Argosy All-Story Weekly, January 21, 1922 — page 22: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

12 However, there I was and I made up my mind to make the best.of it. Changwu was my household god, permanently con- nected now with Li Yuen’s explanation of him as “ the emblem of good luck that sug- gests belief in our ultimate triumph.” I fancied that I knew what Li Yuen meant when he said this would be a fine thing for me, a year of loneliness and meditation and instruction. I had no mind to sit all day like a hermit priest. My duties were light enough, mean- ing no pun. I had but to keep the lenses clean, trim the wicks, replenish the oil reser- voirs and wind up the turning apparatus. Once a month a tub of a packet boat en route from Singapore to Pontianak stopped and sent off a boat with oil, water, some supplies and what mail I had. Usually there were newspapers and magazines and books that showed no sign of the sender, but I know they came from Shanghai, and that was sufficient. To fill in my time I fished. I flew kites, I rowed about in my little tender and went swimming in the one pool where I felt safe from sharks. The waters were alive with those beasts, cruising along the chan- nels or basking on the reefs. Sharks and turtles and giant rays were plentiful, and I got sick of turtle steak and turtle soup in my first month. There were other fishes of gaudy colors and strange shapes, but I was leary of them. Afraid of being poisoned. My main trouble was the confounded heat. I lost weight every day until I looked ascetic enough, lean and brown as a berry, for I wore little as soon as I had acquired tan enough to discard clothes in safety. Finally I wore only a loin-cloth, save when the packet boat was due. I oiled my body like the natives, and I must have been a weird figure. While I shaved regularly, I let my black hair grow like a Dyak’s to protect the back of my neck. I had a rifle along, and I spent a lot of my money in cartridges for that and En Sue’s automatic. handed the pistol to me the first day out from Shanghai to Singapore, a present from Li Yuen. I used to take the empty cans of my grub supply and set them up among The purser of the boat- ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. the reefs or start them floating off in the tide rips, and I discovered to my joy that I was a natural shot. Add that to the practise I got and I became a real sharp- shooter. The sea was wonderful, though there were stretches when I was afraid of it. That was before I began to study. The sheer beauty of it was staggering. At times with the reefs and their passages, the shal- low pools and deeper holes, it looked for all the world like a great peacock’s tail spread out, slightly ruffled by the wind; vivid greens and blues and browns and purples; prismatic, dazzling. Another morning would display irregular breadths and rib- bons of satin spread out. without a ripple under a sky as hard and blue as turquoise. Or the expanse of it would be turbid yel- low, mottled with greasy suds under a sky of brass before the wind came boiling up from nowhere. Then the lighthouse rocked while the steel struts under me twanged with the fury of the squall. Weird sounds came up from this sea, long, shuddering moans in the night, so that at first I would spring out of my bunk and run out naked to the gallery, convinced I had been hailed. Smells would come from it as if the rotten bottom of the sea had been heaved up to lie in festering slime upon the surface. It came to represent to me a beast, beautiful but relentless, al- ways in wait, snarling, purring, howling, whining, sending out the fetid smell of its carrion-laden breath. Of course I was liable to go a bit off my head. I saw that and checked it. Here was I who had lived, who loved excite- ment, the company of my fellows, essential- ly a gregarious animal; living suddenly the life of a hermit, denied all the things that had pleased me, a fettered wanderer. It was no wonder that I saw visions in the clouds and heard voices from the sea. Nights, the stars often reflected in the calm waters would change to the lights of some big city I had known and loved, the lamps of Regent Street or of Broadway on a wet night, doubled in the rainy asphalt. That, with the phonograph going on some familiar tune! I used to look forward to those de- lusions and lie awake afterward. It was COMICLOOKS C©