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In Java, as in most Oriental countries, the traveller feels that he is moving in an atmosphere of antiquity, and though it has become a misnomer to refer to "The Unchanging East," it is borne in upon one that in the large group of islands comprised in the Philippine and Malay Archipelagoes, from Luzon in the north to Java in the south, from Samar in the east to Sumatra in the west, centuries of western contact has left but a slight impress upon the characters of the people.
Quick turns in our course plunge us into archipelagoes, through which a dozen channels run and wind in every direction.
They moved about the front rooms, filled with trophies from the deep, a Nantucketer's treasures bits of pottery from China, weavings from the Indies, lacquers from Japan over all, spicy reminders of far archipelagoes, and the clean fragrance of cedar. On the mantel in the parlor stood a full-rigged ship, a whaling-ship, with her trying-house and small-boats a full ship, homeward bound....
Joan followed the pointing finger, but held the kind hand. And they sat in silence watching "the fair frail palaces, the fading Alps and archipelagoes, and great cloud-continents of sunset seas."
The commander had been directed to visit the archipelagoes on the western side of the Pacific, but he wished first to make a survey of the island on which we had so nearly run during the gale on our course northward. There was another mate, who had lately passed, Alfred Stanford, a very gentlemanly, pleasing young man.
Those tapes returned to Terra after their chance discovery, were studied, probed, deciphered by the best brains of his time, shared out by lot between already suspicious Terran powers, bringing into the exploration of space bitter rivalries and old hatreds. Such a tape had landed their ship on Hawaika, a world of shallow seas and archipelagoes instead of true continents.
In a continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long islands of Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, form a vast mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia, and dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly studded oriental archipelagoes.
It was a dunghill of out-islanders, Nieues, Uveans, Tongans, Tapatueans, banded together in a common poverty; landless people of other archipelagoes, despised of the Samoans, and paying tribute to the lord of the soil a few men in war; a grudging hog in times of peace.
But when you actually make for them you find the coast opening into archipelagoes of islands, to let you safely through into the snug little "tickles," between island and mainland, where you can ride out the storm as well as you could in a landlocked harbour. This is typical of many another pleasant surprise. Labrador decidedly improves on acquaintance. The fogs have been grossly exaggerated.
There stood a little, round, fat man with a brown face and white clothes, a first-class-looking little man, with a four-karat diamond on his finger and his eye full of interrogations and respects. I judged he was a kind of foreigner may be from Russia or Japan or the archipelagoes. "'Hist! says the round man, full of concealments and confidences.
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