But it is not alone the desire to achieve uniqueness that makes the tourist so anxious to leave the Beaten Track. It is not the anticipated pleasure of boasting about his achievements. The incorrigible romantic in every one of us believes, with a faith that is proof against all disappointments, that there is always something more remarkable off the Beaten Track than on it, that the things which it is difficult and troublesome to see must for that very reason be the most worth seeing. Those who travel pursue some phantom which perpetually eludes them; they are always hoping to discover some mode of life that is somehow fundamentally different from any mode with which they are familiar; and they imagine that they will be able, magically, as soon as they have found it, to get into contact with this marvellous existence, to understand and partake in it.
In the obvious places and on the Beaten Track, they never find what they are looking for. On the Beaten Track, through whatever part of the world it may lead, men and women live always in very much the same way, and there is no Open Sesame to their intimacy. But perhaps off the Beaten Track, in the little out of the way places, where the hotels are bad and there are toads in the bathroom—perhaps where there are no hotels, but only rest houses, with centipedes—perhaps in the places where you must bring your own tents and porters, with provisions and ammunition for a campaign of weeks—perhaps where there is nothing but the jungle and leeches, serpents and precipices and vampires and an occasional pygmy with a blow-pipe and poisoned arrows. . . . Perhaps. But even amongst the crocodiles and the cannibals the secret still eludes you. Life is still fundamentally the same. Men and women are as difficult to know as ever—rather more so, on the whole; for your knowledge of Pygmy is rudimentary and the little people are afraid.
It was with such meditations that I allayed the desire to leave the Beaten Track, which the spectacle of the jungle had evoked in me. To be devoured by leeches in the pursuit of something as hopelessly unattainable as the foot of the rainbow—was it worth it? Obviously not. And I thanked heaven and the British Empire for the F.M.S. railway. Still, I went on longing to get behind that wall of green; I went on believing in the teeth of my own denials, that there was something miraculous and extraordinary in the other side. Meanwhile the train steamed on towards Singapore; an attendant from the restaurant car came in to tell us that breakfast was ready.
A little later my longings were cured, for the time being at any rate, by the disappearance of that which had aroused them. The jungle suddenly vanished and its place was taken by interminable rubber plantations. Even in maturity a rubber plantation is a poor thing. In youth it is an eyesore. Miserably scraggy little trees planted neatly in rows flanked the railway and continued to flank it during almost all the rest of the day. We rolled through literally hundreds of miles of potential Dunlops, of latent golf balls, and hot-water bottles to be. I own no rubber shares and am a consumer of tyres and crêpe soles. While admiring the energy of those who have destroyed it, I regretted the jungle. Here and there the train passed through a stretch of country that had ceased to be jungle and had not yet become plantation. The forest has been burnt. A great tract of brown desolation stretches away from the railway. The dead stumps of trees still stand, the charred trunks lie along the ground—the corpses and skeletons of a forest. Soon they will have been rooted out and dragged away. The Brazilian seedlings will be planted and in 1932 or thereabouts another million of goloshes and Malthusian squirts will be distributed throughout a grateful world.
SINGAPORE
Cleared of the forests, tamed into park and garden, this tropical land seems, under its perennially clouded skies, a piece of temperate Europe. From our windows we looked out on to sloping lawns, set here and there with huge umbrageous trees that looked almost like elms and oaks. The clouds swam indolently overhead. A thin haze stippled the distances and made them tenderly dim. We might have been looking out over a park in the Thames valley, but a Thames valley, as you saw at a second glance, deliriously dreaming of palm-trees and orchids, and where the air was as warm as blood. It was into an equatorial England that we had suddenly stepped.
BATAVIA, JAVA
Near the Penang Gate lies an old brass cannon, half buried in the mud. It has no history, it is quite unornamental. A more commonplace piece of ordnance never issued from an eighteenth century arsenal. The world is full of such old brass cannons. By all the rules it should have been melted down long ago or stuck muzzle downwards into the ground to serve as a post, or mounted on a little wooden carriage and left in the weather outside the door of a museum. But destiny decreed otherwise. Instead of suffering any of the ignominies usually reserved for its kind, this superannuated popgun was turned into a god. It lies there in the mud, wreathed with gardenias and orchids and a whole conservatory of paper flowers. The ground all about it is planted with long-stemmed paper lanterns, and incense burns perpetually before its muzzle. Two or three hawkers are encamped all day beside it, under the trees, like the sellers of books and plaster saints and candles in the shadow of a cathedral. The sun god’s worshippers are numerous; they do a roaring trade in offerings and souvenirs. Great is the Cannon of the Batavians.
The Javanese were once Hindus, as their neighbours of Bali are to this day. But now, with the other Malayan peoples of Sumatra and the peninsula, they are Mohammedans. Mohammedans in name, at any rate; for their monotheism is hardly more than a varnish spread over cults much more ancient and, in the tropical circumstances, much more apposite. Pure monotheism is probably the last religion that would suggest itself to the minds of men living near the equator. In a tropical jungle, only a blind deaf-mute could be a monotheist. The woods are horrible; they teem with countless small and separate mysteries—unaccountable sights in the half darkness, inexplicable sounds across the silence. Nobody with ears and eyes could fail, in a jungle, to be a believer in spirits, ghosts and devils. The Malays may call themselves Moslems; but they are still, at heart and by nature, animists.
Nor is it to the spirits alone that they pay their devotions. There is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet. No doubt. But a cannon is cylindrical and, long before they became Moslems, the Javanese were worshippers of the reproductive principle in nature. An immemorial phallism has crystallised round the old gun, transforming it from a mere brass tube into a potent deity, to be propitiated with flowers and little lanterns, to be asked favours of with smoking incense. Men come and, standing before the sacred symbol, silently implore assistance. Women desirous of offspring sit on the prostrate god, rub themselves against his verdigrised sides and pray to him for increase. Even white ladies, it is said, may be seen at evening alighting inconspicuously from their motor cars at the Penang Gate. They hurry across the grass to where the God is lying. They drop a few gardenias and a supplication, they touch the God’s unresponsive muzzle; then hurry back again through the twilight, fearful of being recognised, of being caught in the flagrant act of worshipping at the shrine of a God, who was being adored a thousand generations before Adam was ever thought of and beside whom the Gods of Zoroaster and the Vedas, of Moses and Christ and Mohammed are the merest upstarts and parvenus.
BATAVIA
“In matters of commerce,” it was once affirmed,
“In matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch
Is giving too little and asking too much.”
But either things have changed since those lines were written, or else the Dutch do not regard the selling of food as commerce. For there are restaurants in Holland where, for a remarkably reasonable price, one may eat, not only much more, but also much better food than can be had anywhere else in the world. The five-shilling luncheon at the Restaurant Royal at the Hague is at once Gargantuan and delicious.
