Part 2

So am I. That is one thing, at least, I have learned in travel. I do not love the sea. The look of it is disquieting. There is something in the very sound of it that stirs the apprehension we feel when we listen to noble music; we became inexplicably troubled. It is not the fear of mishap, though that may not be absent. It is more than that, for after all one is much safer in a good ship than when crossing the road at Charing Cross.

It may be a surmise of one’s inconsequence in that immensity of sky and water. And our inconsequence has not been always obvious to us. The ministrations of a city nourish the pride of the social animal and yet make him a dependable creature. Turn him into the open and he shrinks from all that light. The dread problems that our energetic fellow-men create in the cities of the plain make us myopic through the intensity of our peering alarm. We become sure that even the empyrean must watch our activities with grave interest. Yet we may be deceived in that; for on blue water one cannot help noting that the sky does not appear to act with any regard for our interest, and the sea itself is so inscrutable, so vast, and moves with a rhythm that so diminishes one’s own scope and measure, that a voyager may imagine he is confronted by majesty, though an impersonal majesty, without ears or eyes or ruth. That is not comfortable to a sense of self-importance.

Do we travel to learn such things? Of course not. The promise to diminish a feeling of self-importance in a traveller is not one of Messrs. Cook’s happy inducements. We do not travel for that. If we get it at all, we are welcome to it, without extra charge. You must pay more if you want to have a cabin to yourself. There are additional charges, too, if you would deviate from the schedule of your voyage. Should you put off at Penang for a week, and continue by the next ship, that fun must be paid for. Eager still for the end of the rainbow--which, so far on a long voyage, you have not reached, to your surprise and disappointment--you leave your ship at Barbadoes, consult the chart, and judge that what you really want is at Yucatan, at Surinam, at Trinidad, or some other place where you are not; and at a great expense of time and money you go. No use. There again you find that you have taken yourself with you. No rainbow’s end!

I have often wondered what people see who travel round the world in a liner furnished with the borrowings of a city’s club-life and other occasions for idling; Panama, San Francisco, Honolulu, Yokohama, Hong-Kong, Batavia, and Rangoon, all those variations of scenery for the club windows; and so home again. What do they see? The anchorage of Sourabaya is no more revealing than that of Havre, if warmer: a mole, ships at rest, some straight miles of ferro-concrete quays in the distance, flat grey acres of the galvanised roofs of sheds, and a tower or two beyond. True, there are the clouds of the tropics to watch, and a Malay polishing the ship’s brass. Only the mate and the captain are at lunch, for the others have gone ashore. You may make what romance you can out of that.

The others have gone ashore? All the great seaports I have seen have been very much alike; and these liners rarely stay at one long enough to make easy the discovery of a difference. You have no time to get lost. You arrive, and then an inexorable notice is chalked on the blackboard at the head of the ship’s gangway, to which a quartermaster draws your attention as you leave the ship. The old city is two miles away, and the ship sails in two hours. No chance, you see, to get comfortably mislaid and forgotten. Besides, you run off with a car-load of other passengers. Unless the car skids into a ditch the game is up.

Well, after all, that grudging sense of disappointment comes of intemperance with fascinating place-names and illusions. We expect to have romance displayed for us, as though it were a greater Wembley, and it is not. Travellers who “dash” round the world, as the febrile interviewers tell us, who dash across the Sahara or the Atlantic, then get into other speedy engines and dash again, expectant of a full life and their money’s worth, might as well dash to Southend and back till they run over a dog; or dash their brains out, and thus fulfil their destiny. But I am not decrying travel, though sailors, I have been made painfully aware, are much amused by the expectations of those to whom a ship is an interlude of variegated enchantment between the serious affairs of life. I enjoy travel, and a little of it now and then is good for us, if we do not make demands which only lucky chance may fulfil.

The best things in travel are all undesigned, and perhaps even undeserved. I had never seen a whale, for instance, and recently was watching the very waters of the Java Sea where one of them might have been good enough to reward me. Nothing like a whale appeared. Too late for that sort of thing, perhaps. This is the day of the submarine. Or perhaps I stared from the ship listlessly, and with no faith, not caring much whether there were whales and wonders in these days or not. Anyhow, my last chance went. On my way home, while just to the south of Finisterre, I came out of my cabin a little after sunrise merely to look at the weather (which was fine) and a tiny cloud, rounded and defined, was dispersing over the waves, less than a mile away. Shrapnelling? Then a number of those faint rounded clouds of vapour shaped intermittently. The ship was in the midst of a school of whales. There was a sigh--like the exhaust of a locomotive--and a body which seemed to rival the steamer in bulk appeared alongside; we barely missed that shadow of a submerged island. The officer of the watch told me afterwards that the ship’s stem nearly ran over it.

That was a bare incident, however, and perhaps not worth counting. Yet all the significant things in travel come that way. Once in heavy weather I saw a derelict sailing ship; our steamer left its course to inspect her. But she was dead. There was no movement aboard her, except the loose door of a deckhouse. It flung open as we drew near, but nobody came out. The seas ran as they pleased about her deck fixtures. It was sunset, and just when we thought she had gone, for she had slipped over the summit of an upheaval, her skeleton appeared again in that waste, far astern, against the bleak western light. I felt in that moment that only then had the sea shown itself to me.

It is the chance things in travel that appear to be significant. The light comes unexpectedly and obliquely. Perhaps the gods try us. They want to see whether we are asleep. If we are watchful we may get a bewildering hint, but placed where nobody would have expected to find it. We may spend the rest of the voyage wondering what that meant. A casual coast suddenly fixed by so strange a glow that one looks to the opposite sky fearfully; the careless word which makes you glance at a stranger, and doubt your fixed opinion; an ugly city, which you are glad to leave, transfigured and jubilant as you pass out of its harbour; these are the incidents that give a sense of discovery to a voyage. We are on more than one voyage at a time. We never know where Manoa may be. There are no fixed bearings for the City of Gold.

IV

The reader of travellers’ tales is a cautious fellow, not easily fooled. He is never misled by facts which do not assort with his knowledge. But he does love wonders. His faith in dragons, dog-headed men, bearded women, and mermaids, is not what it used to be, but he will accept good substitutes. The market is still open to the ingenious. Any lady who is careful to advise her return from the sheikhs is sure to have the interviewers surprise her at the dock-side. She need only come back from Borneo, by the normal liner, and whisper “head-hunters” to the ever-ready note-books; and if she displays a _parang_ which some Dyak never used except for agricultural purposes, that will be enough to rouse surprise at her daring.

But what are facts? There are limits, as we know, to the credulity of our fellows, as once Mr. Darwin, who considered exact evidence so important, discovered with a shock. What we really want is evidence we can understand, like that most discreet and wary old critic, the aunt of the young sailor. She quizzed him humorously about his flying fish, but was serious at once over that chariot wheel which was brought up on a fluke of his ship’s anchor in the Red Sea. She knew well enough where it was Pharaoh got what he asked for. Give us evidence in accord with our habits of thought, and we know where we are.

Even I have discovered that there are readers of travellers’ tales who decline anything to which there is no reference in _Whitaker’s Almanac_. A very prudent attitude of mind. I cannot find fault with it because it does not accept mermaids from us, but I do suggest there may be things in the world which have not yet come under Mr. Whitaker’s eye. A little scepticism preserves the soul, though infertility would result if the soul were encased in it; which it rarely is, because luckily sceptics only disbelieve what is foreign to them, and accept in unquestioning faith whatever accords with their philosophy. It is true that more scepticism in the past might have saved us from many dragons and visiting angels, which in its absence spawned and flourished with impunity. On the other hand it would have shut out Mount Zion for ever. It must be said, too, that the good readers who repudiate with blighting amusement those narratives of travel which do not accord with Mr. Whitaker’s valuable index, will yet take, and with their eyes shut, much that compels seasoned travellers to smile bitterly.

If you refer to Mr. Whitaker for the Spice Islands, or the Moluccas, for instance, you will fail to find concerning them one little fact: it is not advertised by Mr. Whitaker; not important enough, perhaps. I should never have known it myself, only I was there, once. I am not at all sure the fact is so insignificant that it should pass without notice, so I will record it here. At Ternate, an island which has been forgotten since white men ceased to kill each other for its cloves, it is easy to believe that you have really escaped from the world. Great gulfs of space and light separate you at Ternate from all the agitations by which civilized communities know that they are the buds, full of growing pains, on the tree of life. They are excellent gulfs of light. There are no agitations. Even the typhoons which herald the changes of the seasons, and not so far away, leave Ternate alone. Its volcano--the volcano is all the island--may blow up some day; but we should not expect earthly felicity to shine tranquilly for ever. Therefore while the isle persists it is delightful to walk the strands and by-paths of that oceanic garden of the tropics, and to feel the mind, so recently numbed by the uproar caused in the building of the Perfect State, revive in quietude. One day, on Ternate, I passed through the shade of a nutmeg grove, and came upon a lane at the back of the village. I could smell vanilla, and looked about for that orchid, and presently found it growing against a sugar palm. Behind that odorous shrubbery was a native house, and beyond the house, and far below it, the blue of the sea. Nobody was about. It was noon. It was hot. The high peak of Tidore across the water had athwart its cone a cloud which was as bright as an impaled moon. I saw no reason why this earth should not be a good place for us, and, thanking my fortune, idled along that lane till I saw another house, set back among hibiscus. It was a Malay home, but larger and better than is usual, for it had more timber in it. Along the front of the verandah was a board with a legend in Malay, the Communist Party of India. This confused me, so I strolled in to look closer, and saw hanging within the verandah portraits of Lenin, Trotsky, and Radek; there were others, though I was not communist enough to recognise them; but there they were in my lonely tropical garden, isolated by those gulfs of light and space from Moscow. The Dutch Resident, on hearing later of my extraordinary discovery, merely shot out his lower lip and spread his hands. Why yes, those little meeting houses were all over the East Indies. Such places, as well as the cinematograph.

It is possible that that little fact, as a minor incident of travel, even if it is unknown to Mr. Whitaker, yet may qualify in its own time a number of those facts which are quite well-known to him and to us.

When we are gazing about us in a strange land it is not easy to distinguish what is of importance from what is of no account. You can never tell whether the words of deepest significance are whispered at Government House or in some low haunt near the docks. It is a matter of luck. Time will show. In any case, even if you feel sure you have been vouchsafed a peep into the Book of Doom, and there saw, in the veritable script of an archangel, what you are at once anxious to announce to your fellows for their good, you may save yourself the trouble. If it is not already known, nobody will bother. There is precious little information of importance in the newspapers that has not been long matured in the wood. It is already as old as sin before the man in the street, poor fellow, gapes at it as news.

It may be possible that the hunters of big game miss much while looking for lions, though their thrilling adventures naturally attract most of our attention. And how their records surprise into envy those shy travellers who think lions are quite all right as they are and where they are! The luck of some well-provided travellers is astonishing. They are never bored. They are never still. Only recently I was reading the book of a traveller back from the wilds, whose time had been occupied, while away, in leaping into the jaws of death and out again, which most of us would have found very trying in that heat. Some exercise is good for us, even in the tropics, but cutting that caper too often might do a man serious harm. That equatorial journey appears to have been a long series of frantic but jolly leaps from one threat of extinction to another--the crocodiles, lethal floods, gigantic fish, venomous snakes, and unarmed savages, were everywhere. It was a land where you have to wear top-boots to keep off the anacondas, as one might wear a steel helmet when meteors are about. But such a story is not so surprising as the serious delight with which it is received on publication, and perhaps with entire belief in its ordinary character for a land of that sort. I well understand it; for I can guess from the eager questions that have been put to me about the ubiquity of leopards by night, the serpents which festoon the forest, and the other noticeable wayside affairs of the wilderness, what could be done with a cheerful and fertile fancifulness. It would never do to disclose the plain truth, which is that one can grow as weary of the sameness of Borneo as of that of Islington. I know of one intrepid sojourner on far beaches, a novelist, who fascinates a multitude of readers with livid and staccato fiction in which figure island princesses whose breasts are dangerous with hidden daggers. Head-hunters and dissolute whites move there in a darkness which means Winchesters, but no sleep; even the intense beauty of those beaches is so like evil that only reckless men could face it. Yet in reality those islands are as placid as though laved by the waters of the Serpentine. A migration from Piccadilly to their shores would make the lovely but tigrish princesses show for what they are, no more dangerous than the young ladies peeling the potatoes at Cadby Hall. Indeed, their bold chronicler, who stimulates feverish longing in the dreary lassitude of England’s wage earners with a violent drug distilled from the beach refuse of that distant archipelago, does most of his work in the bed of a rest-house, which is never approached by a danger worse than a falling coconut.

It seems possible for a romanticist, if he is cynical enough, and if he injects his stimulant with a syringe of about the measure of a foot-pump, to have a nice success with those who suffer from the speed and distraction of our homeland; for though the sufferers will take any stimulant, yet their nerves respond to very little that is not as coarse as a weed-killer. This should not be regretted. It would be dismal, indeed, if they were completely insensitive. The high speed of our weeks driven by machinery, the clangour of engines, crime, and politics, the fear which never leaves the poor victims, for they have been parted from the quiet earth which gives shelter and food, have depraved their bodies and starved their natural appetites. It is a wonder that they feel anything, or care for anything. They are left with but a vague yearning for some life, for any life different from their own; but they are so far gone that they cannot conceive that it might be a life of peace and goodwill. Their very sunrises must be bloody, like their familiar news, or they would not know it for the dayspring; yet the full measure of their fall from grace, which only an alienist could rightly gauge, is that they are not satisfied with a dusky bosom unless it conceals a knife.

But when you are out in these barbarous lands you find that princesses, unluckily, are even less noticeable than the leopards, and when seen are less beautiful. They do not wear knives in their bosoms for the same reason that other charmers dispense with them. Indeed, there is no end to the difference between what you have been led to expect in a place, and what is there. Compare the reality of a tropical forest with its popular picture. That popular notion of it did not grow in the tropics, but in the pages of imaginative fiction and poetry. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it is not so easy to read. One may see more orchids in Kew Gardens in a day than in a year of the tropical woods. If the Garden of Eden had been anything like the Amazon jungle, then our first parents would never have been evicted; they would have moved fairly soon on their own account, without giving notice. A few coloured snakes, on some days, would break the brooding monotony of that forest. They are, however, rarely seen. The animals of these fastnesses seldom show themselves. When they do, it is done inadvertently, and they are off at once. If you meet a tiger when on a ramble by daylight, you may consider yourself lucky if his sudden departure gives you two seconds of him before he is gone for ever. After dark, of course, you would take care that he could not meet you alone, for that place is not yours after sunset, and he knows it.

Tigers, snakes, lovely but malignant nymphs, and head-hunters, are not the dangers. What kills men in the outer wilderness is anxiety, undernourishment, and mosquitoes. The mosquito, the little carrier of malaria, is a more exacting enemy of the adventurer than the harpies and dragons of the fairy tales ever were to knights-errant. He is worse than all the cannibal tribes. Head-hunters, it must be confessed, are far better for conveying liveliness to the pages of a travel book, if it is to be worth the great price usually charged for it. Naturally, a reader wants his money’s worth. A mosquito will not go far, if you are an author, and are writing high romance. When, however, you are dealing personally with the realities of the Congo, you will discover a tendency to feel more concern over the small flies which carry fevers and sleeping sickness than for all the lions and cannibals in Africa. A statue to St. George killing a mosquito instead of a dragon would look ridiculous. But it was lucky for the saint he had only a dragon to overcome.

Now the travellers who accompany cinema operators to the outer dangers are always careful to explain to their eager interviewers, for the lucrative object of a publicity as wide as it can be got, the horrific perils of human flesh-pots, poisoned arrows, giant reptiles, and the other theatrical properties which are recognised instantly by everybody with the requisite awe. On the other hand, we learn from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine that the young men who go to Africa to hunt down that elusive creature the trypanosome of sleeping sickness, venture out unannounced, though they have spent years, and not weeks, in preparing themselves for their perilous quest. They go unannounced, are granted but £100 a year as a reward, and return--if they have that luck--less recognisable than the firemen of their ships; for the very firemen, as we know, have been the subject of happy verse. Yet compared with the skill and enterprise and courage needed for the hunting of that trypanosome, the killing of lions is no more than the handing of milk to kittens. The threats and terrors of the mythologies, the cynocephali, anthropophagi, gorgons, and krakens, were but coarse grimaces to the premonition which would make a modern traveller scuttle home, if he allowed it to numb his heart when he is alone, and hungry and fatigued, in the place where the tiny harbingers of fevers and dissolution are at their liveliest. St. George, with all the sacred incantations of the Church, could not fight such a dragon. But there the difficulty is. It cannot be made into a dramatic picture. It is merely an invisible presence, a haunting diffusion, like doom itself. It cannot be fought. There can be no heroics. There can be no escape. It is one with the sly hush of the wilderness.

V