Tide Marks by H.M. Tomlinson — Read

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 leeward. I had no use for it. I saw I might as well expect to reach the Hesperides. As a legend, The Islands were more thin and indistinct, more remote, less verifiable, than when my steamer, against the cruel hostility of an English spring, backed into the Mersey and stood out to sea. The legend each day retired farther, like good fortune when pursued. That delicate line of the horizon was inviolable. It could not be passed. For Magellan and Drake it was all very well to pursue such ideas. Their ships were different. Mine was a high confusion of white boats, black ventilators with blue throats, indeterminate shapes, ladders coming out of nothing and leading nowhere, a cerulean factory stack, and yellow derrick standards holding out stiff arms above a black central structure which appeared to have no beginning and no end. My ship was too big and complicated for me to be reassured by the scientific design which held it together.

And there was the master of our ship. He had grown gray in the East. He knew China and Japan, Java, Sumatra, and Macassar. But he shook his head over Tidore and Timore Laut, as though I were talking to him of a Perfect System or of lost Atlantis. He admitted he had heard of such places. But naturally! We all have heard, as Raleigh once heard, of the City of Gold. Yet where is it? Should we waste the time of a practical seaman on his own navigating bridge with idle talk of it? Raleigh, as we know, found his city. And what was it? Monkeys and trees. My questions to the captain about The Islands, I can see now, were like an eager display of little green apples to a seaman of long experience. My last question he did not even answer. He could not answer it. A cloud, which had quickly made midnight of the morning ahead of us, burst over the ship. She vanished in hissing smoke. My voice was drowned in the roar of waterspouts and the blaring of the siren. Presently she began to take shape again, and through the thinning downpour we could see the figure of the lookout at her head. She fell also most curiously silent as the black squall passed astern with a white foot to its curtain. The captain began to answer me when my last question was twenty minutes old. He took off his oilskins. "You talk," he said, "as if you were on the Underground Railway. Those Islands"-he waved his arm eastward where there was still only a haze-"you couldn't see them in a lifetime. Not in two lives. Some are great countries, and some are three cocoanuts, and the ocean is full of them. They are like stars in the sky. There's thousands of them. Now just look at that!"