A Writer's Notebook (63 page)

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 ladder. 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.