The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes Read online

  Ffellowes, our British brigadier (I sometimes think of him as the grenadier, but he always says his commission was in the artillery), was not in the room, at least at the beginning of the story, but I suddenly looked up and saw him standing outside the circle, smoking a cigar. He had just appeared, in that way he has, one minute absent, the next present. He said nothing, but listened quietly, until the visitor happened to get on the subject of turtles. Then, in the next break in the conversation, when Professor Jones, or whatever his name was, had finished a story about sea turtles mating, he asked, "Did you ever know a man named Strudwick? A specialist in your field, I believe." (The name, by the way, was not anything like Strudwick, but some relative might read this account, and I have no desire to be sued for libel.)

  Our visitor grew pretty excited. "I knew him very well; as a matter of fact, I did some of my graduate work under him. A real genius, but a strange man. He vanished in the Pacific, I believe, some years back, though I forget the details."

  "I knew him slightly," said Ffellowes quietly. "And he was certainly strange." He did not elaborate on his remarks, and Williams snorted audibly.

  Eventually whoever had brought the scientist took him away and a number of others left also. Williams, alas, was not one of them. He had grown to know Ffellowes well enough to scent a story as well as the rest of us regulars, and though he never tires of denouncing the brigadier's tales as total fabrications, he never missed one if he could manage to get into the circle. As usual, Ffellowes ignored him, or treated him rather with the scrupulous courtesy used for unusually aged and stupid waiters and doormen. Williams, I think, would have disliked him less if he had walked up and belted him with a straight left. But, Ffellowes being Ffellowes, this was impossible.

  Ffellowes smiled when we asked if there were a story concerning the missing scientist he had inquired about.

  "Indeed there is. I don't mind telling it. But I warn you it is quite odd. There are a number of things about the whole thing that were, so to speak, left hanging, loose ends. A very peculiar business, from beginning to end." I settled back to listen with an audible, or almost audible, sigh of satisfaction, and I noticed others do the same.

  "I was on leave from a job in Singapore. Let's see, that would have been in 1940. Things were on fire in Europe; London was burning night and day; the Jerries had France, the Low Countries, Norway and what all. I kept trying for active duty, and kept being shoved back into one odd job after another, like that thing in Kenya that I told you about.(*See "His Only Safari") "At any rate, I was due for a spot of leave, and it was decided by a rather intelligent superior of mine, that one could have some fun and still do some work. He knew I liked poking about in the world's backwaters.

  "We were not too happy then about the situation in some of the Dutch islands below us. They had Java and Sumatra under firm political control all right, but we kept hearing about trouble in the smaller, less well-patrolled places, some of the old Somerset Maugham settings, you know. It was obvious that Brother Jap, whom I had already met in other areas, was only waiting for a chance to jump us, and we felt that our Dutch neighbors might be neglecting some of the classic soft underbelly. There were reported meetings of Bajau pirates, of whom plenty existed then, and probably still do, with dissident petty rajahs, Moro bandits from up in the Philippines and so on. Our intelligence people in north Borneo and Sarawak were getting edgy, feeling that there might be a widespread uprising at a time when we all needed to concentrate on a northern invasion. It seemed to want looking into.

  "When you consider," he added, his smooth, ruddy face putting on a rueful appearance, "how badly we ourselves messed up the actual Jap invasion when did come, it seems we were a bit silly to worry about this other and, as it turned out, minor matter. Still, I make no apologies for my mission. Hindsight makes things only too evident that are invisible at the time. Half or more of any given intelligence mission is ridiculous to begin with, becomes more so as it goes on and usually ends up totally irrelevant. Still, as I say, one never knows, not in advance.

  "The scheme we worked out was for me to hire a large prau, a native sailboat, in Sandakan, and then noodle down the islands on a poor man's yachting cruise, picking up what scraps I could from natives, informers, our local agents (mostly worthless, I may say, the latter), and generally trying to find out what was what. We briefed our Dutch opposite numbers, and they didn't care for it; but since their government and queen were now pensioners in England, they had to agree, like it or not, and keep hands off, too.

  "It was a lovely trip, if one doesn't mind trading sunsets for bedbugs and the loveliest seas in the world for appalling grub. Bad Malay cooking is even worse than bad English cooking, but fortunately in those days I had a stomach of proof steel."

  "Who said there was any good English cooking," mumbled Williams, but he might as well not have spoken for all the attention Ffellowes paid.

  "We called at Manado, in the north of Celebes, and then sailed on down through the Molucca Passage. In the middle of the Molucca Sea lie the Sula Islands, lovely places or were then, quite unspoiled and full of white beaches, coco palms and pleasant folk. I used to mourn them privately when the Jap fleet made the waters blood-red later on. And it was there, from a most charming man, a self-exiled Norwegian who had settled as a trader years before, that I heard first of Pulau Tuntong, the Island of the Turtle, and also, incidently, of Dr. and Mrs. Strudwick.

  "I shall not attempt to give you my Norwegian chum's accent, but under it, he spoke fairly intelligible if 'American' English, as well as fluent Malay Buginese, the local talk, into which he would switch when seeking a hard word. I used to speak fairish Malay myself, so we got along well enough.

  " 'That's a funny place, Mr. Ffellowes. Only a few natives and they are not liked much either, sort of pariahs, like they have up in India. They seem to have always lived there, and the other peoples in these parts never go there, and they themselves, they never leave, neither. But I can't say they ever give trouble, no killings or nothing. The Dutch Controleur here, he don't never go there, and no ships call, no Chink traders even, and they go anywhere they can for a profit, with them old, beat-up junks. I never been there, but they say there ain't no harm in the place. Anyone can go there, if you see what I mean, but no one does. Except for the American and his wife. They are there right now, been there six months about. I forward their mail in my own boat once a month. They're some kind of scientists, studying turtles, they said. It's supposed to be a great place for turtles. Guess that's how it got its name. But the whole thing, by Joe, even looks like a turtle. One maybe three miles long, that is half in the water, with only the point of the head sticking out, which is another little island, maybe a quarter mile from shore, from the big one.

  " 'How far? Maybe thirty miles southeast, as the crow is flying from here. Lots of bad reefs and no good anchorage. I wouldn't like to be there in a storm, I tell you. The place is always foggy, too. All kinds of mineral sinks and steams and smokes, so it takes a good wind to give you a view of the whole thing. Must be a capped volcano or something. Lots of these islands are, but I never heard that this one blew or nothing. Just the steams and smokes all the time, like Yellowstone Park in the U.S., or some of our warm springs back in Norway. But it is a kind of place that makes you well discomfortable. My boys don't like to go there, never go ashore, and they leave plenty quick, too.'

  "He rambled on, but I got to wondering to myself. Who were these Americans and what were they doing there? The Dutch had said nothing of them to us, and this was odd. It may have been that they had forgot, but they kept pretty careful account of traveling Caucasians in their islands.

  There weren't so many then, you know. Up in Malaya, we had picked up several White Russians already, types who were the most popular with the Japanese for work in areas where they themselves would be a standout. And there were one or two German agents in the Far East, too, men who had dropped out of sight at the beginning of the war in '39. We would dearly have
liked to know where they were and what they were doing. I had a radio on my prau, and I tried to reach Sandakan and get an enquiry passed to Washington via London. But the damned thing was on the blink, as I have always found these devices to be when most wanted. There were Dutch authorities in the Celebes of course, but I had been warned to avoid them except in case of dire emergency, which this was not. What to do was a puzzle.

  "I finally decided to go have a look-see myself. Old Ali, my captain, was a Bugi himself and passably familiar with these waters. As a matter of fact, he was a reformed pirate, caught by one of our gunboats robbing a trading junk up in the Anambas some years before. My chief had interviewed him, got him a suspended sentence and set him up as a handy type, whenever we needed someone for just such an offbeat mission as my present one. His crew were his sons and cousins, a cheerful collection of sea thieves, got by wives from every race in Indonesia, I imagine, since some were dark and some light and all dressed differently. But they jumped when the old man said 'frog,' and he himself had always proved utterly trustworthy in his dealings with us. There were nine of them, as I recall, all hung about with krises, bolos, kampilans and all other known variety of edged weapon found thereabouts. I had a rifle and a Webley auto pistol below, and the crew had guns too, though I had them kept out of sight. This was quite normal, for we could very easily have met pirates, of whom, as I said, plenty were still known to be operating.

  "Ali waddled up when I called from my cabin the next morning, a short, rubbery old thing, with a Fu-Manchu mustache, stained red with betel nut, a bald head and an engaging black-stumped grin. But the grin vanished when I told him where I wanted to go.

  " 'I have never been there, Tuan. No one goes there. I know we look for bad men, men who would plot against the British and the Dutch. You will never find such people there. It is a waste of time. Let us go further south.'

  "He was talking the Malay lingua franca of the South Seas, which is used from the China Sea to the Australian coast. One can be quite elaborate in it, and he grew increasingly so, since it was obvious that he did not at all care for the proposed visit. Now this was a really case-hardened scoundrel, who had weathered a dozen typhoons in what amounted to skiffs, as well as a thousand other hair-curling experiences to boot. I grew intrigued as he persisted in trying to change my mind, because I couldn't imagine what could scare him. And he was scared.

  "I finally announced that I was going to Pulau Tuntong, alone if necessary, and that if no one of sufficient courage would accompany me, I would rent a one-man boat and go by myself. As I thought, he had far too much pride to take that I had been entrusted to him, and he said he would go, even if all the djins of Hell (he was some kind of casual Moslem) stood in the way. I got out our maps, and the two of us sat down over a bottle of horrible gutrot, some form of arrack he liked, to work out a course. I already had interviewed the natives who took the mail, and got what they could tell me about the trip, and between us, we figured it out. The place might have been thirty miles as the crow flies, but it was nearer double that if you didn't want to get wrecked. We were coming from the north, and we had to land on the south shore of the island, which meant a long detour to avoid the very complex reefs. We decided to leave at first light; no place at all for running a night. After a while the spirit, as I had hoped, got to him, and he began to recall what he had heard from his grandmother or someone of that vintage about the Island of the Turtle. It was all very vague.

  "There was a curse on the place, that was clear. It had, the curse, I mean, something to do with the turtles themselves, who swarmed there. When I asked if he meant the sea turtles, he said it did, but there were many turtles on land, too. This confused me for a moment, since, as you may or may not know, in England everything not a large sea turtle is called, confusingly, a tortoise, even if it lives in fresh water. I have since learnt that the rest of the world uses that term for the ones that live exclusively on land. When I got this sorted out, I continued to pump him, but got little more that made any kind of sense. The people of the island were under the curse too, but only if they left the island. Then they died. They had a turtle as a deity, avoided strangers, and though harmless in themselves, were considered unlucky and good to avoid. Mariners who were shipwrecked there simply never turned up again. Even the toughest Bajau and sea Dayak pirates never went near the place and hadn't for as long as tradition went back.

  "Well, he finally reeled out, his sarong of whatever dragging on the deck, and I turned in with my own thoughts. I had hoped to carry some mail to the alleged scientists, but my Norse friend had sent some off only the week before. An evening with a steam kettle might have told me something.

  "Our trip down was uneventful and we raised the anchorage we were seeking in the evening. I must say the place was not cheerful looking. A low cliff overgrown with scrub seemed to stretch around the whole island. It was hard to make out details, because the fogs and steams that my chum had mentioned did indeed blanket the landscape. Against the sunset it was a sort of whaleback of a thing, as one could make out when the rifts appeared in the mist, perhaps five or six hundred feet high at the top of the curve. There were patches of dense vegetation and patches of bald rock, the latter gleaming wetly. Once in a while, lighter areas showed, which looked like sand. We could see no beach, but I remembered hearing that there was a long one on the north coast, which is where the great sea turtles came to lay their eggs.

  "But we had found the correct place all right. There was a cluster of lights, perhaps fifty or so, in front of us and quite near to the water, and higher up, and further to the east, one small clump, in what appeared to be a sort of shallow dip or declivity. The Americans were said to have built a real house, which sounded curious, but not wildly so, above the village, and this must be its lights. It could be nothing else, since we had been told that the entire population of the place normally lived in this one village which lay before us.

  "Night fell with the suddenness of the tropics, and the lights became hard to see, since there was no wind once the land breeze had fallen and the fogs from the fumaroles (as I guessed) shrouded the island in a blanket. I decided, with the hearty approval of the crew, to lie to until morning, and go ashore only when we could see our way pretty clearly.

  "I was sleeping soundly, my leg over the long bolster known as a 'Dutch wife,' waking only to slap a mosquito which had penetrated my net, when I became conscious of a sound. I can, to this day, think of nothing that quite matches it but the bellow of an alligator in a Florida swamp is somewhat the same. This was not so throaty nor so long lasting, however. A sustained, almost agonized grunt is not too far off, but in the deep note there was a treble as well, causing a most unpleasant wailing effect I have seldom heard a noise for which I cared less. I looked at my wristlet watch and it was 3 p.m. The noise ceased suddenly, and there was nothing more but the slap of tiny waves on the hull of the prau.

  "There was a scratching at the sliding panel on my cab in, which served as a door. I opened it and found Ali holding a torch, a flashlight, you'd say, a small one with his hand over the lens.

  " 'You heard that, Tuan?'

  " 'Yes. What do you think? A crocodile?'

  " 'Never! I have heard them all my life. I do not know this noise, nor my people either. We are frightened. Let us leave this place!'

  "Well, I managed to send him off after a while, feeling a bit better, by pointing out that it was, after all, only an odd noise, perhaps even a night bird with which he was unfamiliar. I told him to set two of his crew as an anchor watch, and have them relieved every few hours. We would see what morning would bring.

  "Morning brought no breeze, a humid stickiness, the dim sun shining through fog wraiths and a distinct smell of sulfur, the latter obviously emanating from the island.

  "We launched our small boat, and with Ali at the helm and me in the stern, pistol under jacket, we rowed in to the place opposite the anchorage, where the village houses, thatched with the usual nipa palms, dimly could be
seen. There was a low place in the cliff there, and we soon saw a well-marked path leading down to a place where one could step out of the boat onto a sort of rock platform. A small group of natives were standing on this waiting for us.

  "As we drew in, I looked closely at them. They were, to my eye at least, innocuous. They all wore the wraparound skirt, though not with the usual bright colors, and seemed in no way very different physically to any of a thousand other Indo-Malayan types I had seen. That is, they were short, slightly built, had black hair, brown skins and slanted black eyes. They were all male, and all unarmed, not even the usually omnipresent kris being tucked in the skirt top. The only thing about them which might be called unusual was a sort of stoop-shouldered appearance, as if they all suffered from the beginnings of a hunchback condition. And one other thing, an air of apathy and disinterest. Most places that see few visitors are very eager to greet new arrivals. But these chaps looked as if we were as interesting as well, a coconut rind. They stood silently while we moored the boat on a rock projection, and only when I got out did one step forward and address me, in ordinary coast Malay, the same I used with the crew.