Tide Marks by H.M. Tomlinson — Read

When the morning is very young and the light has but little heat in it, Macassar's native dock, with its quays of coral rock, and a gathering of schooners and canoes, is almost merrily absurd with a fabulous beauty and a suggestion of wild and secret adventure. The little schooners are gypsies for color, their names are stars and flowers-Bintang this and Buroh that-their brailed sails are sheets of light, and their reflections on the languid water, which is an uncertain blue mirror, are slowly dissolving flakes of lightning and rainbow. The Malays sit on their decks, cooking breakfast. There is a smell of dry fish, copra, and wood smoke. They look so frail, those little antique models, with their tripod masts, their sweeps, and low bows and upstanding galleried sterns. But it happens that once I saw one driving in the dangerous currents, a breeze chasing her from the Indian Ocean, in the channel between the islands of Sumbawa and Lombok, and the impulse was to cheer.

When it is better to find some shade you can turn into Macassar's main street, its bazaar, and then discover, looking into the bags, boxes, casks, and baskets, for how few of the commodities in this part of the world you have even a name. Some stuff it is possible to guess at, though who eats desiccated frogs and dried cuttlefish? But most of it is mummified and enigmatic. The irregular buildings have roofs of red tiles which cast a good shade from widely projecting eaves. They are of timber and stone, lime-washed in blues and yellows, and if you chance to look up out of the stream of dark humanity you see dim figures in upper balconies who are watching the street below, as grave and still as decorative images.