“We are now below the bulge of the world’s waist,” he said, “where the star is simply not visible. We must rely on other references.”
He sent a cabin boy running to the ship’s bridge to bring him back a chart, and he unrolled it for me and Kukachin. It was not a depiction of the local coasts and landmarks, but of the night sky: nothing but painted dots of different sizes indicating stars of different luminosities. The captain pointed upward, showing us the four brightest stars in the sky—positioned as if marking the arms of a Christian cross—and then pointed to their four dots on the paper. I recognized that the chart was an accurate representation of those unfamiliar skies, and the captain assured us that it was sufficient for him to steer by.
“The chart appears as useful as your kamàl, Elder Brother,” Kukachin said to me, and then to the captain, “Would you have a copy made for me—for my Royal Husband, I mean, in case he should ever wish to campaign southward from Persia?”
The captain obligingly and immediately set a scribe to doing that, and I voiced no more misgivings about the lost North Star. However, I still felt a little uneasy in those tropic seas, because even the sun behaved oddly there.
What I had always thought of as “sunset” might have been better called “sunfall” there, for the sun did not ease itself down from the sky each evening and gently settle beneath the sea—it made a sudden and precipitous plunge. There was never a flamboyant sunset sky to admire, nor any gradual twilight to soothe the way from day to night. One moment we would be in bright daylight, and in little more than an eye blink we would be in dark night. Also, there was never any perceptible change in the length of day and night. Everywhere from Venice to Khanbalik, I had been accustomed to the long days and short nights of summertime, and the opposite in wintertime. But, in all the months we spent making our way through the tropics, I never could notice any seasonal lengthing of either day or night. And the captain verified that: he told me that the difference between the tropics’ longest day of the year and the shortest was only three-quarters of an hour’s trickle of sand in the glass.
Three months out from Quan-zho, then, we came to our farthest southern reach, in the archipelago of the Spice Islands, where we would alter course to the westward. But first, since our water needed replenishment again, we made landfall at one of the islands, called Jawa the Greater. From the moment we first saw it on the horizon until we reached it, a good half a day later, we passengers were already saying among ourselves that this must be a most felicitous place. The airs were warm and so laden with the heady aromas of spices that we were almost made giddy, and the island was a tapestry of rich greens and flower colors, and the sea all about was the soft, translucent, glowing color of milk-green jade. Unfortunately, our first impression of having found an island of Paradise did not endure.
Our fleet anchored in the mouth of a river called Jakarta, offshore of a port called Tanjung Priok, and my father and I went ashore with the water-barrel boats. We discovered the so-called seaport to be only a village of zhu-gan cane houses built on high stilts because all the land was quagmire. The community’s grandest edifices were some long cane platforms, with palm-thatch roofs but no walls, piled with bags of spices —nuts and barks and pods and powders—waiting for the next passing trade ship. What we could see of the island beyond the village was only dense jungle growing out of more quagmire. The warehouses of spices did provide an aroma that overwhelmed the jungle’s miasmic smell and the stench common to all tropical villages. But we learned that this island of Jawa the Greater was only by courtesy called one of the Spice Islands, for nothing more valuable than pepper grew here, and the better spices—nutmeg and clove and mace and sandal and so on—grew on more remote islands of the archipelago and were merely collected in this place because it was more convenient to the sea lanes.
We also soon discovered that Jawa had no Paradise climate, for we had no sooner got ashore than we were drenched by a thunderstorm. Rain falls on that island one day of every three, we were told, and usually in the form of a thunderstorm which, we did not have to be told, was a fair imitation of the end of the world. I trust that, after our eventual departure, Jawa enjoyed an uncommonly long spell of fine weather, because we had nothing but bad. That first storm simply continued, day and night, for weeks, the thunder and lightning taking a rest now and then, but the rain falling interminably, and we rode it out there at anchor in the river mouth.
Our captains had intended to go west from this place through the narrow passage called the Sunda Strait, which separates Jawa the Greater from the next westward island, Jawa the Lesser, also called Sumatera. They said that strait allowed the easiest run to India, but they also said the strait could only be negotiated in calm seas and unimpeded visibility. So our fleet stayed in the Jakarta River mouth, where the downpour was so continuous and so heavy that Jawa was not even visible through it. But we knew the island was still there, because we were waked at every dawn by the howling and whistling of the gibbon apes in the jungle treetops. It was not really an uncomfortable place to be marooned—our boatmen brought from shore fresh pork and fowl and fruits and vegetables to augment our stores of smoked and salted foods, and we had a plenitude of spices to enhance our meals—but the waiting got extremely tiresome.
Whenever I got insupportably weary of seeing nothing but the harbor water jumping up to meet the rain, I would go ashore, but the view there was not much better. The Jawa people were quite comely of appearance—small and neatly proportioned and of golden skin, and the women as well as the men went bare to the waist—but the entire populace of Jawa, whatever religion it had originally espoused, had long ago been converted to Hinduism by the Indians who were the chief spice buyers. Inevitably, the Jawa people had adopted everything else that seems to go with the Hindu religion, meaning squalor and torpor and reprehensible personal habits. So I found the people no more appealing than any other Hindus, and Jawa no more appealing than India.
Some of the others of our company tried to alleviate their boredom in other ways, and came to grief by it. All the Han crewmen of our fleet, like mariners of every race and nationality, were mortally terrified of getting into water. But the Jawa people were quite at home on it and in it as well. A Jawa fisherman would skim about on even a turbulent sea in a craft called a prau, so small and flimsy that it would have been careened by the waves except that it was balanced by a log carried at some distance alongside on long cane spars. And even the Jawa women and children swam considerable distances from the shore through quite fearsome surf. So a number of our Mongol male passengers, and a few venturesome females, all of them inland-born and therefore incautious about large bodies of water, decided to emulate the Jawa folk and frolic in that warm sea.
Though the ambient air, full of the downpouring rain, was almost as liquid as the sea, the Mongols stripped down to a minimum of clothing and slid overboard to splash about. As long as they held onto the many rope ladders dangling overside, they were in no great danger. But many got overdaring, and tried swimming at liberty, and of every ten of them who vanished beyond the curtain of rain, perhaps seven would reappear. We never knew what happened to the missing ones, but the attrition kept on. It did not frighten others from venturing out, and we must have lost at least twenty men and two women from Kukachin’s retinue.
We did know what happened to two of our casualties. One man who had been swimming climbed back onto the ship, cursing “Vakh!” to himself and shaking drops of blood from one hand. As the ship’s Han physician salved it and bound it up, the man reported that he had rested his hand on a rock, and a fish had been clinging to it, a fish mottled with algae and looking just like the rock, and its dorsal spines had stung him. He said that much, and then screamed, “Vakh! Vakh! Vakhvakhvakh!” and went into insane paroxysms, thrashing all about the deck, foaming at the mouth, and when he finally slumped in a heap, we found that he was dead.