally has flies in his pockets. He is much interested in butterflies and is bringing out a book on the butterflies of Ceylon. He drinks a great deal and talks willingly of the drinking-bouts in which he has taken part. I don’t know why he is called the Snatcher.
The Jungle. There is a moment just before sundown when the trees in the jungle seem to detach themselves from the great mass of forest and become individuals; then you cannot see the wood for the trees. In the magic of the hour they appear to gain life of a new kind so that you can almost imagine that they enclose spirits and with the sunset will be capable of changing their places. You feel that at some uncertain moment a strange thing will happen to them and they will be fantastically transformed. Then the night comes, the moment has passed, and once more the jungle takes them back; the trees again become part of the wood and they are still and silent.
A planter’s house. The two-storey bungalow is placed on the crest of a little hill and it is surrounded by a garden in which are lawns of some sort of coarse herbage, bright yellow cannas, hibiscus and flowering shrubs. Behind the bungalow is a huge tree with red flowers. From the veranda there is a long narrow view of hill planted with rubber. There is a small formal drawing-room at the back, but the living-room is a large open veranda, furnished with estate furniture, large chairs, with extensions for the legs, cane chairs, a table or two, and some shelves in which are cheap and ragged editions of vapid novels. The bedrooms are upstairs; they are very poorly furnished with iron beds, painted deal chests-of-drawers and a washstand with broken crockery which does not match. At meals the glass is coarse, the plate is shabby, and the crockery is of the cheapest kind. The dinner is elaborate, with soup, fish, roast and sweet, but everything is badly cooked and served in a slovenly and unappetising fashion.
Rangoon. They were father and son, both skippers of tramps belonging to a Chinese firm. The father idolised his trim, smart, handsome boy and was horrified when he fell in love with a Burmese girl, but not just in love, head over ears in love. He was infatuated. He went native, began to smoke opium and eventually lost his job. The older man got the idea that the girl had cast a spell over the boy and determined to save him. One day she was found drowned. No one knew how she had come by her death, but everyone believed that the father was responsible. The boy was broken-hearted. He went all to pieces, and the passionate affection that he had had for his father turned to a deadly hatred.
Mandalay by moonlight. The white gateways are flooded with silver and the erections above them are shot with silhouetted glimpses of the sky. The effect is ravishing. The moat in Mandalay is one of the minor beauties of the world. It has not the sublimity of Kilauea nor the spectacular picturesque of the Lake of Como, it has not the swooning loveliness of the coastline of a South Pacific island, nor the austere grandeur of parts of the Peloponnesus, but it has a beauty which you can take hold of and enjoy and make your own. It is a beauty which does not carry you off your feet, but which can give you constant delight. Those other beauties need the frame of mind to be enjoyed and appreciated, but this is a beauty suited to all seasons and all moods. It is like Herrick’s poems, which you can take up with pleasure when you are out of humour for the Inferno or Paradise Lost.
F. He is a big fat man, with scanty grey hair, but his red face is unlined and round, so that he looks sometimes almost boyish. He has a small grey toothbrush moustache. His teeth are very bad, and the only one you see, a long yellow one in the middle of his mouth, hangs loosely and looks as if it would come out with a sharp pull. His face is shiny with sweat. In mufti he wears a khaki suit, a tennis shirt with a loose open collar and no tie. He has a game leg caused by a bad wound during the war and walks with a pronounced limp. His only interest in life is horses. He speaks of them as skins and talks of nothing else all day long. He races a great deal, keeping his own ponies, and is a byword, for he never wins a race. He is jovial and hearty, but gives you the impression that he is up to all the tricks of the race-track and would hesitate at little to bring off a coup.
E. He describes himself as country-born, and because he has probably been exposed to a good deal of mortification on that account insists that he is proud of it. His father was first mate on a tea clipper running to China, who eventually settled in Moulmein and married a Burmese. E. came to Mandalay as interpreter in 1885 and has remained there ever since, first in the Government service and then in a business of his own, selling jade, amber and silk. When I went to see him I was taken into a room which served both as a parlour and as a shop. It was crowded with cheap European
furniture, upholstered chairs and sofas, occasional tables and what-nots, and here and there were cabinets in which was displayed a certain amount of second-rate jade and amber. There was no fan, and the place was hot and stuffy and mosquito-ridden. He kept me waiting a long time, while he was dressing himself up. Then he came in, a tall thin man with white hair, a sallow dark skin and a flat nose. He talked a great deal in a loud rasping voice; he seemed to like the sound of it. He spoke in a formal elaborate way, using in conversation words which we are accustomed to see only in print. He always chose the long word rather than the short one. He had a passion for the hackneyed phrase. Whenever he referred to anybody and however often, it was always by his full title. Thus he spoke of General Sir George White, the Hero of Ladysmith, and of General Sir Harry Prendergast, V.C.
G. He is a tall man of over six feet, slender, not exactly handsome, but of prepossessing appearance. He has a thin sun-burnt face with sunken cheeks; his eyes are blue and smiling. He is clean-shaven, but for a small toothbrush moustache. His hair, cut short, is hardly grey. He is loose-jointed and his gestures are easy and graceful. He is dressed without affectation, but well; his clothes hang on him loosely, but are well cut. He is a cavalryman and you can imagine that in uniform he must be a striking figure. He speaks with a singular drawl, in a rather humorous fashion. He is dryly ironic. He is an amateur of horseflesh, a great sportsman, and talks easily of all the unusual games that he has played.
A Writer's Notebook Page 23