Tide Marks by H.M. Tomlinson — Read

_August 6._-A cloudless morning in the Java Sea, and the dry monsoon from the southeast is fresh and strong. In the southwest, at seven o'clock, the suggestion of the mountains of the island of Baly was high in the sky, but no land was under that celestial range. At noon our steamer was passing down the Allas Strait, with the peak of Lombok to starboard, a dark cone resting on a wide kingdom of cloud, and from under the cloud the verdure of the island descended to the sea. Close to our port side were the tumbled uplands of the island of Sumbawa. Sumbawa, like all the islands of the Lesser Sundas to the east of Lombok-Flores, Sandalwood, and Timor-is under the subjection of a dry wind from Australia, and its bare pale hills and bright grasslands are remarkable after the coasts loaded with forests of the other islands of Indonesia. Lombok, on the starboard side of the ship, is a much darker green, and has no open uplands. It is a quite different personality from Sumbawa, its neighbor.

_August 7._-This morning I woke in my bunk thinking a Malay was running amok. The frightful lamentations of his suffering victims brought me up at a bound. I peeped out, but could see only a line of palms individual against the screen of a morning mist. The chief officer then paused at my cabin door, but he was calm. He always is. That noise? We are at Ampenan. We shall take here three hundred pigs for Singapore. The horrific wailings then broke out afresh. The chief officer smiled, and compressed his nose with his fingers significantly as he went for'ard.