For him, this dark age of discovery was a quest for the medieval
ends of the earth. His father’s sign read A man peers into the abyss
and there he finds himself. But Roy did not intend to snap photos
from the edge. He was getting ready to jump. As he moved down
through Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore towards the shattered
archipelago of Indonesia his mind slowly faded, and he suspected
that if he kept heading downwards, his body would surely follow.
There was something strangely liberating in this notion. Like sugar
crystals in water, he found himself slowly dissolving.
On a bus in Java he overheard two men talking about Gunung
Kemukus and remembered Tex and the cursed woman. Kemukus—
the mount of last resort. When he asked a man where it was, he was
offered vague directions and a knowing wink.
But the spirits would not help him there, for his body had
become inhabitable. Descending from the hill in shame and despair,
Roy continued south to the southern tip of the continent, only thirty
miles away. After Parangtritis Beach he would find only vast oceans
and ultimately the curved bottom of the world.
He was by now a thin black ghost. The sun had darkened his skin,
the sea had lightened his hair, and the opium had blanched his
memory to the point where only shards of the past still jangled
around in his skull. They surfaced now and again like flotsam on the
polluted Javanese shoreline.
Here there be dragons.
He paced the shore nervously like a stray dog outside a Javanese
butcher shop, tantalized by the scent of mortality, his own. Dragging
himself up and down the dark sand beach, he peered out over the
waves that foamed and surged white like milk. A crowd of Javanese
had assembled there to throw flowers into the roiling mayhem as if
boiling an immense herbal tea. Most of the men were dressed as
Javanese warriors and carried strange swords held to their waists by
sashes on top of long and intricate wraparound sarongs. A young boy
came up to him and offered to sell him some flowers.
“You wan’ buy flower?” the young urchin sang. His smile was
entirely without artifice.
“How much?” Roy asked.
“Four thousand rupiah.”
Fifty cents. Roy bought a bunch.
“You wear green,” the boy said, laughing at his Chinese army
surplus trousers.
ABYSSINIA
116
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