Tide Marks by H.M. Tomlinson — Read

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 tangible enough to float such fairy-like islands, yet it is best to con them by day, and from a wide berth. So your ship will approach Macassar either not much before sunrise or while a memory of the vanished day with a brief exaltation holds away the night. The approach to its harbor, when the sun is near the horizon, especially if there is a stillness before or after rain during the wet monsoon, would make you believe, looking ahead from the ship's bow, that "the storms all weathered and the ocean crost," you were nearing that "favored isle, where billows never roar, and brighter seasons smile. " For there is no end to the illusions of travel-indeed, they are the best of it, and part of the fun is in seeing them break. Half an hour of the beatific! What more should we expect? It is an experience long enough for the good of any mortal traveler. At the end of that time you are alongside a modern wharf and the bunker coal. Macassar is properly proud of its modern facilities, as they are called. Luckily it is easy to escape from them.

The city, though old, with all the history of the Malay islands from the sixteenth century in its streets, native, Portuguese, Dutch, and English, has still behind it a land of which we know hardly more than we know of the future of true religion. Macassar is, in fact, only a market place on a beach where gather the traders and ships from hundreds of islands about it. With the exception of Singapore-a very much greater place-Macassar is, I think, the most interesting town in the East Indies. You soon get tired of Batavia and Sourabaya, sporadic cities where the distances, which would be very little in a temperate climate, in Java are almost impassable gulfs of heat and dust. And even native inland cities, where the Javanese are still listlessly protecting the relics of their traditions and their native crafts that have not yet been foundered in the flood of shoddy from Western civilization, soon weary a traveler. He sees with his own unaccustomed eyes that often what the natives pretend is their traditional craft was made by machinery in the likeness of the original at Manchester or Dresden. But tourists do not see Macassar. It is aside from their track. There is no need for Macassar to deceive chance visitors, and to deceive its regular visitors, the traders, requires careful thought and takes all its time.