Tide Marks by H.M. Tomlinson — Read

In the early morning, which did not come too soon, I found the missionary out by the beach. He told me my bed had been frightened because the island itself had moved. Indeed, some nervous people left their beds long before sunrise to watch flames at the crater. The missionary threw up his chin to look at the summit. That was as peaceful then as a chalk down. He suggested that trouble was coming. There were signs, he said, that the present outlines of sea and land about there were disapproved by whatever artist was surveying them. The resolve was accumulating for a more comfortable adjustment, and some folk, living somewhere about the line of volcanoes running through Sumatra, Java, the Sundas, the Moluccas, the Philippines, and up to Japan, would presently know that they had to pay for the relaying of the earth's floor thereabouts.[2] This missionary, himself resigned to the will of God, had seen it happen in the past, but he complained that he would prefer not to be a witness if our basement were withdrawn suddenly because another place required it as a first floor. Just off the pier on which we stood a Malay in a canoe was straining at a cast net so full of a sort of little herring that it seemed to be as heavy as a load of silver.

After breakfast, as rain threatened, my Christian friend presented me, as an unexpected treat, with a various donation of the kind of magazine which is currently popular in England. He told me that he is in the habit of sharpening his knowledge of English upon them. I glanced at them, but wondered what he could mean. I had thought his knowledge of our language was different from magazine English, which it would be unfair to teach to Papuans. There was nothing else to do, so I toiled steadily, as a sort of propitiatory penance for my leisure on a tropical beach, through number after number, in a fatuous effort to discover why and how they were made. What first drew me to this quest was the discovery that quite a number of the stories oddly concerned the South Seas and the Malay Islands. For some reason well known to the wholesale milliners who trimmed those pages the Orient and the South Seas are the decorations favored by those who enjoy popular magazines. On the whole, perhaps a Malay or a Solomon Islander, when imagining the marvels of London and Manchester for the wonder of his neighbors, might conceive something stranger than those English yarns about the oceanic dots of the tropics; yet it is proper for us to bear in mind that at home we are supposed to be not as unaware as Solomon Islanders. We ought to know more about them than they know about us.