A woman’s voice in it brought his vague survey of the mixture of moving and noisy colours to a focus. A diminutive brown creature in a green sheath, with a silver stud in her nose, was wandering about and calling a name—it sounded like a name. She was seeking somebody in the mob, which took no notice of her, and she appeared to be anxious. She was as though the light of understanding had been let into that ship. She had separated from the agglomerate, and had a personal voice. Then she stopped below his rail. She was bending over a yellow bundle. A child was asleep there in a patch of shadow, with a face as pale and still as a flower upturned to the moon, and its frail hands curled as loosely as fallen petals. Of course, the dark patch in the sky is that only because we cannot do any better with it; not near enough to it; not our place in the sky. That child was as Sinclair, and the woman as himself. There is no such thing as humanity. There are men and women.
The day glowed and was lazy; it was a blue intensity loosened with a tincture of gold. No land was in sight. Yet, with a sea dreaming in so virtuous a sleep that peace itself would have thought that here was its home, a traveller did not look for land. The sky was gracious, brooding in solicitude over their little company of chattering innocents. Their modicum of a steamer—for her size checked Colet with the idea, when he boarded her, that she was venturesome—was enjoying herself as freely as though she knew nothing ever darkened that favoured region.
Colet began to feel, after the first day, that he had drifted into another sphere. He watched a company of brown people squatting by a hatch, whose happy stoicism and doll-like figures were appropriate to ancient tranquillity and unchanging skies. They did not know harshness. They made on stringed instruments improbable music of a tenuous appeal which was heard by a part of his mind of which he knew nothing. It was music in accord with that aromatic foredeck. That was a smell he did not know, any more than the music, but if they were foreign they were known to a dream that was mislaid somewhere in his memory.
The Nibong had many ports of call. Each place appeared unexpectedly, as though by chance. The ports had rare names. A legend, as it were, would precipitate as a silent appearance, and remain by the ship for an hour. If he came out from his cabin to look at it again, it had gone. It had melted into the sky. He began to suppose that this voyage was one without purpose, as vague as the drowsy afternoons. The course of their toy ship was set to nothing more than a fancy generated like the music, fixed by the whimsicality of a song. They paid calls to get settings for the music: Moulmein, Martaban, Tavoy, Mergui. It did not matter where they went. The company on the foredeck changed from place to place, but its colours were the same, and music was always there.
They had a coast to port, after Moulmein; it was that, or a perennial enchantment. Probably it was but the promise of a kingdom, the auspice of a happier time. It was not the spectacle of solid earth. Beyond the indeterminate green where the foliage met the sea there were heights. They might have been mountains, but when you were not watching them their violet outlines changed. When next they were seen they had risen into stupendous ranges of cobalt and bitumen, too massive for clouds, too high for mountains; and that meridian range was hollowed, as lightning glared and quivered in its body, by profound gulfs, abysms seen for an incredible instant, and then gone. The clouds and the far mountains were of the same nature as the constellation of islands through which the Nibong was threading. Norrie, when Colet was leaving him, had an afterthought. He mentioned a place called Mergui.
“Look out for the Mergui Islands. Be careful. Unless it blows hard you’ll want to land on one of them. If you do you’ll forget all that I’ve told you, and I shan’t see you again.”
Here the islands were. But nobody, of course, ever had landed on them. They were unknown to man, except as fond reflections. They were as silent as unspoken thoughts. They were versatile. The thoughts changed. The next was better than the last. As the Nibong cruised through the vision Colet saw faceted stones interrupting that polished level of lapis-lazuli, small mounds of emerald on the mirror, bergs of white marble, glimpses of retirements with coral thresholds leading to palms and a forested mountain under a spell. A canoe or two was seen, but they melted round promontories. The secrets were undisclosed. The shades which haunted that seclusion faded when men approached from the outer world.
Colet was told, later, that they were nearing Penang. It was time, he thought, to do that, and to touch reality. The ship should not cruise off the map for too long, or they might never get on to it again. Now, at last, she was close to a proper shore, a high coast solid and brilliant as it looked to the setting sun. There were great ships, and the level light discovered pale houses recessed within the green of the hills. But as he found it, even as
