Tide marks

From his high window he could see where the Thames, once upon a time, was crossed by Charing Cross Bridge. But not on that winter afternoon. The bridge was a shadow in a murk. I...

The letter, there could be no doubt, was addressed to me. This fact, apparently so doubtful, I was careful to verify at once. And so far as English can be plain it told me to go...

The lethargy of soul is proof against all the facts we do not care to look at. No immortal soldier ever accepted the nature of his destiny in France till the moment when he saw...

We had seen the shadow of Crete in the north, and the next noon our ship was somewhere off the Nile. Despite its antiquity the sky was still in its first bloom, and the sea was...

We are aware—though we hardly dare to whisper our knowledge—that even our street at home will, at rare times, give us the sensational idea that we really do not know it. Can it...

I was leaning on the rail of the bridge with the master, watching the brown scum, peculiar to the Red Sea, pass alongside with its not really pleasant smell, for it hints that t...

_June 5._—To look down a lane in our village you might suppose that literature was about as likely there as the harpsichord. The narrow pathway (when two of us meet in it we mus...

The voyage down the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean was hot and long enough for me to forget where I was going and why I was there. I let the idea of The Islands blow to lee...

We are in the Strait of Malacca. I have a fine confused romantic feeling this morning, like that of a child just before the curtain rises on the “Forty Thieves.” My memory is a...

He had skimmed about Singapore in a jinrickshaw all the morning. He wanted to find Mr. Kow Watt Loon. That Chinaman was as elusive as the glamour of the East. And he was not use...

One morning I escaped from the heat and the bewildering life of Singapore into a shaded office. Its windows opened south and east to a glowing panorama of ships, clouds, and isl...

There was Java. Under some mountains so distant and of so delicate a color that they were only a deeper stain of the sky were spread the flat buildings of Tanjong Priok. To my s...

The trains of Java move only by day. The island is of great length, and in some areas its surface is subject without warning to dissolution by flood or earthquake. I was uncerta...

The moist heat of Java’s plains and seaports, even when the interest of a place is just a little more remarkable than the temperature, soon turns one to thoughts of escape, in t...

When a scholarly English traveler I met at Batavia found in me no warm regard for the ancient Buddhist tope at Borobudor, and only a loose wish to see it before I died, he adjus...

_July 1._—The hotel omnibus which met me at Sourabaya station last night was like a processional car. The horse’s harness was covered with bells, and I jingled off like an Orien...

A ship should have light when making Macassar. The Spermode Islands dot the sea about the southwest end of Celebes, and though the blue film of the waters there seems just tangi...

When the morning is very young and the light has but little heat in it, Macassar’s native dock, with its quays of coral rock, and a gathering of schooners and canoes, is almost...

The warehouse and office of the shipping firm at Macassar whose principal acts as British consul assure a wanderer from home that his affairs may be there considered of conseque...

Whether I looked at the grotesque shape of Celebes on the chart, or leaned on the ship’s rail to watch the unfolding of its coast, I could hardly believe it. The map shows the i...

Our sailors are Malays. My first impression of them was that they were languid and ladylike seamen. No doubt the captain had been unable to get white men for the voyage. He was...

Before this book is done I shall have to speak of Maguire; and it had better be here while there is nothing else to do. Borneo is on one side of us and Celebes on the other, and...

_July 12._—We are at Amurang, a village on the northwest coast of Celebes. It is only a line of palms and huts under the hills, but it serves to remind us that the world is inha...

One day the chief engineer of the _Savoe_ was feeding his parrots. He has a noisy display of them on the boat deck. When I spoke to him he turned on me abruptly and peered inten...

In the early morning, which did not come too soon, I found the missionary out by the beach. He told me my bed had been frightened because the island itself had moved. Indeed, so...

I learned one morning during my stay that the people of Ternate had been considering me, and had concluded that I must be there because I wanted pearls. Pearls were brought to m...

_July 16._—The Jalan Pantai, or the seashore road, of Ternate, has an affinity with that prelude to the day when the risen sun has still to surmount the high land of Halmaheira...

But for the durian, the spell of Ternate might not have been broken. I should have lost count of days and nights. I might have imagined that I had been cast upon a place beyond...

_August 6._—A cloudless morning in the Java Sea, and the dry monsoon from the southeast is fresh and strong. In the southwest, at seven o’clock, the suggestion of the mountains...

That romantic seaport town of the Orient made him uneasy. He wanted to get away from it. Yet how it had attracted him once—but that was when it was only a fine name on the map o...

After our little coasting steamer had worked clear of the noisy bewilderment of Singapore’s crowded harbor the reality of the East dissolved. The East again was only a silent pr...

We landed next morning at Tumpat, thus far justifying faith, for nothing noteworthy was visible from our anchorage. Tumpat is on the present main channel of the delta of the Kel...

With our possessions assembled into six small packs roped in rubber sheets, next morning at daybreak Smith and I took train for Rantau Panjang, a village on the right bank of th...

It is as pleasant to travel afoot in the tropics, so long as you keep intact the curiosity of a newcomer and do not expect life to be buoyant near towns, as it is in Devonshire;...

The forest changed our thoughts as soon as we were in it. We began to climb southwest of the Golok Valley through a tunnel in the jungle. It was a day—somewhere, anyhow, it was...

It is all very well, but one must pay for blundering carelessly through the hindrances which discourage most men from the central hills of Malaya. Yet a reward for being thus fa...

Alongside Ryan’s hut the stream spread out into a pool with a floor of white sand. It had a canopy of leaves. A few rods of sunlight, almost solid in their bright distinction in...

It was time to leave Ryan, and make across country to the Golok. The men had made fast the loads. All was ready. I looked round that narrow well in the trees, into which the sun...

We got out to the coast again at last, and so cheaply, too, for our foolish intrusion into the wild against which society protects us, that I had the feeling that we had either...

_September 10._—I suppose I am as interested in Singapore as in any place I have ever seen. It is, sometimes, a fearful interest. Singapore seethes with human life, and can be a...

It was not pleasant to be on deck that night, and the promenaders and gossipers had abandoned it. Spume was shooting inboard. The deck chairs huddled in the nook amidships were...

Something had happened. I switched on the reading lamp at the head of the bunk and looked at my watch. Four in the morning! I could have sworn that the noise which had roused me...