All of us on the decks went to look overside—and that is exactly what the Sunda Strait seemed to be doing: boiling and bubbling, like a pot of water set on a brazier to make cha. And then, right in the middle of the fleet, the sea heaved up in a hump, opened like a monster mouth and exhaled a great gust of steam. The plume kept spewing upwards for several minutes, and the steam drifted all among the ships. We passengers had been making exclamations of one kind or another, but when the cloud of steam enveloped us we began to cough and sputter, for it had the suffocating stench of rotten eggs. And when the steam had passed over us, we were all dusted with a fine yellow powder on our skin and clothes. I wiped the dust from my stinging eyes and licked it from my lips, and tasted the distinctive musty taste of sulphur.
The captains were shouting to their crews, and there was a deal of running about and shifting of sail spars, and all our ships turned about and fled the way they had come. When the boiling and belching patch of sea was safely behind us, our vessel’s captain told me, apologetically:
“Farther along the strait lies the brooding black ring of sea mountains called the Pulau Krakatau. Those peaks are actually the tops of undersea volcanoes, and they have been known to erupt with devastating effect. Making waves as high as mountains, waves that scour the strait clean of every living thing, from end to end. Whether that boiling of the water yonder presaged an eruption I cannot know, but we cannot take the risk of sailing through.”
So the fleet had to double back through the Jawa Sea and then turn northwestward up the Malacca Strait between Jawa the Lesser, or Sumatera, and the land of the Malayu. That was a reach of water three thousand li long and so broad I might have taken it for a sea, except that circumstances forced us to carom back and forth from one side of it to the other, so I knew well that there was extensive land on both verges of it, and got to know those lands rather better than I would have wished. What happened was that the weather turned foul again, and perniciously stayed so, harrying us constantly from the swampy western Sumatera side to the forested eastern Malayu side of the strait and back again, and making us take shelter in bays or coves on one shore or the other—and put in for water and fresh foods at wretched little cane villages too negligible to deserve names, though they all had names: Muntok and Singapura and Melaka and many others I have forgotten.
It took us fully five months to beat our way up the Malacca Strait. There was open sea at the northern end, where we might have turned due west, but our captains kept on northwestward, sailing us in prudent short lunges from one island to the next of a long string of islands called the Necuveram and Angamanam archipelago, using them in the manner of stepping-stones. Finally we came to the island that they said was the farthermost of the Angamanam, and there we anchored offshore and passed enough time to fill all our water tanks and take on all the fruits and vegetables we could wheedle out of the inhospitable natives.
Those were the smallest people I ever saw, and the ugliest. Men and women alike went about stark naked, but the sight of an Angamanam female would arouse no least lust even in a mariner long at sea. Men and women alike were squat and chunky of form, with enormous protruding underjaws, and skin blacker and glossier than any African’s. I could easily have rested my chin atop the head of the tallest person among them—except that I would not have done any such thing, because their hair was their most repellent feature: merely random tufts of reddish fuzz. One would expect a people so grotesquely ugly to try to make up for it by cultivating a gracious nature, but the Angamanam folk were uniformly scowling and surly. That was because, a Han seamen told me, they were disappointed and irate that we had not wrecked a vessel or two of our fleet on the island’s coral reefs, for the people’s only occupation and only religion and only joy was the plundering of grounded ships and the slaughter of their crews and the ceremonial eating of them.
“Eating them? Why?” I asked. “Surely no inhabitants of a tropic isle, with all the provender of sea and jungle, can lack for food to eat.”
“They do not eat the shipwrecked mariners for nourishment. They believe that the ingestion of an adventurous seafarer makes them as bold and venturesome as he was.”
But we were too many and too well armed for the black dwarfs to make any assault on us. Our only problem was persuading them to part with their water and vegetables, for of course such people had no interest in gold or any other sort of monetary recompense. They did, however, like so many hopelessly ugly folk, have a high vanity. So, by doling out among them bits of trumpery cheap jewelry and ribbons and other fripperies with which they could adorn their unspeakable selves, we got what we required, and we sailed away.
From there, our fleet had an uneventful westward run across the Bay of Bangala, which is the only foreign sea that I have now traversed three times, and I will be gratified if I never have to do so again. This crossing was somewhat more to the southerly than my other two had been, but the view was the same: an infinite expanse of azure water with little white trapdoors of foam opening and closing here and there, as if mermaids were taking peeps at the upper world, and herds of pork-fish frisking about our hulls, and so many flying-fish hurtling aboard that our cooks, having long since depleted our tanks of Manzi freshwater fish, periodically collected them from the decks and made us meals of them.
The Lady Kukachin humorously inquired, “If those Angamanam people acquired courage by eating courageous people, will these meals make us able to fly like flying-fish?”
“More likely make us smell like them,” grumbled the maid who attended her bathing chamber. She was disgruntled because, on this long run across the bay, the captains had commanded that we could bathe only in sea water dipped up in buckets, not to waste the fresh. Salt water gets one clean enough, but it leaves one cursedly gritty and scratchy and uncomfortable afterward.
3
AT the western side of the great bay, we made landfall on the island of Srihalam. That was not far south of the Cholamandal of India, where I had earlier made sojourn, and the islanders were physically very similar to the Cholas and, like the Cholas, the island’s coastal residents were mainly engaged in the trade of fishing for pearls. But there the similarity ended.
The Srihalam islanders had adhered to the religion of Buddha, hence were vastly superior to their mainland Hindu cousins in morals and customs and vivacity and personal appeal. Their island was a lovely place, tranquil and lush and of generally balmy weather. I have often noticed that the most beautiful places are given a multiplicity of names: witness the Garden of Eden, which is also variously called Paradise and Arcadia and Elysium and even Djennet by the Muslims. Just so, Srihalam has been severally named by every people who ever admired it. The ancient Greeks and Romans called it Taprobane, meaning Lotus Pond, and the early Moorish seafarers called it Tenerisim, or Isle of Delight, and nowadays Arab mariners call it Serendib, which is only their faulty pronunciation of the islanders’ own name for the place, Srihalam. That name, Place of Gems, is variously translated in other languages: Ilanare by the mainland Cholas, Lanka by other Hindus, Bao Di-fang by our Han captains.
Though we had put into Srihalam of necessity, for water and other supplies, our captains and crews and Lady Kukachin and her retinue and I and my father were not a bit reluctant to tarry there for a while. My father even did some trading—the name Place of Gems being descriptive as well as poetic—and acquired some sapphires of a fineness we had never seen elsewhere, including some immense, deep-blue stones with starlike rays coruscating in their depths. I did not engage in any business, but merely wandered about to see the sights. Those included some ancient cities, deserted and abandoned to the jungle, but still displaying a beauty of architecture and adornment that made me wonder if these people of Srihalam could be the remnants of the admirable race that had inhabited India before the Hindus, and had built the temples which the Hindus now pretended were their own.