Imagens da página
PDF
ePub

For hours I lay there, listening to the wind and water; imagining, now, that I heard shrieks out at sea; now, that I distinctly heard the firing of signal guns; and now, the fall of houses in the town. I got up several times and looked out; but could see nothing except the reflection in the window-panes of the faint candle I had left burning, and of my own haggard face looking in at me from the black void.

At length my restlessness attained to such a pitch, that I hurried on my clothes and went down stairs. In a large kitchen, where I dimly saw bacon and ropes of onions hanging from the beams, the watchers were clustered together, in various attitudes, about a table, purposely moved away from the great chimney, and brought near the door. A pretty girl, who had her ears stopped with her apron, and her eyes upon the door, screamed when I appeared, supposing me to be a spirit; but the others had more presence of mind, and were glad of an addition to their company. One man, referring to the topic they had been discussing, asked me whether I thought the souls of the colliercrews who had gone down, were out in the storm?

I remained there, I dare say, two hours. Once I opened the yard-gate, and looked into the empty street. The sand, the seaweed, and the flakes of foam were driving by; and I was obliged to call for assistance before I could shut the gate again, and make it fast against the wind.

There was a dark gloom in my solitary chamber, when I at length returned to it; but I was tired, now, and, getting into bed again, fell-off a tower and down a precipice -into the depths of sleep. I have an impression that for a long time, though I dreamed of being elsewhere and in a variety of scenes, it was always blowing in my dream. At length I lost that feeble hold upon reality, and was engaged with two dear friends, but who they were I don't know, at the siege of some town in a roar of cannonading.

The thunder of the cannon was so loud and incessant that I could not hear something I much desired to hear, until I made a great exertion and awoke. It was broad dayeight or nine o'clock; the storm raging, in lieu of the batteries; and some one knocking and calling at my door.

"What is the matter?" I cried. "A wreck! Close by!"

I sprung out of bed and asked what wreck? "A schooner, from Spain or Portugal, laden | with fruit and wine. Make haste, sir, if you want to see her! It's thought, down on the beach, she'll go to pieces every moment."

The excited voice went clamoring along the staircase; and I wrapped myself in my clothes as quickly as I could, and ran into the street.

Numbers of people were there before me, all running in one direction, to the beach. I ran the same way, outstripping a good many, and soon came facing the wild sea.

The wind might by this time have lulled a little, though not more sensibly than if the cannonading I had dreamed of had been diminished by the silencing of half a dozen guns out of hundreds. But the sea, having upon it the additional agitation of the whole night, was infinitely more terrific than when I had seen it last. Every appearance it had then presented bore the expression of being swelled; and the height to which the breakers rose, and, looking over one another, bore one another down, and rolled in, in interminable hosts, was most appalling.

In the difficulty of hearing anything but wind and waves, and in the crowd, and the unspeakable confusion, and my first breathless efforts to stand against the weather, I was so confused that I looked out to sea for the wreck, and saw nothing but the foaming heads of the great waves. A half-dressed boatman, standing next to me, pointed with his bare arm (a tattoo'd arrow on it, pointing in the same direction) to the left. Then, O, great Heaven, I saw it, close in upon us!

One mast was broken short off, six or eight feet from the deck, and lay over the side, entangled in a maze of sail and rigging; and all that ruin, as the ship rolled and beat

which she did without a moment's pause and with a violence quite inconceivable-beat the side as if it would stave it in. Some efforts were even then being made to cut this portion of the wreck away; for as the ship, which was broadside on, turned towards us in her rolling, I plainly descried her people at work with axes, especially one active figure with long curling hair, conspicuous among the rest. But a great cry, which was audible even above the wind and water, rose from the shore at this moment; the sea, sweeping over the rolling wreck, made a clean breach, and carried men, spars, casks, planks, bulwarks, heaps of such toys, into the boiling surge.

The second mast was yet standing, with the rags of a rent sail and a wild confusion of broken cordage flapping to and fro. The ship had struck once, the same boatman hoarsely said in my ear, and then lifted in and struck again. I understood him to add that she was parting amidships, and I could readily suppose so, for the rolling and beating were too tremendous for any human

work to suffer long. As he spoke there was another great cry of pity from the beach; four men arose with the wreck out of the deep, clinging to the rigging of the remaining ast; uppermost the active figure with the Qurling hair.

There was a bell on board, and as the ship rolled and dashed, like a desperate creature driven mad, now showing us the whole sweep of her deck, as she turned on her beam-ends towards the shore, now nothing but her keel, as she sprung wildly over and turned to wards the sea, the bell rang; and its sound, the knell of those unhappy men, was borne towards us on the wind. Again we lost her and again she rose. Two men were gone. The agony on shore increased. Men groaned and clasped their hands; women shrieked and turned away their faces. Some ran wildly up and down along the beach, crying for help where no help could be. I found myself one of these, frantically imploring a knot of sailors whom I knew not to let those two lost creatures perish before our eyes.

They were making out to me, in an agitated way-I don't know how, for the little I could hear I was scarcely composed enough to understand that the life-boat had been bravely manned an hour ago, and could do nothing; and that as no man would be so desperate as to attempt to wade off with a rope, and establish a communication with the shore, there was nothing left to try; when I noticed that some new sensation moved the people on the beach, and saw them part, and Ham come breaking through them to the front. I ran to him-as well as I know, to repeat my appeal for help. But, distracted though I was, by a sight so new to me and terrible, the determination in his face, and his look, out to sea-exactly the same look as I remembered in connexion with the morning after Emily's flight-awoke me to a knowledge of his danger. I held him back with both arms; and implored the men with whom I had been speaking, not to listen to him, not to do murder, not to let him stir from off that sand!

Another cry arose on shore and looking to the wreck, we saw the cruel sail, with blow on blow, beat off the lower of the two men, and fly up in triumph round the active figure left alone upon the mast.

Against such a sight, and against such determination as that of the calmly desperate man who was already accustomed to lead half the people present, I might as hopefully have entreated the wind. "Mas'r Davy," he said, cheerily grasping me by both hands, "if my time is come, 'tis come. If 'ta'n't, I'll bide it. Lord above bless you, and bless all! Mates, make me ready! I'm a going off!"

I was swept away, but not unkindly, to some distance, where the people around me made me stay: urging, as I confusedly perceived, that he was bent on going, with help or without, and that I should endanger the precautions for his safety by troubling those with whom they rested. I don't know what I answered, or what they rejoined; but, I saw hurry on the beach, and men running with ropes from a capstan that was there, and penetrating into a circle of figures that hid him from me. Then I saw him standing alone in a seaman's frock and trowsers: a rope in his hand, or slung to his wrist : another round his body: and several of the best men holding, at a little distance, to the latter, which he laid out himself, slack upon the shore, at his feet.

The wreck, even to my unpractised eye, was breaking up. I saw that she was parting in the middle, and that the life of the solitary man upon the mast hung by a thread. Still he clung to it. He had a singular red cap on, -not like a sailor's cap, but of a finer color; and as the few yielding planks between him and destruction rolled and bulged, and his anticipative death-knell rung, he was seen by all of us to wave it. I saw him do it now, and thought I was going distracted, when his action brought an old remembrance to my mind of a once dear friend.

Ham watched the sea, standing alone, with the silence of suspended breath behind him, and the storm before, until there was a great retiring wave, when, with a backward glance at those who held the rope which was made fast round his body, he dashed in after it, and in a moment was buffeting with the water; rising with the hills, falling with the valleys, lost beneath the foam; then drawn again to land. They hauled in hastily.

He was hurt. I saw blood on his face, from where I stood; but he took no thought of that. He seemed hurriedly to give them some directions for leaving him more freeor so I judged from the motion of his armand was gone as before.

And now he made for the wreck, rising with the hills, falling with the valleys, lost beneath the rugged foam, borne in towards the shore, borne on towards the ship, striving hard and valiantly. The distance was noth ing, but the power of the sea and wind made the strife deadly. At length he neared the wreck. He was so near, that with one more of his vigorous strokes he would be clinging to it-when a high, green, vast hillside of water, moving on shoreward, from beyond the ship, he seemed to leap up into it with a mighty bound, and the ship was gone!

Some eddying fragments I saw in the sea,

as if a mere cask had been broken, in running to the spot where they were hauling in. Consternation was in every face. They drew him to my very feet-insensible-dead. He was carried to the nearest house; and, no one preventing me now, I remained near him, busy, while every means of restoration were tried; but he had been beaten to death by the great wave, and his generous heart was stilled forever.

A WEEK AT BATAVIA.

Batavia, 10th November, 1866.—The last inhabitants of Australia of whom we took leave were cannibals, with black skins and carrying poisoned arrows: the first to receive us on the soil of Java are Dutch custom-house officers, pale and fair, dressed in brilliant uniforms, and bearing huge bunches of keys. They softened for us the transition from savage to civilized life by the ruthless opening of our boxes and entire upsetting of their contents. Under the great shed of the Custom House, some four hundred chocolatecoloured porters, with bare chests, scarlet "Sir," said he, with tears starting to his sashes, and green turbans, fight for our lugweather-beaten face, which, with his tremb-gage, and carry it off at a run. My anxious ling lips, was ashy pale, "will you come over glance follows a certain hat-box, with a clusyonder?" ter of sixteen coolies clinging wildly to it, yelling with all their might, and finally becoming lost in the crowd.

As I sat beside the bed, when hope was abandoned and all was done, a fisherman, who had known me when Emily and I were children, and ever since, whispered my name at the door.

The old remembrance that had been recalled to me, was in his look. I asked him, terror-stricken, leaning on the arm he held out to support me :

"Has a body come ashore?" He said, "Yes."

"Do I know it?" I asked then. He answered nothing.

But he led me to the shore. And on that part of it where she and I had looked for shells, two children-on that part of it where some lighter fragments of the old boat, blown down last night, had been scattered by the wind- among the ruins of the home he had wronged-I saw him lying with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at

school.

CHARLES DICKENS.

IN MEMORIAM.

I wage not any feud with Death

For changes wrought on form and face;
No lower life that earth's embrace
May breed with him, can fright my faith.
Eternal process moving on,

From state to state the spirit walks;
And these are but the shatter'd stalks,
Or ruin'd chrysalis of one.

Nor blame I Death, because he bare
The use of virtue out of earth:
I know transplanted human worth
Will bloom to profit, otherwhere.

For this alone on Death I wreak

The wrath that garners in my heart;
He puts our lives so far apart
We cannot hear each other speak.

TENNYSON.

We get, two and two, into some charming little open carriages, which seem to abound here, it being essential to the dignity of a European never to go on foot. Each is drawn by Lilliputian ponies, like Newfoundland dogs, brought from the island of Timor, with closecropped manes, and knowing little heads, and who go at a tremendous pace. The eccentriclooking coachmen who goad them on with voice and whip are Malays, wearing red and yellow striped hats like enormous bell-glasses, which shade them entirely. In this manner we pass at a gallop through the old town of Batavia, built on the unhealthy mud of the sea-shore. Here there are only the dwellings of the natives, and a good many countinghouses, whose old-fashioned gable ends recall the Dutch buildings of the last century, and contrast curiously with the luxuriant verdure of tropical vegetation. In these lanes plenty of Chinamen are to be seen with their conceited strut, rich dandies of the Celestial Empire, with heads well shaved, and tails so tightly plaited that they always make one long to pull them. A Malay shades them from the sun with an immense sky-blue umbrella. For more than three-quarters of an hour our drive continues, and we pass by the most novel sights. We skirt canals, where groups of thirty or forty Malay women are bathing, and are suddenly startled in their gambols by a pirogue, heavily laden with fruit, moving silently along by the aid of its languid paddles. Here comes a troop of native cavalry, trotting "à l'anglaise ;" their swords, as tall as their horses, trail upon the ground; their long spears touch the plumes of the cocoa-nut trees: these Malays, with their gingerbread complexions and hanging lips, are dressed up as European soldiers, and

VOL. I.

blooming there. To the right-through clumps of coffee trees, nutmeg trees, vanilla trees, and tamarinds-we catch glimpses of lawns, in fairy-like gardens; and in the distance the white palaces and green verandahs of the European nabobs. I had seen nothing but these avenues and villas, and fancied myself in some delightful suburb of the city, when we found ourselves at the hotel, "der Nederlanden," which, it appears, is in the centre of Batavia; so that this blossoming wood is the town itself! I am in such ecstacies with it, I can hardly believe my eyes. By the beard of all the monkeys with long tails or short that I have yet seen, I swear that it is impossible to describe to you my amazement and admiration. Our new dwelling is situated in the midst of a garden, and sheltered by large trees. The principal building, which is of marble, is supported by an airy colonnade, into which it opens on all sides; on the side of the street and the canal is a circular verandah, where officers, grown thin from the heat, are lounging in cane rocking-chairs. On the opposite side a great oval-shaped kiosk, open to all the winds, but protected by a light roof from the sun, serves as a diningroom. Some sixty Malay servants are swarming like ants to lay the table there. Nothing can be prettier than their long robes, made of red cotton or silk, their blue turbans, and yellow sashes, set off by the whiteness of the balconies and the pavement. Two long

their bare feet decorated with magnificent | dling in the water, the tufts of water-lilies spurs. There, numbers of itinerant merchants, adorned with "langoutis of the most vivid colours, traverse the streets at the peculiar trotting pace common to Indians; gesticulating, apostrophising the passer-by, and laughing loudly. It is the most bewildering, the most picturesque, the liveliest crowd I ever saw. It would take me hours to describe its thousand colours, the inconceivable specimens of humanity that compose it, its noisy pantomimic animation. But soon we cross a bridge, and enter the new town. Oh, what a garden of fairyland, what a verdant paradise this is! Literally speaking, there are no streets in Batavia; there are only splendid avenues, shaded by the most beautiful and luxuriant trees, which form immense long bowers, such as in Europe are only seen in a scene at the opera. The fiery rays of a pitiless sun can only at intervals penetrate this shade, but they deck all that forms it with marvellous hues: the many plumes of the cocoa-nut tree; the slender branches of the tulip tree, which are all flower, and scarlet flower; bananas with their green leaves as large as a man; cotton trees, covered with snow white tufts; the travellers' palm, great fans of the most exquisite grace, from which a stream of a milky fluid springs, if you pierce the trunk; finally, immense banyan trees, from which hundreds of creepers fall straight down, and taking root almost as soon as they touch the ground, climb again to the summit of the tree, twin-wings, of one story only, with verandahs and ing round it in knotted garlands, only to fall colonnades, enclose the gardens commanded again! One of these trees alone forms a for- by the kiosk. Here are our rooms, and on est surrounded by a curtain, a network of entering them we feel a real sensation of interlaced foliage and flowers, through which freshness, a delicious temperature compared to children in a state of nature, putting on one that outside; there, in fact, the thermometer side the hundreds of creepers waving in the is at 1140, and here it is kind enough to go wind, can look at the boats and the swimmers down to 102°. It is five o'clock in the afterpassing along the canal. noon; good heavens! what will it be tomorrow at noon?

The greater part of these bowers of the tropical Babylon are, in fact, only the footpaths to the "arroyos," the greater waterways, which the Dutch would certainly have formed by hundreds, in recollection of their mother-country, if the Malays had not already made them in thousands. Thus the instincts of the white race from the north and the yellow race of the equator coincided. The greatest navigators and the greatest pirates in the world cut up their soil into innumerable islets, and the canals in this town are the veins by which circulates their whole commercial life. Another many-coloured bower therefore, to our left, shades the arroyo on whose opposite shore we are driving. I cannot take my eyes from the innumerable vessels that traverse it; the laughing groups pad- |

We had hardly begun to unpack our boxes when a man presented himself. He was a native, half bailiff, half policeman, with bare feet and a sword at his side, and made us write down, according to police regulations, our names and qualities in a register, which he appeared to hold in great veneration, demanding a legal and minute account for every column. I complied very willingly with the regulations of the colonial "Pietri," but when my august travelling companion was called upon to write down his domicile, he was tempted to put "Batavia itself;" is not every land which is not the beloved country an equally transitory domicile to the exile?

If the flowering trees of this terrestrial paradise are the most characteristic beauties

enne pepper sauce, constitutes the celebrated curry; an absence of all meat that can be cut with an ordinary knife; an abundance of bamboo salads and chutnee; there is a local flavour about this much appreciated by amateurs, but which in palates and digestions unaccustomed to Javanese cooking raises fiery torments, which are only increased by drink

of the town, the marble basins for bathing
are certainly the greatest charm of a Javanese
hotel. In less than ten minutes after alight-
ing at the "Nederlanden," I had gone to the
end of the colonnade, descended a few steps,
and was enjoying in the whitest of basins the
voluptuous delights of an abundant shower
manufactured by a Malay who pumped the
water by a regular movement up to the ceiling.
ing, whence it fell again to inundate me. I
should have remained in my bath to all eter-
nity if the patience of these placid Malays
had not exhausted mine. Two attendants, in
fact, had insisted upon following me, and
crouching down some four yards off were
waiting till I was pleased to condescend to
require their soft towels; and beside the man
who pumped, a fourth man in a red robe
offered me a basket full of mangoes, red man-
gosteens, whose inside is like pink snow, and
the perfumed little-known bananas.

In the evening we dined in the kiosk; round us a many-coloured noisy crowd danced under the big trees, from which hung Venetian lanterns. From time to time, amongst the red vests and green robes, a wealthy Dutchman passes languidly along in loose white garments, preceded by the light of an immensely long cigar. We are waited upon by the whole troop of Orientals of whom I spoke just now. I have a Malay to supply me with iced water, which he pours out at arm's length; there are two to change my plate; three to bring round the dishes; one carves; another is awaiting the moment for coffee. I believe if I wished for a dozen dishes, and particularly if I could call for them in the native dialect, I should give employment to the twelve men in red who stand behind my chair! What a charming effect all this variety of colours has on this beautiful evening, with a bright light shining upon them! And when, lazily stretched under the verandah, enjoying the balmy evening breeze, I call "Sapada, cassi api!" immediately one of these Arabian Nights figures, whom one is tempted to call slaves, advances from the column, at the foot of which he has been silently crouching like a statue of Buddha, and brings me to light my cigar a long match of which he has the constant care. It is made of sandal wood saw-dust glued together, and burns night and day with the most delicious perfume. I feel as if I were turning into a pasha!

As regards the dinner itself, as a Northman I must make some reservation: eight and forty different kinds of capsicums, a mountain of rice covering a microscopic atom of chicken (the anti-type of the fragment of the Australian Dinornis), which with a Cay

11th November, 1866.-As I lay down last night on a bed already possessing the peculiarity of being made with mats instead of sheets, I was greatly surprised to find, besides the innumerable gnats imprisoned behind the mosquito net, a companion quite as remarkable. This was a long roll made of grass matting, about two yards long, and the thickness of an ordinary bolster, which awaited me laid lengthwise on the bed. It was obligingly explained to me that no inhabitant of Java will sleep without this vegetable production, which must be kept between the legs to cool the body. I was very much amused with this specimen of manners and customs; but if it soothes the creoles with a. refreshing slumber, it rouses Europeans incontrollably to a bolstering match. Besides the swarms of buzzing mosquitoes, with their impertinent stings, exasperated us by whistling their Javanese airs in our ears; but as the capsicums, the grass bolsters, and the mosquitoes are necessary features of the locality, I intend in a few days to make friends with them all.

Very different from Paris customs, fashionable life begins here at half-past four in the morning. As soon as the first mists of a tropical dawn appear, old and young begin to be heard moving over the tiled floors in slippers, and, wrapped in floating cotton garments, hasten to the pools to enjoy the icecold waves. As I left them, I met a real odalisque, with jet black eyes, and of the most foreign appearance; she glided between the columns, throwing back masses of black hair which fell to the ground, and classically draped like Stratonice in rose-coloured cashmere. She seemed to us really an apparition, with her sudden changing glances, the wild swiftness of her movements, her air as of a lioness surprised, and that Indian fire in her veins which always gives so fascinating a charm. We were told that she was the daughter of a Dutch officer and of a native of Borneo.

The half-caste beauties bloom wonderfully under the sun of Java, while the unhappy Europeans, enfeebled and worn out by the heat, look pale and ghastly, and inspire one with the most profound pity. Such was my

« AnteriorContinuar »