GENGHIS IN PARADISE

 

Our hero arrives on the Isle Sorong.

 

“Genghis,” said Genghis. “Frank Genghis.”

 

The inquiry was from a squat yellow-eyed trooper, presumably Javanese, sporting a rusty AK47 in a casual sling. His face was pocked. His brow was continuous.

 

“Where you from?” he inquired further in dicky English.

 

There was really no need to ask since it was all neatly profiled on our hero’s passport but the trooper would do as troopers will and he was rankling in the sweaty dewdrops of the humid afternoon. The airport was bustling with squawking ladies and fast-moving Eurotrash.

 

There was no way on earth that Genghis was going to lift his trademark dark glasses even though this was the subtext of the investigation.

 

“Australi,” he said, slightly impatient. He was itching for all the fare of a festive wurung, a cigarette and a Bahama Mama or two with a squeeze of lemon on ice. The air was already spicy with pineapple. Paradise was just beyond the gates.

 

“What you do here?” asked the trooper, unimpressed.

 

“I’m a writer,” said Genghis. “I’m here to do some writing.”

 

It was an incautious reply as it happened. He was slightly off his guard. There are jurisdictions, of course, where such a confession would rouse the gnarly advent. Writers and secret service officers, for example, are often at unfriendly paces, or, as in this case, a boastful literati irks the semi-literate goon with a gun. Accordingly, the trooper grimaced and Genghis noticed that his upper lip, furry with a weedy attempt at man-hair, trembled in further yellow-eyed flits.

 

“What you write?” the trooper wanted to know.

 

The true answer was ‘anything that pays, from epic poems to greeting card ditties’ but the writer just said “stories” without extra differentiations. In point of fact, he was working on a novel. Or rather, THE novel, namely the great Australian novel, albeit still in the planning stages. He was fresh from on-going success. He’d written the great Tasmanian mini-saga, the great Victorian ode and, most recently, the great West Australian blog post. Now it was aloft his magnus opus. A bout of ennui and a skirmish with a jealous husband with a bowie knife had convinced him of a change of scenario. How could the great Australian novel be written anywhere but outside of Australia, after all? There was no prospect of explaining thus to the livery trooper, though, and there was, in any case, the ruffled weariness of the flight. There had been a touch of turbulence over the Timor Sea. Genghis just longed for his little share of Eden.

“Stories?” asked the trooper, dense.

 

“Once upon a time…” said Genghis, laboured.

 

The trooper fiddled with the passport some more. It became obvious that he was angling for baksheesh. All the writer had on board was half a pack of camel no filters and a pocketful of Australian schrapnel adorned with Her Majesty the Queen. The guy had picked the wrong tourist from the crowd.

 

“You wait,” the trooper then instructed. He was next intent to go behind a makeshift screen, flick aimless through some bogus paperwork and possibly wangle a taxi scam as a Plan B, but before he could delay the Australian any longer a snazzy local, complete with batik, a man in his forties - a man who didn’t look like a teenager on a surf safari - stuck in his head and said in passable English, “What the problem here?”

 

He grinned. It was the grin of a man worth money. The batik itself was bright blue and red, a sort of lazy palm-tree design with an abstract swirl that made Genghis think of mini-golf.

 

“I don’t know,” said Genghis. “I’m sure my passport’s all in order, but this gentlemen seems to be suggesting otherwise.”

 

The wealthy local summed up the situation. He rattled off a few sentences in unzipped Bahasa and the trooper gave a brief reply.

“Where you from?” was the next question again.

 

“Australi,” said the Australian.

 

The wealthy local was overjoyed. “Oh Australi!” he beamed. “My brother live in Australi!”

 

There was then some more Bahasa.

 

The trooper looked defeated. He gazed down at the passport, folded its royal blue officialdom together into a slim parcel, and reluctantly handed it back.

 

“What bring you to the Isle Sorong?” asked the local.

 

“Sunshine,” said Genghis, as if it was in short supply back home.

 

“How long you stay?” asked the local continuing.

 

“As long as it takes,” said the visitor.

 

“You have hotel?”

 

“Not yet.”

 

“OK. OK.”

 

The local beamed again. He was flashy and neat. Unusually, his teeth were all intact and his wristwatch wasn’t chintzy. His thick black hair was greased back to accentuate his round lunar domain and - so Genghis noticed at this juncture - his feet were flat and brown and cradled in a nice array of leather sandals such that only men of means might afford.

 

He spoke a few more words to the goon who hung his head and finally waved the Australian on.

 

That’s what it takes on the Isle Sorong - the right words from a local will open any doors.

 

***

 

The visitor made his thanks in the taxi. The airport was on a treed peninsula a long freeway from the city. The turquoise waters of the bay were shimmering on one side and on the other, where Genghis peered over the sights within the dark penumbra of his famous shades, volcanic mountains -where once, they say, Krishna and Arjuna played - fortified the long horizon and framed the green lushness of the island with a startling blue remembrance of primal fire.

 

“I don’t know what the problem was,” Genghis said, “but thanks for sorting it out. I owe you one.”

 

“OK. OK,” smiled the local. “No problem. Mate.”

 

Australi all over.

 

“So where exactly does your brother live?” Genghis eventually inquired.

 

“You know Sydney Harbour Bridge?”

 

“I’ve heard of it,” Genghis admitted.

 

“Just near there!”

 

It was time, then, for jolly introductions.

 

“Genghis,” said Genghis, “Frank Genghis.”

 

“My name Harry,” said the local. “Just Harry. Mr Harry.”

 

“Well, Mr Harry,” said Genghis, “As I say, I owe you one. Mate.”

 

Mr Harry, though, was brimful of swift OKs. It was a sign of his well-to-do. He wouldn’t have his guest indebted. His hospitality knew no bounds.

 

“You stay my place, Frank Genghis,” he announced and he spoke with snappy purpose to the driver who, the visitor could tell, was being well-behaved.

 

Genghis took it in his stride, like any dose of sudden fortune. He thought ‘Why not?’ and ‘If it doesn’t work out I can always find a twin-share with a swimming pool.’

 

“Very kind of you,” he said.

 

“First time on Isle Sorong?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“I show you round.”

 

There are times, Genghis thought, when it’s foolish to kick a gift horse in the shins, and driving into the swarming suburbs of a tropical metropolis unprepared and hungry and stretched out after a bumpy plane ride and a close encounter with a trooper wielding an assault rifle are assuredly among them.

 

Writing the great Australian novel was, in fact, third or fourth rank on his immediate list of things to do. Ahead of it was sampling the fruits of abundance, finding a decent spa, and seeing the whole hilly splendour of the equatorial wonder that was all about and ready to be seen. There was a new city to explore, full of new mischief, too.

 

“Much obliged,” he said, thankful some more.

 

You can be lucky, he thought. This Mr Harry was obviously a man to mention, of all the people who might collude in an arrival longue. It became even more apparent further into the journey. The local found occasion to boast of his belongings, several houses and apartments, and how he was just back from the USA on business for the third time this year. Was it an empty boast? Not at all. Eventually the taxi came to a huge testament to prosperity, a two storey abode in an enclosed compound, and Mr Harry made noises at the gate and a gatekeeper in a spiffy uniform let them in. Before that, there were long suburbs of modest poverty, ramshackle bamboo, dirty streets, smelly canals. Mr Harry was a man of clean, cool granite. A high fence kept out the riff raff. There was a gorgeous orange flower of startling aplomb blaring in the front garden and shady palms and long steps of the sort of bad taste only a wealthy man could possibly manage.

 

“Nice digs,” Genghis admitted.

 

So nice, in fact, that he did at last lift his trademark dark glasses in order to have a proper look.

 

He was a handsome beast, Frank Genghis, in a way that writers rarely are, but he kept himself deliberately unkempt as a means, he would say, of keeping his prose more rugged and true. Australia had been good to him. He was well fed and a stranger to long bouts of celibacy. He had seen south-facing marvels. His university degree was on a low-interest loan he was determined never to repay. He called a white painted terrace house in the back streets of Parramatta his fine ancestral presence.

 

Mr Harry’s house was lavish. Genghis looked at its rare display. For all its luscious sunshine and pineapple aromas  the Isle Sorong was a land of contrasting measures. Most people, Genghis could tell just from the taxi trip, were poor but happy; a few like Mr Harry were plump like plaintains, rolling in it, commanding fortunes in the glitz of touristy largess, an unembarrassed bounty amid luxurious numbers. The local made the point of adding that he owned a light plane and resorts on outlying islands.

 

“Hmmm,” Genghis added. He was certain he could get used to this type of treatment.

 

A valet - maybe fourteen years old - carried in his luggage. Then, making the picture complete, Mr Harry, batik and all, was greeted with a kiss from a ravishing beauty, dark and slender, at his door.

 

“Frank Genghis,” said Mr Harry, “I’d like you meet Miss Toraja. Miss Tojara, Frank Genghis. Australi.”

 

Before she moved Miss Toraja was a timeless fixture in a painting by Gaugin. Then she smiled. “Australi!” she rejoiced. Her smile forced Genghis to lift his shades again just to make sure that her beauty was authentic.

 

“A lovely place you have here, Miss Toraja,” he said, nodding in deference, not forgetting his oriental manners.

 

“Mr Harry has brother in Australi!” she announced.

 

The entry way was plush. The ceilings were tall. Miss Toraja was in bare feet on the smooth stone floors - a sublime sensuality. Further in there was a fountain, its silver waters rolling down into a pool and cooling the air with sounds like tropical rain.

 

Genghis was betaken at once. It wasn’t a dream. More importantly, it wasn’t - all his better senses told him - a ruse by the touts and swindlers he had read about in Lonely Planet. Welcome to the Isle Sorong! It required a physical effort on his behalf to move his eyes away from Miss Toraja’s curvy exotica to where they were thanking Mr Harry, his host, for this hospitality again. He decided he had better lower his sunglasses back into place after all.

 

* * *

 

The following day was all papayas. It began with sunny leisure and ended kicking back to pina coladas in the delicious ambience of an amber afterglow that splashed across the wide sky. The most obviously impressive affectation of Mr Harry was his illustrious collection of batik shirts. He emerged in the morning wearing a lime-green and scarlet arrangement that almost flashed with sudden rapture. He kept a small army of servants, most of them children, who tended to both he and his guest, scuttling silently around the house, appearing unannounced with drinks and nibbles and hand fans to allay the draining heat. Miss Toraja emerged, still stunning, at midday. Her long black hair held in a pony tail almost reached her petite behind and she walked with a sultry glide that kept Genghis glancing whenever it was not conspicuous to do so.

 

“I understand,” said Genghis after lunch, “that the beaches on the north of the island are the best.”

 

“OK. OK,” said Mr Harry. “We go tomorrow.”

 

“I wasn’t suggesting…” Genghis corrected. “I was just asking if…”

 

“The best. Yes,” agreed Mr Harry. “Tomorrow. We go there. You see.”

 

Such hospitality. It was slightly oozing.

 

The afternoon was sticky, but it burst into hot rain at about three o’clock which lasted for twenty minutes and then devolved into steam. At one point Mr Harry left on business following a phone call and it befell to the lovely Toraja to keep the Australian entertained.

“So, have you travelled much Miss Toraja?” asked Genghis making idle.

 

The lady thought it a humorous inquiry.

 

“Noooo------“ she laughed.

 

“No? Why not?”

 

“Mr Harry. He say no.”

 

“Oh. I see.”

 

It eventuated, in fact, that she had never left the Isle Sorong. She had been born in a distant village, grew up on her father’s kava plantation, and only knew the wider world from the tourists and the TV. She expressed an intense interest in Australi.

 

“It’s big,” Genghis assured her. “And flat.”

 

“You have kangaroo?” she asked.

 

“Me? Sure,” said Genghis.

 

She smiled and her eyes burst with fascination. Her face was small and pretty. Her button nose was crafted with perfect curves of islandish innocence. She reminded Genghis of the dawn of the earth when a gentle soul yet occupied the unsullied caramels of nubile sweetness. Just looking at her moved him to imperialist song.

 

“What name your kangaroo?”

 

“His name? His name Skippy,” said Genghis. “He’s looking after the house while I’m away.”

 

Her lips made an ‘O’ as if she could hardly believe it and she moved to sit closer, fawning and captive to this dark mystery.

 

Genghis kept his suave.

 

Mr Harry returned in an hour or so and took them all to see his shopping malls and to buy some KFC. It was all shiny and replete with modern chromes. It turned out that his pastime - an adjunct to his indecent wealth - was betting on the races live from Singapore, several hours behind. Genghis went along to the betting shop, an interior world peopled with hapless locals scratching on slips of yellow paper. After that there was a long promenade crowded with street food vans and vendors selling pulped sugar cane in plastic cups.

Genghis took it all in. These were the sights and sounds, the smells and sundries of the busy Isle Sorong, a steamy wonder-world of clashing colours and exuberant foliage in evergreen.

 

When the morrow came it was equally as sunny. Mr Harry, though, was gone. A house boy told Genghis that he had flown to another island early on business but he would make good his promise of white sandy beaches by leaving Miss Toraja with a driver who would be there shortly after breakfast. Breakfast was intense. It was a spicy soto and chili rice packed in a banana leaf, a bumbu and a goreng and ayam skewers in a fiery satay sauce, and the coffee was sweet and milky and made raucous with cardamom. It was a banquet of torrid flavours and the hungry Australian ate his fill.

 

Then the driver arrived and Miss Toraja appeared wearing nothing but her beach wrap and they set out on a day of coastal adventure.

It was one of the finest days of Genghis’ hairy-chested existence. The road north wound through tall forests of majestic teakwood, over mountains of dramatic escarpment, prodigious plateaus and young formations of wild igneous stone. There were birds of blue-green and tangerine with butter-coloured beaks and flowers of sapphire shining in the undergrowth of plenty. There were rivers and waterfalls and whole families of villagers on little scooters grinning with the wind in their teeth as they traversed the daring bends. The beach, when they arrived, was a stretched bow of alabaster perfection. The water was a shimmer of beryl and liquid jewels under a joyous sky. The sand was like white velvet. The tide kissed the landfall with abiding tenderness. Minnows laughed as they swam out of the path of bog-eyed kingfish and the three-finned mackerel. Clubs of seabirds met on rocky outcrops discussing the pristine earth. In this Edenic reverie Miss Toraja let her hair fall and our hero drowned his gangly ennui in the warm waves of the sparkling Gulf of Sumba.

 

It was both exhausted and renewed that Genghis felt when they arrived back in the city very late. He went up to his room with a determination to sketch notes by long-hand having plucked ideas for tales and characters from the enduring sea. He lay on his bed in breathless repose for a while, unmoving. He might have drifted off to sleep like that except that from downstairs came a ruckus and a wrangle. It was the voice of Mr Harry. It was merely animated at first, then loud, then angry. Genghis couldn’t make it out but he supposed it to be in Bahasa. It lasted for half an hour then resumed a little later until finally the house fell silent again except for city noises from beyond the compound walls. Genghis rolled over, looked at his notebook and pencil but went to sleep on top of the covers before he could muster the energy to move.
 

* * *

 

Over the next few days the Australian explored the laneways and street stalls of the city on foot. It was a realm of South-East Asian knicknacks and juicy fruit. The locals all mistook him for Clint Eastwood but when he explained “Australi” they smiled with neighbourly affection and mistook him for an Old Testament Christian.

 

During this time he didn’t see anything of Miss Toraja but when he did one morning he couldn’t but notice the livid swell of her blackened eye.

 

“Who did that to you?” he asked, compelled.

 

She turned away.

 

“Mr Harry? Did he do that?”

 

She left the room and he didn’t see her again for another several days. By that time the swelling had gone down and the fine-boned beauty of her face had restored the proper proportions of her young and untainted smile.

 

It was clear she didn’t want to talk about it. She wanted to talk about Skippy.

 

“Yeah, listen,” Genghis began, “I’ve got to tell you something about old Skip. You see…”

 

“I go Australi one day,” she said, interrupting.

 

Genghis looked at her with sympathetic sunglasses.

 

“Of course,” he said. “Yes. You go to Australi one day. If that’s what you want to do, then you do it! Never mind what Mr Harry says.”

She was buoyed by such encouraging words. He gave her permission to dream.

 

The dream was suddenly shaken, however, when the floor below their feet turned momentarily to jelly, the walls went the wobbles and a silver plaque with abstract designs fell to the ground with an alarming clang. There were thuds and creaking carpentry. The whole house and the wider world all shook and trembled in a fever. It lasted less than a minute. Several staff members ran through after that and Genghis looked around for some solid support.

 

“What the???!” he said.

 

Miss Toraja kept still and listened. Then she broke out of her statuesqueness and said everything was “OK.”

 

“Earthquake,” she said, matter of fact.

 

“Earthquake?”

 

“Not hurt,” she said. “Small.”

 

More staff went through on their way to assess any ill repair.

 

It was more a tremor than a quake, and a miserly 3 or 4 on the Richter Scale but it reorganised the outlay of the entire afternoon. Utopians forget that paradise is built upon a fault line of tawdry tenderness. The Isle Sorong sits perched on a fire-swept precipice ever hopeful of the furious earth. It was formed in geological fury and had lived on the edge of wrath ever since. Australi, Genghis suddenly appreciated, is a spent old bag spread out on a table and she couldn’t pique an outrage of geology if she tried.

 

Concerning thus, later, Mr Harry, back from business again, reported that there was damage to the railway lines and several bridges had been closed, but he explained that it happened every month or so and was merely a fact of life on this particular island. The volcano on the highlands, Mount Boomboom, was having hissy fits, and villagers were moving their goats down to lower ground. It might mean, though, he said, that “production” would be interrupted and this caused him an anxious face.

 

“If you don’t mind me asking,” asked Genghis, “What exactly is it you produce, Mr Harry?”

 

“OK. OK,” said Mr Harry. “Tomorrow. I show.”

 

Another invitation materialized from an untimely inquiry.

 

Genghis had, in fact, asked much the same of a young girl who came to his room to sweep and change his linen.

 

“Where does Mr Harry make his money?” he had wondered.

 

The servant smiled with a nervous agitation and shook her head to mean either that her English was deficient or she simply didn’t know. She looked at him as if he was as mad as a monk, then scuttled to another of her duties.

 

Genghis was growing itchy. Other than a footnote for his memoirs he hadn’t penned a word all week, and his investigative inclinations had him second-guessing the lap of luxury again. It was a bad habit. Every time he found himself an idyll of comfort he started looking for who it was that was pulling all the strings. Never content with a free lunch, he always wanted to meet the man who was picking up the tab. O restless soul! O troubadour of curiosity’s incessant wangle! It was the mysteries of existence, as much as rum and cola, that kept him on his neverending quest.

 

* * *

 

His worst suspicions were fulfilled the next day. Breakfast was spicy again and Mr Harry was wearing a batik of gold and apricot with black squares in a bustling rummage of fabric.  Then a driver arrived and the host, the visitor and sweet Toraja climbed into a car and made for the unsteady hills. It was a sweltering day on the lowlands, so the hills were the place to be, but the air there was misty and thick and unpleasantly obtuse. There was, besides, a layer of ash filling all the up-draughts, for the volcano had a tiny tantrum overnight and the villagers were reporting sorry things about the gods. Storms of the earth are more bitter than those of the sky.

 

They drove to the far end of the island, deep into the jungle. They could see Mount Boomboom fuming like a dragon and it seemed for a while as though they were driving directly into its nostrils. They turned off the made roads and headed into the forest, a forest of tangled majesty. There were trees, Genghis could see, several hundred feet tall, and an understorey housing white tigers and strange primates of a former age. All was alive with a voluptuous grandeur. The verdant sap of primordial life was ripe in the green bark and many ebullient bamboo thickets. This was paradise unwrankled. This was the ample wonder of naked germination. Luxuriating vegetation overwhelmed the tropical spawn. There were miles of it unspoilt, bursting forth from the augmented red soils. Genghis kept his usual cool but inside he was reverent. It was like a vast cathedral of burgeoning verdure with rare hints of skylight seeping through a canopy of thousand-fingered fronds, stain-glassed windows of emerald green. The writer had never seen such raw glory in all his long-legged days.

A terrible affront awaited, though, some long miles up the mountain and into a promontory dangling off the mainland. This was where the volcano lurked. A sudden scar marked the earth. The road came to a sign that read, in bold American, NEW BATAVIA LOGGING INC.’ and the ancient forest gave way to bare rusty desolation. A vast logging operation opened up before them that Mr Harry was happy to report had made him unspeakable rupiah.

 

“I see,” said the Australi, shocked by the rolling devastation.

 

There were teams of men busy at work ripping down trees with huge machines and mobile stripping plants chugging on dirty diesel in the shelter of the smoking mountain. The machinery munched on timber and spat out the waste as twenty-wheeled trucks waited in a muddy circle of systemic greed.

 

Mr Harry gave instructions to the driver in his Bahasan chatter. There was something he wanted his guest to see. It was the biggest, dirtiest machine of all. He explained that it had recently been purchased from a company in the Netherlands and could clear a hundred acres in a single session of mayhem. They pulled up nearby and a foreman named Mr Wawan introduced them to the monster. It was as big as a factory, as massive as a meatworks, as mammoth as a mine, a cyclopean foundry on titanic wheels grinding up the ground with towers of steely purpose.

 

“Wow!” said Genghis, genuinely appalled.

 

Mr Harry, though, was grinning like a bug. This leviathan was his latest baby.

 

“Twenty million dollar Australi,” he boasted. “Twenty million!”

 

It was a gigantic implement of death that turned pristine forests into middle-class coffee tables without a second rupture.

More instructions to Mr Wawan.

 

As a special treat - hospitality unbounded! - the Australian would be invited not only to gaze upon but to actually climb inside the rumbling cogs. Mr Wawan, in his hard-hat, showed the way. They climbed up onto a platform, walked further along a barracaded strollway, then entered the control centre of the metallic giant. Even more special, the Australian was invited into the cockpit and to sit in the driver’s seat, at the key exchange, and to see for himself the wanton purview of the workers who were making Mr Harry all his millions.

 

“Twenty million bucks, you say?” said Genghis.

 

It was worth the sample. From here he could see how it was done. The big chomper would crawl along like a brontosaurus and devour a dozen towering trees in a single gulp. It could easily reduce a rainforest to a mud heap of wood-chips in no time.

 

Genghis looked at Miss Toraja. She never said a word. Mr Harry, though, was nodding, and grinning some more while Mr Wawan looked official and did his best to satisfy the boss.

 

Genghis gripped the wheel. He looked out over the front loader. He felt the gear stick. He fiddled with the starter keys. Too easy.

 

“Well, it’s certainly a monster alright,” he said. What else could he say?

 

It could, he imagined, make short work of ourang-utangs and the bronze quoll, the red-bellied marsupial shrew, the long-nosed dunnart, the sumartran bandicoot, the silky cuscus, the copper ringtail, the mountain dugong, Rickhart’s nectar dyak and countless other endangered mammals, to say nothing of birdlife and reptiles and the whole habitat of the Asiatic elephant.

 

“New,” Mr Harry assured him. “Big production now!”

 

But big production was at the mercy of Mount Boomboom all the same. The volcano was more or less directly above, just up a steep incline, and its gods were evidently disconcerted, as Genghis could well understand.

 

Even as the mountain huffed and puffed, Mr Harry thought that his guest might like a closer inspection. Why not make a day of it? They made their way back to the car and drove up a narrow road until they came to a roadblock  manned by troopers who were preventing the curious from entering the danger zone. The vegetation beyond had fallen away. Trees were stunted with sulphur. Ferns were seared from the fuming gases. Beyond a certain point you could feel the noxious odours in your nose. The entire terrain quivered in feminine mystery. Genghis looked out through the car window. Driving into the scalding menace of a live volcano was certainly something new for him.

 

They pulled up briefly and Mr Harry alighted to speak to the troopers who barred the way. Once again, that’s what it takes on the Isle Sorong - the right words will open any doors. After a short Bahasa yabber, establishing that they were talking to an important man in keen sandals and flash batik, the troopers sidled their rifles and moved the roadblock away and the party drove on through, upwards to the summit, a moonscape of craggy vapours.

 

There were, as it happened, others at the crater’s lip, pointing and peering and taking pictures of the laval soups spluttering and bursting from the earth’s innards in spectacular reverberation. The quivers would move to shakings and then to sudden convulsions, then back to an uneasy stillness. They drove up, got out, and the air was buzzing with electric tizz. Genghis - Miss Tojara by his side - edged close, right up to the lip, and realised that it was once again an occasion to lift his trademark glasses from his eyes and see the parcels of reality unshadowed. He gazed on all the colours of fire. He looked down into the smouldering vulva of the earthly cannonade. The crater was smoking. The soil was seething hot. There were fierce paroxysms of passion combusting to the surface from the deep crusts of the planet’s yearning interior. There were pools of oxidating elements popping with endothermic lust. There were riverlets of boiling bitumen eeking from wide cracks and flocculent scabs of otherworldly tufts of melting stone. Here was the smithy of the kaolin god, the workshop of the swarthy hammerer who beat on the powdery orbs of chloride in the subterranean chalice of creation. Genghis marvelled for a moment at the blatant force. What terrible alchemy drives the tectonic magma! He mused how everyone, in the volcanic menace of their blood, is just waiting to erupt in pyroclastic fits of human creativity if ever the wound of being opens.

 

“It looks like it could blow at any minute,” he observed to Miss Toraja who was still sticking close.

 

Mr Harry was off somewhere like a man convinced his money and bright shirts could defy a mountain’s rage.

 

There was a team of tourists taking snap shots from beside their mini-van.

 

“Oh, look here!” said Genghis aloud but to himself. From his coat pocket he lifted a set of keys. They were the keys to Mr Harry’s twenty million dollar monster. They must have fallen into his pocket in the inadvertent roughage of the cockpit whilst he sat as a special guest at the massive wheel. “Hmmm,” he pondered.

 

Then, just as accidently, he dropped the keys over the scalding lip down, down, into the crater until, perhaps eighty feet below, they splashed into a bubbling pond of lava.

 

“Damn,” he said. “Slipped.”

 

A shock rippled through the hot terrain. It was - beyond all calculations - the straw that made the camel melt into a swelter, as they say. There was a roaring tremor. The film on the white-hot spume below wiggled and wavered and split into a savage slag. Great banks of ash started sliding from the walls. An obsidian coulee of vibrant magnesium started inching up the sides, unstoppable.

 

“Whoops,” said the Australian.

 

There was a crack and a moan from deep within the mountain.

 

“I think we better be getting out of here, don’t you Miss Toraja?” he suggested.

 

Everyone around the crater had the same idea. The picture session was over. Mount Boomboom had had enough.

 

* * *

 

There was some confusion thereafter. Amidst the roaring and acrid billows comes the grim realisation that you only have a few minutes to get off an angry mountain. Where was Mr Harry and his driver when you need them? Taking the initiative, Genghis took Miss Toraja by the hand, flung her in an idle putt-putt which was parked across a salty rock-face and gave its two-stroke a kick-start with decided deliberation. It whined with kerosene muscle and, without stopping to watch the purple splashes of lava reach the crater’s lip, our hero and his damsel zoomed down the mountain track like the proverbial bat out of hell. It was definitely an occasion for dark sunglasses. With his elbows raised and the wind in his handsome hair he thrashed the pathetic little three-wheeler and gave a prayer to all those souls scrambling down the mountain at that very time. There was no more moment to move the village goat. The workmen at New Batavia Logging Inc. all looked up, screamed and ran for their lives. In a short time, for sure, there would be no more big production and the monster from the Netherlands would be swept up in an unrelenting lava flow, a vomit of cosmic justice. If Mr Harry didn’t get down in time archaeologists would find the remnants of his outrageous batik in another thousand years. He was a hospitable man, and he had a brother in Australi, who lived just near the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but he mistreated women and made his fortune cutting out the heart of paradise.

 

“Hold on!” Genghis yelled out to Miss Toraja. She held her sari in place and her hair from her face and clung tight to the bold Australian as they made a hasty escape.

 

To his great credit, even in these circumstances the writer was mentally composing another chapter for his memoirs. “There I was,” he wrote, “hurtling down a jungle path in a glorified lawnmower pursued by a river of red-hot liquid basalt, a gorgeous island beauty by my side…” Pure Genghis! No one back in Parramatta would believe him, but it happened to be true.

 

It also happened to be true that when they made it to the end of the trail and scooted at last to the long side of the promontory where the ridge of Mount Boomboom met the sea they came to a fishing village only recently deserted. The putt-putt whined into the main thoroughfare but there was nobody around. The mountain in the background was getting really nasty. Presumably, the locals had decided to stay out of her way. There were thundering cannons of primal urge going off - Boom! Boom! - and a churning cloud of lightning-struck causticity mingled down with the sea air. The sea birds had thought better of it too. The sky was empty. Everything living had fled to another haven. Genghis decided that it was probably the best strategy to employ. Ah well! Time to move on.

 

In the harbour, tied to a rustic mooring, was a quite acceptable tanjaq with solid rigging equipped with two square sails of Suluwesian linen. The hull was sturdy fore and aft and well-crafted for a village schooner made for net fishing in the shallows and traversing islands all around the long archipelago.

 

Genghis looked up at the angry mountain, then out to the placid sea.

 

It was time for a cigarette. He pulled out a camel and struck a match.

 

 “I don’t suppose you know anything about sailing, do you, Miss Toraja?”

 

She laughed. She thought it another silly question.

 

“Noooo---“ she said.

 

“Pity. We could sail away for a year and a day to the land where the bong tree grows,” he quoted.

 

She looked at him. She shook her head. She didn’t understand.

 

“Never mind,” he said.

 

He would work it out.

 

“You like come to Australi?” he then asked.

 

She smiled broadly. She was genuinely happy.

 

“Skippy?” she asked.

 

“Sure,” he said.

 

He would work that out too, eventually.

 

As the lava flows made their way towards the coast, the two of them manned the tanjaq and, in an awkward makeshift, drifted slowly from the shore searching for a saving breeze. At length, the sail picked up and the aimless drift turned into a meaningful meander and they sailed away.

 

Thus concluded the brief adventures of Frank Genghis in that humid dew-drop of emerald. The Isle Sorong was not the place to write the great Australian novel after all. 

 

 

O. Spaniel Murray