being burned alive and Christians crucified? That her bodyguard go almost naked - but with pipe-clayed cartridge belts, behind a band playing `The British Grenadiers'? That her chief pleasures are torture and slaughter - why, I have seen a ritual execution at which hundreds were buried alive, sawn in half, hurled from—'
'No, Don Solomon, no!' squeals Elspeth, covering her ears, and old Morrison muttered about respecting the presence of ladies - now, the Don Solomon of London would never have mentioned such horrors to a lady, and if he had, he'd have been profuse in his apologies. But here he just smiled and shrugged, and passed on to talk of birds and beasts such as were known nowhere else, great coloured spiders in the jungle, fantastic chameleons, and the curious customs of the native courts, which decided guilt or innocence by giving the accused a special drink and seeing whether he spewed or not; the whole place was ruled by such superstitions and crazy laws, he said, and woe betide the outsider who tried to teach 'em different.
'Odd spot it must be,' says I. 'What did you say it was called?'
'Madagascar,' says he, and looked at me. 'You have been in some terrible places, Harry - well, if ever you chance to be wrecked there'— and he nodded at the green shore —'pray that you have a bullet left for yourself.' He glanced to see that Elspeth was out of earshot. 'The fate of any stranger cast on those shores is too shocking to contemplate; they say the queen has only two uses for foreign men - first, to subdue them to her will, if you follow me, and afterwards, to destroy them by the most fearful tortures she can devise.'
'Playful little lady, is she?'
'You think I'm joking? My dear chap, she kills between twenty and thirty thousand human beings each year - she means to exterminate all tribes except her own, you see. When she came to the throne, some years ago, she had twenty-five thousand enemies rounded up, forced to kneel all together in one great enclosure, and at a given signal, swish! They were all executed at once. She kept a few thousand over, of course, to hang up sewed in ox skins until they rotted - or to be boiled or roasted to death, by way of a change. That's Madagascar.'
'Ah, well,' says I, 'Brighton for me next year, I think. And you're going ashore?'
'For a few hours. The governor of Tamitave, up the coast, is a fairly civilized savage - all the ruling class are, including the queen: Bond Street dresses, as I said, and a piano in the palace. That's a remarkable place, by the way - big as a cathedral, and covered entirely by tiny silver bells. God knows what goes on in there.'
'You've visited it?'
'I've seen it - but not been to tea, as you might say. But I've talked to those who have been inside it, and who've even seen Queen Ranavalona and lived to tell the tale. Europeans, some of 'em.'
'What are they doing there, for God's sake?'
'The Europeans? Oh, they're slaves.'
At the time, of course, I suspected he was drawing the long bow to impress the visitors - but he wasn't. No, every word he'd said about Madagascar was gospel true - and not one-tenth of the truth. I know; I found out for myself.
But from the sea it looked placid enough. Tamitave was apparently a very large village of yellow wooden buildings set out in orderly rows back from the shore; there was a fairish-sized fort with a great stockade some distance from the town, and a few soldiers drilling outside it. While Haslam was ashore, I examined them through the glass - big buck niggers in white kilts, with lances and swords, very smart, and moving in time, which is unusual among black troops. They weren't true niggers, though, it seemed to me; when Haslam was rowed out to the ship again there was an escorting boat, with a chap in the stern in what was a fair imitation of our naval rig: blue frock coat, epaulettes, cocked hat and braid, saluting away like anything - he looked like a Mexican, if anything, with his round, oily black face, but the rowers were dark brown and woolly haired, with straight noses and quite fine features.
That was the closest I got to the Malagassies, just then, and you may come to agree that it was near enough. Solomon seemed well satisfied with whatever business he had done ashore, and by next morning we were far out to sea with Madagascar forgotten behind us.
Now, I said I wouldn't weary you with our voyage, so I shall do no more than mention Ceylon and Madras - which is all they deserve, anyway, and take you straight away across the Bengal Bay, past the infernal Andamans, south by the heel of Great Nicobar, and into the steaming straits where the great jellyfishes swim between the mainland of Malaya and the strange jungle island of Sumatra with its man-monkeys, down to the sea where the sun comes from, and the Islands lie ahead of you in a great brilliant chain that runs thousands of miles from the South China Sea to Australia and the far Pacific on the other side of the world. That's the East - the Islands; and you may take it from one who has India in his bones, there's no sea so blue, no lands so green, and no sun so bright, as you'll find beyond Singapore. What was it Solomon had said —'where it's always morning.' So it was, and in that part of my imagination where I keep the best memories, it always will be.
That's one side of it. I wasn't to know, then, that Singapore was the last jumping-off place from civilization into a world as terrible as it was beautiful, rich and savage and cruel beyond belief, of land and seas still unexplored where even the mighty Royal Navy sent only a few questing warships, and the handful of white adventurers who voyaged in survived by the speed of their keels and slept on their guns. It's quiet now, and the law, British and Dutch, runs from Sunda Strait to the Solomons; the coasts are tamed, the last trophy heads in the long-houses are ancient and shrivelled,13 and there's hardly a man alive who can say he's heard the war gongs booming as the great robber fleets swept down from the Sulu Sea. Well, I heard 'em, only too clearly, and for all the good I've got to say of the Islands, .I can tell you that if I'd known on that first voyage what I learned later, I'd have jumped ship at Madras.
But I was happily ignorant, and when we slipped in past the green sugar-loaf islands one fine April morning of '44, and dropped anchor in Singapore roads, it looked safe enough to me. The bay was alive with shipping, a hundred square-riggers if there was one: huge Indiamen under the gridiron flag, tall clippers of the Southern Run wearing the Stars and Stripes, British merchantmen by the bucketful, ships of every nationality - Solomon pointed out the blue crossed anchors of Russia, the red and gold bars of Spain, the blue and yellow of Sweden, even a gold lion which he said was Venice. Closer in, the tubby junks and long tradingpraus were packed so close it seemed you could have walked on them right across the bay, fairly seething with half-naked crews of Malays, Chinese, and every colour from pale yellow to jet black, deafening us with their high-pitched chatter as Solomon's rowers threaded the launch through to the river quay. There it was bedlam; all Asia seemed to have congregated on the landing, bringing their pungent smells and deafening sounds with them.
There were coolies everywhere, in straw hats or dirty turbans, staggering half-naked under bales and boxes - they swarmed on the quays, on the sampans that choked the river, round the warehouses and go-downs, and through them pushed Yankee captains in their short jackets and tall hats, removing their cheroots from their rat- trap jaws only to spit and cuss; Armenian Jews in black coats and long beards, all babbling; British blue jackets in canvas shirts and ducks; long-moustached Chinese merchants in their round caps, borne in palkis; British traders from the Sundas with their pistols on their hips; leathery clipper men in pilot caps, shouting oaths of Liverpool and New York; planters in wideawakes making play among the niggers with their stout canes; a file of prisoners tramping by in leg-irons, with scarlet-coated soldiers herding them and bawling the step - I heard English, Dutch, German, Spanish, and Hindi all in the first minute, and most of the accents of England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the American seaboards to boot. God knows what the native tongues were, but they were all being used at full pitch, and after the comparative quiet we'd been used to it was enough to make you dizzy. The stink was fearful, too.
Of course, waterfronts are much the same everywhere; once you were away from the river, out on the 'Mayfair' side of the town, which lay east along Beach Road, it was pleasant, and that was where Solomon had his house, a fine two-storey mansion set in an extensive garden, facing the sea. We were installed in cool, airy rooms, all complete with fans and screens, legions of Chinese servants to look after us, cold drinks by the gallon, and nothing to do but rest in luxury and recover from the rigours of our voyage, which we did for the next three weeks.
Old Morrison was all for it; he had gluttonized to such a tune that he'd put on flesh alarmingly, and all he wanted to do was lie down, belching and refreshing his ill nature in a hot climate. Elspeth, on the other hand, must be up and doing at once; she was off almost before she'd changed her shift, carried in a palki by menials, to pay calls on what she called The Society People, find out who was who, and squander money in the shops and bazaars. Solomon pointed her in the right directions, made introductions, and then explained apologetically that he had weeks of work to do in his 'changing-house at the quays; after that, he assured us, we would set off on our tour of his possessions, which I gathered lay somewhere on the east coast of the peninsula.
