Tide Marks by H.M. Tomlinson — Read

_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 as fascinating and repellent as an exposed formicarium where the urgent streaming of instinctive protoplasm, even if you are a naturalist, can be worse than the silence of the Sphinx. In the name of God, why is it, what is it doing? You get the idea that even the rank smells of Singapore are of its fecundity. Such odors are beyond merely ordinary carelessness. The gush of its life is from no failing source. It spurts and eddies in lusty brown swashes unceasingly through every street and alley. That tide is never low; it is always rising higher. China need not be a military nation; she merely overflows into neighboring lands. Yet perhaps humanity anywhere in the mass will not bear looking at for long. It is dominant on earth, but its movements are as unreasonable and incalculable as seismic convulsions. The mob of any great city flattens and nullifies reason, even in reasonable men. The movements of the herd are more infectious than plague, and can be as ruinous; for the instinct to self-preservation, so easily moved by fear, may be the same as social suicide, and may wreck all that fine minds have accomplished.

Of an evening, though, quiet within the bungalow of some English friends which overlooks the city's delightful botanical gardens-a house where I have been sheltered, often to my embarrassment, as though my desires in Singapore's broad and undirected flood of human bodies were of importance-this dread of the inscrutable mass movements of humanity was lessened. After all, fine minds, I could see, have a persistence which is as natural as the instinctive movements of the herd. The lady of the house somehow maintained in that alien place the repose of an English garden, and the young men, occupied by the problems of wide commercial and administrative affairs, appeared to me to be as apart from the trend of mankind's instinctive movements as though they were not quite of that stock. (Another dream, evoked by the evening's peace and well-being? ) After a bewildering day of mine in the alleys at the back of the city where the enigmatic stream of humanity give no sign of its destiny, except the temples to Dragons and to Siva, to Buddha and Mohammed, in that cool bungalow one young man would talk of the English poets, of the studies of Orientalists, and of Amiens cathedral, as though a unanimous folly of all mankind that should presently rise to founder the whole achievement of industrious human hands would still leave high and immune those peaks from which a few men have surmised a day not yet come.