A Writer's Notebook (62 page)

The schoolmaster. He is a man between fifty and sixty, tall and spare, with a much-wrinkled face; his grey hair grows thickly on his head, and he has a grey moustache and a week's growth of grey beard on his chin. His teeth are badly broken and discoloured. He talks indistinctly, partly owing to his lack of teeth and partly owing to the heavy moustache, so that it is an effort to listen to him. He is dressed in a khaki stengah shifter, a pair of ragged pepper-and-salt trousers, old tennis shoes and a shapeless felt hat. He is very dingy and dirty. He has lived on Mobiag for fifteen years in a shabby bungalow on the water-front among the coconut trees. It is of planks covered with a roof of corrugated iron. The cane chairs are rickety. On the walls are a number of photographs and coloured advertisements. On a little shelf are his books, cheap editions of popular novels and magazines. His wife has native blood in
her. She is a dark woman, wizened, with grey curly hair and a stoop. She wears a torn white skirt and a not very clean white blouse. When I went into their house a dozen native girls of just under fifteen, buxom and nimble, were seated on the floor taking a sewing lesson.

The missionary. He is a very thin man with a shock of grey hair and blue eyes. He generally wears grey trousers and a singlet, but when he wants to dress up puts on a clerical collar with a black frontpiece over his singlet, and a white coat. In his library are cheap novels and theological works. He has a ketch in which he travels from island to island, for his parish consists of eight islands. He is at home very little. His wife has short wavy hair, and if she did not wear spectacles and were nicely dressed she would be a pretty woman. She is a very bad cook and keeps her house in a slovenly way. She is shy with strangers.

In front of the veranda were casuarina trees, and through them you saw the sea and the island beyond. Long after the sun set there was a blood-red glow over the sea and the casuarina trees were silhouetted against it. They were lacelike and graceful and unreal. The picture reminded you of a Japanese print. At last the fitful breeze swayed them a little more and there sprang into sight, only to disappear again, a white star.

The casuarina trees were like a veil of phantasy that pleasant thoughts obtrude between you and the sight before your eyes.

Next morning we started for Deliverance. C. wanted to put in there to deliver stores. The wind was lighter than the day before. The superficial clouds still sped swiftly across the sky against, as it were, a background of dark heavy clouds that
seemed hardly to move. The sun shone brightly. I sat on deck in a shirt and a pair of ducks, with my feet bare, and read. At one time we had the wind dead fair and C. set the mainsail and the foresail butterfly-wise. Deliverance is a low-lying island, and at first one saw only a dimness on the horizon, then the tops of trees. We had to sail round in order to find shelter to anchor. There is no opening in the reef and we were obliged to anchor outside a mile or more from the island. The sea was choppy and it took over an hour to row ashore. We had to bail out all the time with an empty fruit tin.

Back on board we had a shark line out with a piece of dugong as bait, and suddenly there was a great commotion in the water. We drew the line in. There was a struggle and a flurry. We saw a shark. C. fetched his revolver and we drew the shark to the surface and near the side. C. fired and there was a stain of blood in the water. The struggle went on and C. put six shots into it. Then a rope was passed round it, over the head and below the dorsal fin, with a noose, and this was attached to the pulleys. We hoisted it over the side and it fell heavily on the deck. It was not quite dead and lashed spasmodically with its tail. Utan took a tomahawk and gave it whacking blows on the skull, then a long knife and slit open its belly. In the stomach were the bones of a turtle. We cut out the huge liver. Then we cut off a piece of the shark, baited the hook and flung the line overboard. In a few minutes another shark was hooked. Soon we had three huge sharks from fourteen to eighteen feet long. The decks were horribly greasy and bloody. Early next morning we cast them overboard and set sail for Merauke. C. wanted to make oil from their livers for the masts and spars, and all day two of the crew were cooking chunks of liver in a kerosene tin over a fire of sticks. The stench was awful.

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.