The whole
length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow
faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the colour of an Eastern crowd.
And all these beings stared without a murmur, without a sigh, without
a movement. They stared down at the boats, at the sleeping men who at
night had come to them from the sea. Nothing moved. The fronds of palms
stood still against the sky. Not a branch stirred along the shore,
and the brown roofs of hidden houses peeped through the green foliage,
through the big leaves that hung shining and still like leaves forged
of heavy metal. This was the East of the ancient navigators, so old, so
mysterious, resplendent and somber, living and unchanged, full of
danger and promise. And these were the men. I sat up suddenly. A wave
of movement passed through the crowd from end to end, passed along
the heads, swayed the bodies, ran along the jetty like a ripple on the
water, like a breath of wind on a field--and all was still again. I see
it now--the wide sweep of the bay, the glittering sands, the wealth of
green infinite and varied, the sea blue like the sea of a dream,
the crowd of attentive faces, the blaze of vivid colour--the water
reflecting it all, the curve of the shore, the jetty, the high-sterned
outlandish craft floating still, and the three boats with tired men
from the West sleeping unconscious of the land and the people and of the
violence of sunshine. They slept thrown across the thwarts, curled on
bottom-boards, in the careless attitudes of death.
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