“The chart appears as useful as your kamàl, Elder Brother,” Kukachin said to me, and then to the captain, “Would you have a copy made for me—for my Royal Husband, I mean, in case he should ever wish to campaign southward from Persia?”
The captain obligingly and immediately set a scribe to doing that, and I voiced no more misgivings about the lost North Star. However, I still felt a little uneasy in those tropic seas, because even the sun behaved oddly there.
What I had always thought of as “sunset” might have been better called “sunfall” there, for the sun did not ease itself down from the sky each evening and gently settle beneath the sea—it made a sudden and precipitous plunge. There was never a flamboyant sunset sky to admire, nor any gradual twilight to soothe the way from day to night. One moment we would be in bright daylight, and in little more than an eye blink we would be in dark night. Also, there was never any perceptible change in the length of day and night. Everywhere from Venice to Khanbalik, I had been accustomed to the long days and short nights of summertime, and the opposite in wintertime. But, in all the months we spent making our way through the tropics, I never could notice any seasonal lengthing of either day or night. And the captain verified that: he told me that the difference between the tropics’ longest day of the year and the shortest was only three-quarters of an hour’s trickle of sand in the glass.
Three months out from Quan-zho, then, we came to our farthest southern reach, in the archipelago of the Spice Islands, where we would alter course to the westward. But first, since our water needed replenishment again, we made landfall at one of the islands, called Jawa the Greater. From the moment we first saw it on the horizon until we reached it, a good half a day later, we passengers were already saying among ourselves that this must be a most felicitous place. The airs were warm and so laden with the heady aromas of spices that we were almost made giddy, and the island was a tapestry of rich greens and flower colors, and the sea all about was the soft, translucent, glowing color of milk-green jade. Unfortunately, our first impression of having found an island of Paradise did not endure.
Our fleet anchored in the mouth of a river called Jakarta, offshore of a port called Tanjung Priok, and my father and I went ashore with the water-barrel boats. We discovered the so-called seaport to be only a village of zhu-gan cane houses built on high stilts because all the land was quagmire. The community’s grandest edifices were some long cane platforms, with palm-thatch roofs but no walls, piled with bags of spices —nuts and barks and pods and powders—waiting for the next passing trade ship. What we could see of the island beyond the village was only dense jungle growing out of more quagmire. The warehouses of spices did provide an aroma that overwhelmed the jungle’s miasmic smell and the stench common to all tropical villages. But we learned that this island of Jawa the Greater was only by courtesy called one of the Spice Islands, for nothing more valuable than pepper grew here, and the better spices—nutmeg and clove and mace and sandal and so on—grew on more remote islands of the archipelago and were merely collected in this place because it was more convenient to the sea lanes.
We also soon discovered that Jawa had no Paradise climate, for we had no sooner got ashore than we were drenched by a thunderstorm. Rain falls on that island one day of every three, we were told, and usually in the form of a thunderstorm which, we did not have to be told, was a fair imitation of the end of the world. I trust that, after our eventual departure, Jawa enjoyed an uncommonly long spell of fine weather, because we had nothing but bad. That first storm simply continued, day and night, for weeks, the thunder and lightning taking a rest now and then, but the rain falling interminably, and we rode it out there at anchor in the river mouth.
Our captains had intended to go west from this place through the narrow passage called the Sunda Strait, which separates Jawa the Greater from the next westward island, Jawa the Lesser, also called Sumatera. They said that strait allowed the easiest run to India, but they also said the strait could only be negotiated in calm seas and unimpeded visibility. So our fleet stayed in the Jakarta River mouth, where the downpour was so continuous and so heavy that Jawa was not even visible through it. But we knew the island was still there, because we were waked at every dawn by the howling and whistling of the gibbon apes in the jungle treetops. It was not really an uncomfortable place to be marooned—our boatmen brought from shore fresh pork and fowl and fruits and vegetables to augment our stores of smoked and salted foods, and we had a plenitude of spices to enhance our meals—but the waiting got extremely tiresome.
Whenever I got insupportably weary of seeing nothing but the harbor water jumping up to meet the rain, I would go ashore, but the view there was not much better. The Jawa people were quite comely of appearance—small and neatly proportioned and of golden skin, and the women as well as the men went bare to the waist—but the entire populace of Jawa, whatever religion it had originally espoused, had long ago been converted to Hinduism by the Indians who were the chief spice buyers. Inevitably, the Jawa people had adopted everything else that seems to go with the Hindu religion, meaning squalor and torpor and reprehensible personal habits. So I found the people no more appealing than any other Hindus, and Jawa no more appealing than India.
Some of the others of our company tried to alleviate their boredom in other ways, and came to grief by it. All the Han crewmen of our fleet, like mariners of every race and nationality, were mortally terrified of getting into water. But the Jawa people were quite at home on it and in it as well. A Jawa fisherman would skim about on even a turbulent sea in a craft called a prau, so small and flimsy that it would have been careened by the waves except that it was balanced by a log carried at some distance alongside on long cane spars. And even the Jawa women and children swam considerable distances from the shore through quite fearsome surf. So a number of our Mongol male passengers, and a few venturesome females, all of them inland-born and therefore incautious about large bodies of water, decided to emulate the Jawa folk and frolic in that warm sea.
Though the ambient air, full of the downpouring rain, was almost as liquid as the sea, the Mongols stripped down to a minimum of clothing and slid overboard to splash about. As long as they held onto the many rope ladders dangling overside, they were in no great danger. But many got overdaring, and tried swimming at liberty, and of every ten of them who vanished beyond the curtain of rain, perhaps seven would reappear. We never knew what happened to the missing ones, but the attrition kept on. It did not frighten others from venturing out, and we must have lost at least twenty men and two women from Kukachin’s retinue.
We did know what happened to two of our casualties. One man who had been swimming climbed back onto the ship, cursing “Vakh!” to himself and shaking drops of blood from one hand. As the ship’s Han physician salved it and bound it up, the man reported that he had rested his hand on a rock, and a fish had been clinging to it, a fish mottled with algae and looking just like the rock, and its dorsal spines had stung him. He said that much, and then screamed, “Vakh! Vakh! Vakhvakhvakh!” and went into insane paroxysms, thrashing all about the deck, foaming at the mouth, and when he finally slumped in a heap, we found that he was dead.
A Jawa fisherman, who had just brought his catch to sell to us, regarded that performance without emotion, and then said—a Han crewman translating—“The man must have touched a stonefish. It is the most venomous creature in any sea. Touch it, you endure such terrible agony that you go mad before you die. If that happens to anyone else, split a ripe durian and apply it to his wound. It is the only remedy.”
I knew that the durian had many praiseworthy qualities—I had been voraciously eating of them ever since I discovered that they grew in profusion here—but I would never have suspected that the fruit had medicinal qualities. However, soon afterward, one of Kukachin’s hairdressing women also went for a swim, and came back weeping from the pain of a spine-stung arm, and the physician tried the durian remedy. To everyone’s pleased surprise, it worked. The girl s
uffered no more than a swollen and painful arm. The physician made a careful note for his collection of materia medica, saying in some amazement, “As nearly as I can judge, the durian pulp somehow digests the stonefish poison before it can take dire effect.”
And we also saw what accounted for the loss of another two of our company. The rain had finally stopped, and the sun had come out, and our captains were all standing on their decks, scrutinizing the sky and waiting to see if the weather might continue fine, long enough for us to up anchor and be away, and they were muttering Han incantations to make it so. The jade-green Jawa Sea that day looked so pretty as almost to tempt me into it—a gentle chop, fish-scaled with glittering lunettes of light—and did tempt two other men, Koja and Apushka, two of the three envoys of the Ilkhan Arghun. They challenged each other to a water race to a distant reef, and plunged from the chuan’s side and went flailing and splashing away, and we all gathered at the rail to cheer them on.
Then down from the sky swooped a number of albatrosses. The birds, I suppose, had been balked in their usual fishing by the long spell of rain, and were weary of scavenging our ships’ garbage and wanted some fresh meat. They began making dives at the two swimmers, stabbing their long hooked beaks at whatever parts of the men showed above the water, which was their heads. Koja and Apushka stopped swimming, trying to fend off the clustering birds and stay above water at the same time. We could hear them shouting, then cursing, then screaming, and see the blood running down their faces. And, when the albatrosses had plucked the eyes out of both of them, the men in desperation sank under water. They tried to rise up for a gasp of air a time or two, but the birds were waiting. And finally the two men simply let themselves drown, in preference to being torn to pieces. But, of course, as soon as their bodies floated limply and soggily on the surface, the albatrosses settled on them and peeled and shredded them for all the rest of that day.
It was sad, that Apushka and Koja had come safely through the countless hazards of journeying overland from Persia to Kithai, and then the long sea way to here, to die so abruptly and in such an un-Mongol-like way. We were all, Kukachin especially, much grieved by the loss. We did not think to take it as a premonition of any future and perhaps more grievous loss—my father did not even murmur about “bad things always happening in threes”—though, as events turned out, we might well have seen an omen in it.
When the weather had kept bright and clear for two more days, our captains decided to trust that it would go on holding. The crews were set to their immense oar beams, and rowed our ponderous ships slowly out of the river mouth to the open sea, and the vast slatted sails were raised, and we again were taken by the wind, and turned westward toward home. But when we had rounded a high headland and turned southwest into a channel narrow enough that we could see another distant coast on our other side, a mast-top lookout on the leading ship called down. He did not cry one of the usual curt sea calls, like “Ship in sight!” or “Reefs ahead!”—no doubt because there was no accepted and abbreviated call for what he saw. He only shouted down, in a voice of wonderment, “Look how the sea boils!”
All of us on the decks went to look overside—and that is exactly what the Sunda Strait seemed to be doing: boiling and bubbling, like a pot of water set on a brazier to make cha. And then, right in the middle of the fleet, the sea heaved up in a hump, opened like a monster mouth and exhaled a great gust of steam. The plume kept spewing upwards for several minutes, and the steam drifted all among the ships. We passengers had been making exclamations of one kind or another, but when the cloud of steam enveloped us we began to cough and sputter, for it had the suffocating stench of rotten eggs. And when the steam had passed over us, we were all dusted with a fine yellow powder on our skin and clothes. I wiped the dust from my stinging eyes and licked it from my lips, and tasted the distinctive musty taste of sulphur.
The captains were shouting to their crews, and there was a deal of running about and shifting of sail spars, and all our ships turned about and fled the way they had come. When the boiling and belching patch of sea was safely behind us, our vessel’s captain told me, apologetically:
“Farther along the strait lies the brooding black ring of sea mountains called the Pulau Krakatau. Those peaks are actually the tops of undersea volcanoes, and they have been known to erupt with devastating effect. Making waves as high as mountains, waves that scour the strait clean of every living thing, from end to end. Whether that boiling of the water yonder presaged an eruption I cannot know, but we cannot take the risk of sailing through.”
So the fleet had to double back through the Jawa Sea and then turn northwestward up the Malacca Strait between Jawa the Lesser, or Sumatera, and the land of the Malayu. That was a reach of water three thousand li long and so broad I might have taken it for a sea, except that circumstances forced us to carom back and forth from one side of it to the other, so I knew well that there was extensive land on both verges of it, and got to know those lands rather better than I would have wished. What happened was that the weather turned foul again, and perniciously stayed so, harrying us constantly from the swampy western Sumatera side to the forested eastern Malayu side of the strait and back again, and making us take shelter in bays or coves on one shore or the other—and put in for water and fresh foods at wretched little cane villages too negligible to deserve names, though they all had names: Muntok and Singapura and Melaka and many others I have forgotten.
It took us fully five months to beat our way up the Malacca Strait. There was open sea at the northern end, where we might have turned due west, but our captains kept on northwestward, sailing us in prudent short lunges from one island to the next of a long string of islands called the Necuveram and Angamanam archipelago, using them in the manner of stepping-stones. Finally we came to the island that they said was the farthermost of the Angamanam, and there we anchored offshore and passed enough time to fill all our water tanks and take on all the fruits and vegetables we could wheedle out of the inhospitable natives.
Those were the smallest people I ever saw, and the ugliest. Men and women alike went about stark naked, but the sight of an Angamanam female would arouse no least lust even in a mariner long at sea. Men and women alike were squat and chunky of form, with enormous protruding underjaws, and skin blacker and glossier than any African’s. I could easily have rested my chin atop the head of the tallest person among them—except that I would not have done any such thing, because their hair was their most repellent feature: merely random tufts of reddish fuzz. One would expect a people so grotesquely ugly to try to make up for it by cultivating a gracious nature, but the Angamanam folk were uniformly scowling and surly. That was because, a Han seamen told me, they were disappointed and irate that we had not wrecked a vessel or two of our fleet on the island’s coral reefs, for the people’s only occupation and only religion and only joy was the plundering of grounded ships and the slaughter of their crews and the ceremonial eating of them.
“Eating them? Why?” I asked. “Surely no inhabitants of a tropic isle, with all the provender of sea and jungle, can lack for food to eat.”
“They do not eat the shipwrecked mariners for nourishment. They believe that the ingestion of an adventurous seafarer makes them as bold and venturesome as he was.”
But we were too many and too well armed for the black dwarfs to make any assault on us. Our only problem was persuading them to part with their water and vegetables, for of course such people had no interest in gold or any other sort of monetary recompense. They did, however, like so many hopelessly ugly folk, have a high vanity. So, by doling out among them bits of trumpery cheap jewelry and ribbons and other fripperies with which they could adorn their unspeakable selves, we got what we required, and we sailed away.
From there, our fleet had an uneventful westward run across the Bay of Bangala, which is the only foreign sea that I have now traversed three times, and I will be gratified if I never have to do so again. This crossing was somewhat more to the southerly
than my other two had been, but the view was the same: an infinite expanse of azure water with little white trapdoors of foam opening and closing here and there, as if mermaids were taking peeps at the upper world, and herds of pork-fish frisking about our hulls, and so many flying-fish hurtling aboard that our cooks, having long since depleted our tanks of Manzi freshwater fish, periodically collected them from the decks and made us meals of them.
The Lady Kukachin humorously inquired, “If those Angamanam people acquired courage by eating courageous people, will these meals make us able to fly like flying-fish?”
“More likely make us smell like them,” grumbled the maid who attended her bathing chamber. She was disgruntled because, on this long run across the bay, the captains had commanded that we could bathe only in sea water dipped up in buckets, not to waste the fresh. Salt water gets one clean enough, but it leaves one cursedly gritty and scratchy and uncomfortable afterward.
3
AT the western side of the great bay, we made landfall on the island of Srihalam. That was not far south of the Cholamandal of India, where I had earlier made sojourn, and the islanders were physically very similar to the Cholas and, like the Cholas, the island’s coastal residents were mainly engaged in the trade of fishing for pearls. But there the similarity ended.
The Srihalam islanders had adhered to the religion of Buddha, hence were vastly superior to their mainland Hindu cousins in morals and customs and vivacity and personal appeal. Their island was a lovely place, tranquil and lush and of generally balmy weather. I have often noticed that the most beautiful places are given a multiplicity of names: witness the Garden of Eden, which is also variously called Paradise and Arcadia and Elysium and even Djennet by the Muslims. Just so, Srihalam has been severally named by every people who ever admired it. The ancient Greeks and Romans called it Taprobane, meaning Lotus Pond, and the early Moorish seafarers called it Tenerisim, or Isle of Delight, and nowadays Arab mariners call it Serendib, which is only their faulty pronunciation of the islanders’ own name for the place, Srihalam. That name, Place of Gems, is variously translated in other languages: Ilanare by the mainland Cholas, Lanka by other Hindus, Bao Di-fang by our Han captains.
The Journeyer Page 115
