Authors: Joseph Conrad
"Certainly, sir—though I don't see how we can do it. It seems far
inland. A signal for what, sir?"
"It was not meant for us," said Lingard in an unexpectedly savage tone.
"Here, Shaw, make them put a blank charge into that forecastle gun. Tell
'em to ram hard the wadding and grease the mouth. We want to make a good
noise. If old Jorgenson hears it, that fire will be out before you have
time to turn round twice. . . . In a minute, Mr. Carter."
The yacht's boat had come alongside as soon as the brig had been brought
up, and Carter had been waiting to take Lingard on board the yacht. They
both walked now to the gangway. Shaw, following his commander, stood by
to take his last orders.
"Put all the boats in the water, Mr. Shaw," Lingard was saying, with one
foot on the rail, ready to leave his ship, "and mount the four-pounder
swivel in the longboat's bow. Cast off the sea lashings of the guns,
but don't run 'em out yet. Keep the topsails loose and the jib ready for
setting, I may want the sails in a hurry. Now, Mr. Carter, I am ready
for you."
"Shove off, boys," said Carter as soon as they were seated in the boat.
"Shove off, and give way for a last pull before you get a long rest."
The men lay back on their oars, grunting. Their faces were drawn, grey
and streaked with the dried salt sprays. They had the worried expression
of men who had a long call made upon their endurance. Carter, heavy-eyed
and dull, steered for the yacht's gangway. Lingard asked as they were
crossing the brig's bows:
"Water enough alongside your craft, I suppose?"
"Yes. Eight to twelve feet," answered Carter, hoarsely. "Say, Captain!
Where's your show of cutthroats? Why! This sea is as empty as a church
on a week-day."
The booming report, nearly over his head, of the brig's eighteen-pounder
interrupted him. A round puff of white vapour, spreading itself lazily,
clung in fading shreds about the foreyard. Lingard, turning half round
in the stern sheets, looked at the smoke on the shore. Carter remained
silent, staring sleepily at the yacht they were approaching. Lingard
kept watching the smoke so intensely that he almost forgot where he
was, till Carter's voice pronouncing sharply at his ear the words "way
enough," recalled him to himself.
They were in the shadow of the yacht and coming alongside her ladder.
The master of the brig looked upward into the face of a gentleman,
with long whiskers and a shaved chin, staring down at him over the side
through a single eyeglass. As he put his foot on the bottom step he
could see the shore smoke still ascending, unceasing and thick; but even
as he looked the very base of the black pillar rose above the ragged
line of tree-tops. The whole thing floated clear away from the earth,
and rolling itself into an irregularly shaped mass, drifted out to
seaward, travelling slowly over the blue heavens, like a threatening and
lonely cloud.
The coast off which the little brig, floating upright above her anchor,
seemed to guard the high hull of the yacht has no distinctive features.
It is land without form. It stretches away without cape or bluff, long
and low—indefinitely; and when the heavy gusts of the northeast monsoon
drive the thick rain slanting over the sea, it is seen faintly under the
grey sky, black and with a blurred outline like the straight edge of a
dissolving shore. In the long season of unclouded days, it presents to
view only a narrow band of earth that appears crushed flat upon the vast
level of waters by the weight of the sky, whose immense dome rests on it
in a line as fine and true as that of the sea horizon itself.
Notwithstanding its nearness to the centres of European power, this
coast has been known for ages to the armed wanderers of these seas
as "The Shore of Refuge." It has no specific name on the charts, and
geography manuals don't mention it at all; but the wreckage of many
defeats unerringly drifts into its creeks. Its approaches are extremely
difficult for a stranger. Looked at from seaward, the innumerable islets
fringing what, on account of its vast size, may be called the mainland,
merge into a background that presents not a single landmark to point the
way through the intricate channels. It may be said that in a belt of sea
twenty miles broad along that low shore there is much more coral, mud,
sand, and stones than actual sea water. It was amongst the outlying
shoals of this stretch that the yacht had gone ashore and the events
consequent upon her stranding took place.
The diffused light of the short daybreak showed the open water to the
westward, sleeping, smooth and grey, under a faded heaven. The straight
coast threw a heavy belt of gloom along the shoals, which, in the calm
of expiring night, were unmarked by the slightest ripple. In the faint
dawn the low clumps of bushes on the sandbanks appeared immense.
Two figures, noiseless like two shadows, moved slowly over the beach of
a rocky islet, and stopped side by side on the very edge of the water.
Behind them, between the mats from which they had arisen, a small heap
of black embers smouldered quietly. They stood upright and perfectly
still, but for the slight movement of their heads from right to left and
back again as they swept their gaze through the grey emptiness of the
waters where, about two miles distant, the hull of the yacht loomed up
to seaward, black and shapeless, against the wan sky.
The two figures looked beyond without exchanging as much as a murmur.
The taller of the two grounded, at arm's length, the stock of a gun with
a long barrel; the hair of the other fell down to its waist; and, near
by, the leaves of creepers drooping from the summit of the steep rock
stirred no more than the festooned stone. The faint light, disclosing
here and there a gleam of white sandbanks and the blurred hummocks of
islets scattered within the gloom of the coast, the profound silence,
the vast stillness all round, accentuated the loneliness of the two
human beings who, urged by a sleepless hope, had risen thus, at break of
day, to look afar upon the veiled face of the sea.
"Nothing!" said the man with a sigh, and as if awakening from a long
period of musing.
He was clad in a jacket of coarse blue cotton, of the kind a poor
fisherman might own, and he wore it wide open on a muscular chest the
colour and smoothness of bronze. From the twist of threadbare sarong
wound tightly on the hips protruded outward to the left the ivory hilt,
ringed with six bands of gold, of a weapon that would not have disgraced
a ruler. Silver glittered about the flintlock and the hardwood stock
of his gun. The red and gold handkerchief folded round his head was of
costly stuff, such as is woven by high-born women in the households of
chiefs, only the gold threads were tarnished and the silk frayed in the
folds. His head was thrown back, the dropped eyelids narrowed the gleam
of his eyes. His face was hairless, the nose short with mobile nostrils,
and the smile of careless good-humour seemed to have been permanently
wrought, as if with a delicate tool, into the slight hollows about
the corners of rather full lips. His upright figure had a negligent
elegance. But in the careless face, in the easy gestures of the whole
man there was something attentive and restrained.
After giving the offing a last searching glance, he turned and, facing
the rising sun, walked bare-footed on the elastic sand. The trailed butt
of his gun made a deep furrow. The embers had ceased to smoulder. He
looked down at them pensively for a while, then called over his shoulder
to the girl who had remained behind, still scanning the sea:
"The fire is out, Immada."
At the sound of his voice the girl moved toward the mats. Her black hair
hung like a mantle. Her sarong, the kilt-like garment which both sexes
wear, had the national check of grey and red, but she had not completed
her attire by the belt, scarves, the loose upper wrappings, and the
head-covering of a woman. A black silk jacket, like that of a man of
rank, was buttoned over her bust and fitted closely to her slender
waist. The edge of a stand-up collar, stiff with gold embroidery,
rubbed her cheek. She had no bracelets, no anklets, and although dressed
practically in man's clothes, had about her person no weapon of any
sort. Her arms hung down in exceedingly tight sleeves slit a little way
up from the wrist, gold-braided and with a row of small gold buttons.
She walked, brown and alert, all of a piece, with short steps, the eyes
lively in an impassive little face, the arched mouth closed firmly; and
her whole person breathed in its rigid grace the fiery gravity of youth
at the beginning of the task of life—at the beginning of beliefs and
hopes.
This was the day of Lingard's arrival upon the coast, but, as is known,
the brig, delayed by the calm, did not appear in sight of the shallows
till the morning was far advanced. Disappointed in their hope to see the
expected sail shining in the first rays of the rising sun, the man and
the woman, without attempting to relight the fire, lounged on their
sleeping mats. At their feet a common canoe, hauled out of the water,
was, for more security, moored by a grass rope to the shaft of a long
spear planted firmly on the white beach, and the incoming tide lapped
monotonously against its stern.
The girl, twisting up her black hair, fastened it with slender wooden
pins. The man, reclining at full length, had made room on his mat for
the gun—as one would do for a friend—and, supported on his elbow,
looked toward the yacht with eyes whose fixed dreaminess like a
transparent veil would show the slow passage of every gloomy thought by
deepening gradually into a sombre stare.
"We have seen three sunrises on this islet, and no friend came from the
sea," he said without changing his attitude, with his back toward the
girl who sat on the other side of the cold embers.
"Yes; and the moon is waning," she answered in a low voice. "The moon
is waning. Yet he promised to be here when the nights are light and the
water covers the sandbanks as far as the bushes."
"The traveller knows the time of his setting out, but not the time of
his return," observed the man, calmly.
The girl sighed.
"The nights of waiting are long," she murmured.
"And sometimes they are vain," said the man with the same composure.
"Perhaps he will never return."
"Why?" exclaimed the girl.
"The road is long and the heart may grow cold," was the answer in a
quiet voice. "If he does not return it is because he has forgotten."
"Oh, Hassim, it is because he is dead," cried the girl, indignantly.
The man, looking fixedly to seaward, smiled at the ardour of her tone.
They were brother and sister, and though very much alike, the family
resemblance was lost in the more general traits common to the whole
race.
They were natives of Wajo and it is a common saying amongst the Malay
race that to be a successful traveller and trader a man must have some
Wajo blood in his veins. And with those people trading, which means also
travelling afar, is a romantic and an honourable occupation. The trader
must possess an adventurous spirit and a keen understanding; he should
have the fearlessness of youth and the sagacity of age; he should be
diplomatic and courageous, so as to secure the favour of the great and
inspire fear in evil-doers.
These qualities naturally are not expected in a shopkeeper or a Chinaman
pedlar; they are considered indispensable only for a man who, of noble
birth and perhaps related to the ruler of his own country, wanders over
the seas in a craft of his own and with many followers; carries from
island to island important news as well as merchandise; who may be
trusted with secret messages and valuable goods; a man who, in short,
is as ready to intrigue and fight as to buy and sell. Such is the ideal
trader of Wajo.
Trading, thus understood, was the occupation of ambitious men who played
an occult but important part in all those national risings, religious
disturbances, and also in the organized piratical movements on a large
scale which, during the first half of the last century, affected the
fate of more than one native dynasty and, for a few years at least,
seriously endangered the Dutch rule in the East. When, at the cost of
much blood and gold, a comparative peace had been imposed on the
islands the same occupation, though shorn of its glorious possibilities,
remained attractive for the most adventurous of a restless race. The
younger sons and relations of many a native ruler traversed the seas of
the Archipelago, visited the innumerable and little-known islands, and
the then practically unknown shores of New Guinea; every spot where
European trade had not penetrated—from Aru to Atjeh, from Sumbawa to
Palawan.
It was in the most unknown perhaps of such spots, a small bay on the
coast of New Guinea, that young Pata Hassim, the nephew of one of the
greatest chiefs of Wajo, met Lingard for the first time.
He was a trader after the Wajo manner, and in a stout sea-going prau
armed with two guns and manned by young men who were related to his
family by blood or dependence, had come in there to buy some birds
of paradise skins for the old Sultan of Ternate; a risky expedition
undertaken not in the way of business but as a matter of courtesy toward
the aged Sultan who had entertained him sumptuously in that dismal brick
palace at Ternate for a month or more.
While lying off the village, very much on his guard, waiting for the
skins and negotiating with the treacherous coast-savages who are the
go-betweens in that trade, Hassim saw one morning Lingard's brig come
to an anchor in the bay, and shortly afterward observed a white man of
great stature with a beard that shone like gold, land from a boat and
stroll on unarmed, though followed by four Malays of the brig's crew,
toward the native village.