Tide Marks by H.M. Tomlinson — Read

After our little coasting steamer had worked clear of the noisy bewilderment of Singapore's crowded harbor the reality of the East dissolved. The East again was only a silent presentiment. For several days I saw to port the somber hills of Johore, Pahang, and Trengganu, and behind them each day the sun disappeared in an appalling splendor of thunder and flames. But those hills by the China Sea and the wrack of day above them were in the same world; one was no nearer to me than the other. The weather was heated and calm, and the sea was glazed, for the monsoon was northeast. I was bound for Bangkok. Yet Malaya was implicit in that magnificent dread to port at dayfall; though how could I enter it? How does one reach the sunset clouds? I had come to see that land, but I had given it up. I was going to Bangkok instead. Singapore is not Malaya-it is more Chinese than anything else; nor Penang; nor even Malacca. You may drift about from one anchorage to another in the China Sea and the Bay of Bengal-voyage along both sides of that strip of Asia which reaches down to the equator and is called the Malay Peninsula; or travel leisurely in a railway coach for days past inland stations with pleasing native names, or career for weeks over excellent roads, through miles of rubber plantations, jungle, tin-mining districts, old Malay hamlets, and modern Chinese compounds, and feel all the time that you will never enter Malaya. I had tried every device in an effort to glimpse it, but it had eluded me; and soon I must go home. We ought to have more sense, of course, than to try to touch a dream, or to reach that place which exists but in the glamour of a name.

The agent of our steamer at one sleepy coastal station, when I asked him whether it was possible to travel inland away from the usual roads, shook his head. He did not know. He thought not. It was wild and uncertain. Nobody ever did it. He had been there nine years and had not been more than ten miles inland. That overseer of cargoes and manifests looked toward the hills, and I thought for a moment that his glance was half regretful. "No," he said; "I shall never know what is behind them. I'm too busy. And when I'm finished here I shall go, please God, straight to Dorking. Do you know Dorking in Surrey? That's where my hills are."