Seven-Tenths Read online

  This is most inventive, and ‘Parallax’ had many disciples from that day on, some of whom cribbed his examples. In 1940 a certain E. L. Venter of Bloemfontein published 100 Proofs that Earth Is Not a ‘Globe’ and also considered the cannon test, concluding ‘the ball always falls back on the cannon’. (Had he conducted his own experiments, one wonders, wearing a tin hat on a private range out in the veldt?) ‘That test proves that the earth is stationary. It is our proof no. 45 that the earth is not a globe.’ To this he adds the evidence of the ‘shadow’. ‘In the tropics a six foot man has no shadow at noon and for 16 miles on each side of him men have no shadow at noon, but men farther away begin to have shadows. This test of the vertical rays of the sun indicates that the diameter of the sun is only 32 miles …’

  This sort of thing is not like the position of men like Dr Udintsev, the lone sceptic who doubts tectonic theory. But the point at which a serious scientist becomes a ‘nut’ is not without interest. The original zetetics were followers of Pyrrho, the founder of the sceptic philosophy, and their name derives from the Greek verb ‘to seek’. They thought of themselves as searchers and enquirers, not believers. The example of ‘Parallax’ and others like him shows how swiftly a text or collection of assertions turns into a doctrine which itself becomes a comfortable hive for every bee in every bonnet. Yet there ought to be an aspect of zetetics which confines itself to an absolute scepticism both playful and imaginative. There was an admirable movement which resolutely refused to believe in the US moon landing of 1969, maintaining that the entire thing had been a brilliant hoax designed to cow and discomfit the USSR as well as to ensure Congressional votes for the further unlimited funding of NASA. The idea was that the astronauts had never left the launch pad, that the extravaganza had been created in the studio using simulation techniques and special effects and fed into millions of TV sets around the world where it was received by a credulous audience. The merit of this argument, apart from being funny, was that the average viewer could not refute it. It made the point that a TV audience will believe anything they see provided it is served up with the right trappings and couched in the approved ‘History in the Making’ rhetoric.

  It is not only from an anarchic streak that one would nearly prefer this version of events, but mainly because scepticism constantly frees thought yet can coexist with knowledge. Only at irritable moments aboard Farnella would I have been tempted to argue that GLORIA was an expensive hoax and the seabed at an infinite depth. Even the denial of a true idea creates a space which vibrates with possibility.

  This place has no name. … Nor does the lost swimmer even have a place, buoyed up as he is in an illimitable steep of fluid and, for all he knows, borne along by a current. In all directions is void, whether air or water, though busy with sunlight and spangles and small events. The sea itself is calm. He wishes there were a higher swell so he could more easily keep up the hope that his boat, even though not many yards away, remains hidden by conspiracies of wavelets. He knows exactly what it would be like to be in an aeroplane flying above where he is now. He knows the burnished pane of ocean with its frozen wrinkles crossed by the aircraft’s shadow. He knows, too, how words like ‘millpond’ only ever come into the mind when gazing disembodiedly out of a window at 20,000 feet. This leaves the swimmer with an echo from which to build a name, ‘Despond’, for this locus in which he is adrift before he abandons it as hackneyed and unhelpful.

  At last he works out that this place can have no name other than his own. Nothing if not isolate, he is himself an island. By mischance or gross carelessness he has become marooned on himself. This perception has a point in its favour. It is an island with room for only one castaway. In the almost impossible event of anybody else reaching its shores they would at least be coming as rescuers.

  * In the days before flight and satellites this fancy was perhaps slightly less stupid than it appears today. Many a nineteenth-century Arctic explorer was fooled by a fata morgana, a complex mirage that can give an illusion of distant mountain ramparts.

  * ‘Parallax’, op. cit.

  2

  Islands and Boundaries

  A detail from Abraham Ortelius’s map of the world (1570) showing a selection of North Atlantic islands, both imaginary and misplaced.

  I

  Tiwarik lies little more than half a mile off the coast, immediately opposite the fishing village of Sabay which from the seaward side appears as a straggle of huts on stilts half lost among the coconut groves. In front of them on the stony beach boats are drawn up, each of which in time becomes identifiable so it is possible on any particular day to read the beach and know who is doing what. The island is uninhabited (uninhabitable, practically, since there is no water) and tiny, being about a quarter of a mile across. But its size on a map – and I have never seen a map large-scale enough to mark it – would be deceptive, for it rises to a peak off in one corner which cannot be less than 400 feet above the sea. There are no beaches, merely that one shifting coral strand maybe a hundred yards long and facing the mainland. The rest of Tiwarik rises from gurgling boulders more or less vertically up volcanic cliffs of black rock. From one quarter there is a steep sweep of coarse tall cogon grass up to the forest which caps the peak. Seen from the strait on a breezy day the sunlight goes running up and up through this wild grassfield. It is the same effect as with young hair and similarly afflicts me with deepest melancholy, affection and pleasure.*

  This was how I depicted an uninhabited island where I lived for a while. I wanted to account for its centrality to my life, while describing the lives of the villagers on the other side of the narrow strait, their habits of dynamite fishing and our nocturnal spear-gunning forays among the reefs and boulders. I noted some of the salient features of tropical offshore islets in South-East Asia: their considerable discomforts, their frequent lack of drinking water, their distance from supplies of nearly everything other than brine, rocks, harsh coral sand, thorns and greenery.

  Perhaps I wrote too much about beauty – at least, about the unidyllic way the island struck me as beautiful – since really I wanted to make the point that in the terms of holiday brochures it was nothing out of the ordinary and near to nowhere very special. I observed that it was in no sense a ‘paradise isle’ as the tourist industry understands it, advancing its complete lack of fresh water and, more especially, its lack of a permanent beach of soft white sand as reasons for asserting that at least ‘Tiwarik’ would never suffer the indignity of being turned into a resort. Its unyielding, basaltic indifference to any melting aspect, to the dreamy topos (not a coco palm anywhere) would guarantee its own rugged persistence. Finally, to protect myself as much as the island, I gave it a fictitious name and was carefully vague about the Philippine province off which it lay.

  Many months after I had finished writing the book wisps of rumour reached me way up the coast. Rumours in those parts being what cocaine is to Hollywood, I attached no importance to them. Then in due time I went back to the little fishing hamlet of ‘Sabay’ from whose shore one can see the island a mile or so away on the other side of a strait of tearing currents.

  To be the biographer of a place or person can insert a murky distance between them and oneself, especially after publication. What has been a private, even obsessive, project turns overnight into an implied claim to special knowledge or scholarship when really all one had on one’s mind was love and curiosity. It becomes easy to retreat into snappish inward pronouncement that while anybody may be a greater expert on the subject, nobody else has quite the same affectionate eye … and up drifts the murk. But on this occasion I sat on an empty oxygen cylinder on ‘Sabay’ beach and gazed through a clear lens of air at ‘Tiwarik’, picking out the details which I still felt had written me as much as I them. On that very outcropping I had lived, had fought a grass fire, dried my catches, had worms, been bitten by centipedes, had watched a pair of sea eagles come and go to their nest in the cap of jungle with fish in their claws. I had glimpsed much el
se besides, and often felt I had voyaged on it further than the island’s small boundaries.

  ‘No more,’ said a friend. ‘It’s been sold.’

  A knifelike stroke. Studiedly offhand, though: ‘Oh? To whom?’

  ‘Japanese. Very rich. Ayy … very big project, James. Very big plans.’

  ‘For that? Oh, nonsense, Baka tsismis lang.’ Just another of those rumours (narcotic, stimulant, currency). Just the favourite Filipino pastime of telling tales of projects which are going to transform the hardscrabble of living, tales which occupy a psychic territory as much as a local site. Sunken galleons … Japanese war chests … Chinese pirate hoards … wood-burning power stations. … The tales fade, re-emerge, fade again. The captains and the scuba divers depart; the phrase ‘feasibility study’ drops from conversations. Things go on being the same.

  Not this time, apparently. This time they really were to change. I paddled across to ‘Tiwarik’, half despondent and half thinking there was probably nothing to worry about. The familiar difficult strand, the familiar steep climb up the cliff path were the same. But up on what I knew privately as the Field of Crabs were signs that people other than local farmers and fishermen had been there. Ominous pegs had been hammered into the baked soil. A shallow pit had been dug and a red-and-white surveyor’s ranging rod stuck up out of it like a thermometer in the mouth of a sick man. Only in the most oblique and imaginative sense had I ever thought of ‘Tiwarik’ as my island. Now it wore the anonymous, severed look of real estate.

  For an hour or two I wandered about without being able to reclaim it. I stood in favourite places and looked down at the suck and surge of water, down through water to the island’s roots. Those boulders, ledges, shelves, coral palaces; those blue thoroughfares and weedy balconies: I knew them, had examined and hunted every inch of them by day and by torchlight. While their aerial map was still familiar they themselves had withdrawn, taking with them whatever it is that makes places vibrate when looked at with a certain eye. Over the horizon comes the world; the eye in distraction flickers and clouds and at once even the rocks shrink in upon themselves like touched anemones. The land reverts to a blob.

  So I left. Over the next year or so stories reached me out of which I built my own fretful picture of the vanishing of ‘Tiwarik’ and the creation of the ‘Fantasy Elephant Club’, as the new resort was apparently to be known. The lack of beach would be no hindrance to the wealthy Japanese visitors who would be flown there direct from Manila by seaplane and helicopter. The last thing they would want to do was swim. There in the chalets where the Field of Crabs had once been they would live in the pallor of circular neon lights and beneath these coldly fizzing haloes be massaged by geishas, recline on vinyl couches to watch porno videos, gamble and sip Chivas Regal and other drinks peculiar to duty-free life. … I hoped the fish eagles had lifted off disdainfully at the first roar of the chainsaws. Where they had nested a cement tower was apparently now going up. I envisaged an oriental folly, a stylised ninja pagoda symbolising the martial art of Third World property development. I kept hoping that some of ‘Tiwarik”s old, implacable quality would assert itself: plagues of centipedes, perhaps; the belated discovery that the Japanese military had tested anthrax bombs there in 1944 and that all the soil more than a metre deep was virulent; even a Krakatoalike eruption of the volcano opposite which had not let out so much as a squeak of steam in the past 50,000 years. … Then I heard that three people had been killed – labourers, possibly, but not from ‘Sabay’. I packed my bag and went back to the village to see old friends and separate news from rumour.

  This time there was a choice of two oxygen cylinders on the beach on which to sit. Several families depended for their income on catching small, brightly coloured species of coral fish, bagging them in plastic with a litre or two of seawater and a squirt of oxygen and shipping them off to Manila for export to the pet shops of Japan and the West. (The mortality rate was probably 80–5 per cent, but as long as they left ‘Sabay’ alive it was not the fishermen’s problem.) Now from these empty cylinders the view across the strait was novel indeed: of an unfamiliarly shaped island girt with rows of what seemed to be white cement bungalows with red roofs. What had once been an empty stretch of water was full of small craft ferrying groups of labourers and materials. Even as I sat, a bangka carrying a large cylindrical water tank crawled heavily out of the difficult shallow channel off ‘Sabay’ beach, its outriggers ploughing the water instead of skimming its surface. Elsewhere along the beach were long heaps of sandbags. Clearly, two of the disadvantages I had wishfully imagined would guarantee the island’s immunity to change were being remedied almost with disdain. No drinking water? Fetch it over in huge tankfuls. No beach? Take ‘Sabay”s across in sacks. What, then, is an island? The author of The Island Within surveys his kneecaps sticking up out of the water in his bathtub and considers them very much part of his personal mainland.* The image has a geological aptness. ‘Tiwarik’ is as much a part of the mainland as ‘Sabay’ is. It just happens to look like an island because the land between was low-lying enough to have been invaded by the sea. Its flora and fauna are scarcely affected by the intervening strait. The weather is that of the mainland, birds and seeds fly to and fro. From time to time people had made efforts to cultivate small patches of its total 13 hectares, though lately this amounted to little more than occasionally cutting the cogon for thatch. The island’s crown of virgin jungle is a miniature version of those vestiges still surviving in gullies and ravines high up Mount Malindig opposite.

  ‘Tiwarik’, then, is a crumb fallen from the mainland, made of the same dough and nourishing the same plants and animals. At the time I built my first hut on it the island had no economic function of its own. Yet it did form a casual part of several economies. Locals fished there and, especially when caught by sudden squalls or currents, would hole up on it until conditions improved. On ordinary days they might land and build a driftwood fire on the coral strand, toasting a fish for lunch. It was also used by travellers. The archipelago is full of migrants undertaking long and dangerous journeys in frail craft with ropy engines. Some of these travellers are landlubbers apprehensively trying as cheaply as possible to reach a city like Cavite or Batangas or Manila where they have heard jobs are to be had. But most are born boat people who give the impression of being refugees from dry land. Visayan fishermen spend weeks away from home, drifting from province to province, from one favourite fishing ground to another, catching and selling. Some of them claim to have no particular home but, gypsy-like, roam these central seas often with only a language, a dialect and a place of birth to give them geographical identity. Any of them at any time may haul their boats on to ‘Tiwarik”s little shore for a few hours to mend nets, cook a meal, calculate how much rice and fuel they will need to buy across the strait before pressing on again. Still other maritime vagrants are smugglers and pirates. Why else would a big, 30-foot bangka from Romblon be carrying at least six boxes of grenades and a .50 calibre machine-gun hidden beneath a nylon sail? They were the most affable of all, catching me mending a plywood flipper. I gave them cooking oil and a disposable butane lighter and in return they offered me a grenade for fishing. When I declined, saying I would rely on my speargun, they said ‘For self-defence, then. There are a lot of bad characters around these parts. Us, for example.’ We all laughed, I a little uneasily; after an hour or two they left, waving.

  Since ‘Tiwarik’ had no population and nothing to offer except a bit of dry land in the middle of a lot of water it was on nobody’s itinerary and was no one’s port of call. It lay at the crossroads of no particular routes, it formed no conceivable milestone in anyone’s journey. Yet it was there to be used, to provide refuge or shelter, sticks for fires, corals and boulders for fishing. Or, for the reflective, it offered a place where one could hear only the sea’s rinsing murmur, the cries of birds and, at night, the tiny hollow sigh of a lamp wick in its glass chimney.

  Now this place no longer exists, and I
need no reminding as our bangka noses on to the Fantasy Elephant Club’s new beach. The tangle of boulders and thorns which had always hidden the foot of the cliff is gone. In its place is a concrete sea wall which at one end abuts the foundations for a small pier. Grey cement teeth stick up out of the blue water sprouting tufts of rusty reinforcing rods. On the spot where I had pitched a flapping shelter during a storm on my first visit to ‘Tiwarik’ many years before stands an octagonal, open-sided beach house with at its centre the beginnings of a circular bar surrounded by polished marble stools. At empty stone tables sit a variety of site officials – architects and engineers – waiting for a boat, as well as a blue-uniformed guard with a pistol and a walkie-talkie. No, he says, it isn’t possible for me just to stroll on up and look around. This is a Japanese operation and things are run in an efficient and security-conscious manner. Why do I want to visit the island, anyway? I explain that I had once spent time here, had lived here alone, am curious to revisit it. The guard calls up, is told to wait. I sit down on a marble stool and watch relays of sweating boys stagger beneath the sacks of sand they are unloading from a bangka. Time passes; the guard speaks, his radio crackles back; more time passes. Finally, I and my two friends from ‘Sabay’ are allowed to walk up to the site but are reminded that when it is finished the Fantasy Elephant Club will be exclusively for Japanese members.