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Walter E. Traprock - The Cruise of the Kawa
down over the Kawa and her inmates.
Only a few days before Whinney, usually so philosophical, had burst out petulantly with: "To hell with
these islands. Give me a good mirage, any time." Swank and I had heartily agreed with him, and it was in
that despondent spirit that we had begun our Fourth of July celebration.
As we sat cozily on deck, sipping our coffee, it slowly dawned on us that we had made the amazing
discovery of an absolutely new type of island! - something so evidently virgin and unvisited that we
could only gaze in awe-struck silence.
"Do you know," whispered Swank, "I think this is the first time I have ever seen a virgin" - he choked for
an instant on a crumb - "island."
We could well believe it.
The islands lay before us in echelon formation. The one in our immediate foreground was typical of the
others. Its ground-floor plan was that of a circle of beach and palm enclosing an inner sea from the center
of which rose an elaborate mountain to a sheer height of two thousand, perhaps ten thousand, feet. The
general effect was that of a pastry masterpiece on a gigantic scale. [Footnote: Oddly enough the scene
struck me as strangely familiar but it was not until weeks afterward that I recalled its prototype in the
memory of a decoration worn by General Grosdenovitch, Minister very-extraordinary to America from
Montenegro just before the little mountain kingdom blew up with a faint pop and became absorbed by
Jugo-Slovakia (sic).] We could only stare in open-mouthed amazement, thrilled with the thought that we
were actually discoverers. A gorgeous feature of our find, in addition to its satisfactory shape, was its
color. Sand and vegetation were of the conventional hues, but where the flanks of the rock rose from the
enclosed pool we observed that they were of the pure elementary colors, red, blue and yellow, fresh and
untarnished as in the latest masterpiece from the brush of the Master of All Painters. Here before our
eyes was an unspoiled sample of what the world must have looked like on varnishing day.
Swank, who is ultra-modern in his tendencies, was in ecstasies over the naive simplicity of the color
scheme. "Look at that red!" he shouted. "Look at that blue!! Look at that yaller!!!" He dove below and I
heard rattling of tubes and brushes that told me he was about to commit landscape. This time I knew he
couldn't possibly make the colors too violent.
Fringing the exquisitely tinted coral strand were outlying reefs, alternately concave and convex, which
gave the shore edge a scalloped, almost rococo finish, which I have heard decorators call the
Chinese-Chippendale "effect." Borne to our nostrils by an occasional reflex of the zooming trades came,
ever and anon, entrancing whiffs of a brand new odor.
It is always embarrassing to attempt to describe a new smell, for, such is our inexperience in the nasal
field, that a new smell must invariably be described in terms of other smells, and by reason of a
curious, inherited prudery this province has been left severely alone by English writers. I know of but
one man, M. Sentant, the governor of Battambang, Cambodia, who frankly makes a specialty of odors.
[Footnote: See Journal des Debats, '09, "Le nez triomphant" de Lucien Sentant.]
"J'aime les odeurs!" he said to me one day as we sat sipping a siem-bok on the piazza, of the residency.
"Mais il y en a des mauvaises," I deprecated.
"Meme les mauvaises," he insisted, "Oui, surtout les mauvaises!"
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