Yesterdays in the PhilippinesStevens, Joseph Earle
History
Yesterdays in the Philippines
Stevens, Joseph Earle
Philippines -- Description and travel
Cabalian is another little hemp-town, at the foot of a huge mountain;
but in the starlight of the very early morning we stopped there only
long enough to leave the mail and drop a pony overboard. Sunrise caught
us still steering to the south, but nine o'clock tied our steamer to
a little wharf in Surigao, directly in front of a large hemp-press
and store-house belonging to the owners of the ship on which we were
journeying. Some of the best hemp that comes to the Manila market
is pressed at Surigao, and all around were stacks of loose fibre
drying in the sun or being separated into different grades by native
coolies. Several of us left the ship and walked to the main village,
but, as before, found little to note except the intense heat of a
boiling sun.
There was the customary hill behind the town, and at the risk of
going entirely into solution during the effort, two of us climbed to
the top for a breath of air and a panoramic view.
Dinner came along as usual at five; but I must say that the more I
ate of those curiously timed meals the less I could accommodate my
mental powers to the comprehension of what I was doing. Everybody
knows what a difficult psychological problem it is to determine the
exact numerical nature of the feeling in the second and third toes of
his feet, as compared with that in the fingers of his hands. On your
hands you can distinctly feel the first finger, the middle finger, and
the fourth finger; but on your feet your second toe doesn't feel like
your first finger nor as a second toe should naturally feel. The great
toe corresponds in sensation to one's first finger, and all the other
toes save the last seem to be muddled up without that differentiated
sensation which the fingers have. And so with these meals aboard
ship. A ten o'clock breakfast was neither breakfast nor luncheon,
and it bothered me considerably to know what in the dickens I was
really eating. In fact, it affected my mind to such a degree that
somehow the food tasted as if it did not belong to any particular
meal, but came from another order of things; and I spent long,
serious moments between the courses in trying to locate the repast
in my library of prehistoric sensations, just as I have often tried
to locate the digit which my second toe corresponds to in feeling.
We left Surigao an hour before midnight, sailed away over moonlit
seas toward the island of Camiguin, and when I stuck my head out of
the port-hole at half after five next morning, the two very lofty
mountain-peaks which formed this sky-scraper of the Philippines
were just ridding themselves of the garb of darkness. Three of us
went ashore at seven, and were introduced to a rich Indian, who,
although the possessor of four hundred thousand dollars, lived in a
common little nipa house. He invited us to see the country, fitted
us out with three horses and a mounted servant, and sent us up into
the mountains, where his men were working on the hemp-plantations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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