Where the Strange Trails Go Down. E. Alexander Powell
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"concludes the morning performance. This afternoon we will present for your approval a programme consisting of pony races, a carabao fight, a shark-fishing expedition, and, if time permits, a visit to the pearl-fisheries to see the divers at work. This evening we will call on the Princess Fatimah, the daughter of the Sultan, and tomorrow I have arranged to take you to Tapul Island to shoot wild carabao. After that——"
"After that," I interrupted, "we go away from here. If we stayed on in this quiet little island of yours much longer, we shouldn't have any film left for the other places."
CHAPTER II
OUTPOSTS OF EMPIRE
We sailed at sunset out of Jolo and all through the breathless tropic night the Negros forged ahead at half-speed, her sharp prow cleaving the still bosom of the Sulu Sea as silently as a gondola stealing down the Canale Grande. So oppressive was the night that sleep was out of the question, and I leaned upon the rail of the bridge, the hot land breeze, laden with the mysterious odors of the tropics, beating softly in my face, and listlessly watched the phosphorescent ostrich feathers curling from our bows. Behind me, in the darkened chart-room, the Filipino quartermaster gently swung the wheel from time to time in response to the direction of the needle on the illuminated compass-dial. So lifeless was the sea that our foremast barely swayed against the stars. The smoke from our funnel trailed across the purple canopy of the sky as though smeared with an inky brush.
How long I stood there, lost in reverie, I have no idea: hours no doubt. I must have fallen into a doze, for I was awakened by the brisk, incisive strokes of the ship's bell, echoed, a moment later, by eight fainter strokes coming from the deck below. Then the soft patter of bare feet which meant the changing of the watch. Though the velvety darkness into which we were steadily ploughing had not perceptibly decreased, it was now cut sharply across, from right to left, by what looked like a tightly stretched wire of glowing silver. Even as I looked this slender fissure of illumination widened, almost imperceptibly at first, then faster, faster, until at one burst came the dawn. The sombre hangings of the night were swept aside by an invisible hand as are drawn back the curtains at a window. As you have seen from a hill the winking lights of a city disappear at daybreak, so, one by one, the stars went out. Masses of angry clouds reared themselves in ominous, fantastic forms against a sullen sky. The hot land breeze changed to a cold wind which made me shiver. Suddenly the mounting rampart of clouds, which seemed about to burst in a tempest, was pierced by a hundred flaming lances coming from beyond the horizon's rim. Before their onslaught the threatening cloud-wall crumbled, faded, and abruptly dropped away to reveal the sun advancing in all that brazen effrontery which it assumes in those lawless latitudes along the Line. Now the sky was become a huge inverted bowl of flawless azure porcelain, the surface of the Sulu Sea sparkled as though strewn with a million diamonds, and, not a league off our bows, rose the jungle-clothed shores of Borneo.
Scattered along the fringes of the world are certain places whose names ring in the ears of youth like trumpet-calls. They are passwords to romance and high adventure. Their very mention makes the feet of the young men restless. They mark the places where the strange trails go down. Of them all, the one that most completely captivated my boyish imagination was Borneo. To me, as to millions of other youngsters, its name had been made familiar by that purveyor of entertainment to American boyhood, Phineas T. Barnum, as the reputed home of the wild man. In its jungles, through the magic of Marryat's breathless pages, I fought the head-hunter and pursued the boa-constrictor and the orang-utan. It was then, a boyhood dream come true when I stood at daybreak on the bridge of the Negros and through my glasses watched the mysterious island, which I had so often pictured in my imagination, rise with tantalizing slowness from the sapphire sea.
We forged ahead cautiously, for our charts were none too recent or reliable and we lacked the "Malay Archipelago" volume of The Sailing Directions—the "Sailor's Bible," as the big, orange-covered book, full of comforting detail, is known. As the morning mists dissolved before the sun I could make out a pale ivory beach, and back of the beach a band of green which I knew for jungle, and back of that, in turn, a range of purple mountains which culminated in a majestic, cloud-wreathed peak. An off-shore breeze brought to my nostrils the strange, sweet odors of the hot lands. A Malay vinta with widespread bamboo outriggers and twin sails of orange flitted by an enormous butterfly skimming the surface of the water. I was actually within sight of that grim island whose name has ever been a synonym for savagery. For never think that piracy, head-hunting, poisoned darts shot from blow-guns are horrors extinct in Borneo today, for they are not. Ask the mariners who sail these waters; ask the keepers of the lonely lighthouses, the officers who command the constabulary outposts in the bush. They know Borneo, and not favorably.
You will picture Borneo, if you please, as a vast, squat island the third largest in the world, in fact—half again as large as France, bordered by a sandy littoral, moated by swamps reeking with putrid miasmata and pernicious vapors, covered with dense forests and impenetrable jungles, ridged by mile-high mountain ranges, seamed by mighty rivers, inhabited by the most savage beasts and the most bestial savages known to man. Lying squarely athwart the Line, the sun beats down upon it like the blast from an open furnace-door. The story is told in Borneo of a dissolute planter who died from sunstroke. The day after the funeral a spirit message reached the widow of the dear departed. "Please send down my blankets" it said. But it is the terrible humidity which makes the climate dangerous; a humidity due to the innumerable swamps, the source of pestilence and fever, and to the incredible rainfall, which averages over six and a half feet a year. No wonder that in the Indies Borneo is known as "The White Man's Graveyard."
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Imbedded in the northern coast of the island, like a row of semi-precious stones set in a barbaric brooch, are the states of British North Borneo, Brunei, and Sarawak. Their back-doors open on the wilderness of mountain, forest and jungle which marks the northern boundary of Dutch Borneo; their front windows look out upon the Sulu and the China Seas. Of these three territories, the first is under the jurisdiction of the British North Borneo Company, a private corporation, which administers it under the terms of a royal charter. The second is ruled by the Sultan of Brunei, whose once vast dominions have steadily dwindled through cession and conquest until they are now no larger than Connecticut. On the throne of the last sits one of the most romantic and picturesque figures in the world, His Highness James Vyner Brooke, a descendant of that Sir James Brooke who, in the middle years of the last century, made himself the "White Rajah" of Sarawak, and who might well have been the original of The Man Who Would Be King. Though all three governments are permitted virtually a free hand so far as their domestic affairs are concerned, they are under the protection of Great Britain and their foreign affairs are controlled from Westminster. The remaining three-quarters of Borneo, which contains the richest mines, the finest forests, the largest rivers, and, most important of all, the great oil-fields of Balik-Papan, forms one of the Outer Possessions, or Outposts, of Holland's East Indian Empire.
Long before the yellow ribbon of the coast, with its fringe of palms, became visible we could make out the towering outline of Kina Balu, the sacred mountain, fourteen thousand feet high, which, seen from the north, bears a rather striking resemblance in its general contour to Gibraltar. The natives regard Kina Balu with awe and veneration as the home of departed spirits, believing that it exercises a powerful influence on their lives. When a man is dying they speak of him as ascending Kina Balu and in times of drought they formerly practised a curious and horrible custom, known as sumunguping, which the authorities have now suppressed. When the crops showed signs of failing the natives decided to despatch a messenger direct to the spirits of their relatives and friends in the other world entreating them to implore relief from the gods who control the rains. The person chosen to convey the message was usually a slave or an enemy captured in battle. Binding their victim to a post, the warriors of the tribe advanced, one by one, and drove their spears into his body, shouting with each thrust the messages which they wished conveyed