River of Smoke(9)

This was when the Serang revealed to us that the island was not new to him; in his youth, while working on a Hainanese junk, he had come here many times. It was called Great Nicobar and it was by no means a deserted wilderness; on the far side of the mountain, down by the water, there were some surprisingly rich villages.

How so? we said.

He pointed at the sky, where flocks of swift-flying birds were wheeling and soaring. See those birds, he said, the islanders call them hinlene; they revere them because they are the source of their wealth. Those creatures look insignificant but they make something that is of immense value.

What?

Nests. People pay a lot of money for their nests.

You can imagine the effect this had on us three Hindusthanis! Your grandfather and Jodu and I all thought the Serang was making gadhas out of us.

Where in the world would people pay to buy birds’ nests? we said.

China, he said. In China they boil and eat them.

Like daal?

Yes. Except that in China, it’s the most expensive food of all.

This seemed incredible to us, so we turned to Ah Fatt: could this possibly be true?

Yes, he said, if these were the nests that were called ‘yan wo’ in Canton, then they were indeed of great value, as good a currency as any that existed in eastern waters – depending on their quality they were worth their weight in either silver or gold. A single chest of nests could fetch the equivalent of eight troy pounds of gold in Canton.

Our first thought was that we were rich, and that all we had to do was to find the nests and scoop them up. But Serang Ali quickly put us right. The birds nested in enormous caverns, he said, and each cave belonged to a village. If we walked in and helped ourselves we would never leave the island alive. Before doing anything we would have to seek out a a village headman – omjah karruh they called them there – to ask permission, arrange a proper division of the proceeds and so on.

Fortunately the Serang was acquainted with such a headman, so we set off at once to look for his village. After a half-day’s walk, we found the omjah karruh heading up the slopes of the mountain; although he had a large work party with him he was glad to see us for he urgently needed more hands.

It took an hour or so of strenuous climbing to reach the mouth of the cave, and there for a while we stood bedazzled, staring at an astonishing spectacle. The floor of the cavern was of a pale ivory colour, being thickly paved with droppings. The light of the sun, reflecting brightly off this surface, was shining upwards into a chamber that was vaster and higher than anything that any of us had ever seen. The walls, rising sheer for hundreds of feet, were lined with a numberless multitude of white nests; it was as if every exposed expanse of rock had been inlaid with shells of mother-of-pearl.

Although the great majority of the nests were high up, a few were not far off the ground. The first nest I looked at was at shoulder height and it had a bird sitting inside: the creature made no movement when I approached, nor even when I picked it up – it was smaller than my palm and I could feel its heart pounding against my fingers. It was but a modest little creature, black-brown in colour, with white underparts, and no more than eight inches in length, with a forked tail and sharply angled wings – I was to learn later that it was known as a ‘swiftlet’. When I opened my hand it tried to flap its wings but was unable to launch itself: it was only when I threw it up that it streaked away.

The storm had wrought havoc upon this colony and a great number of nests were lying upon the floor. Once the feathers, twigs and dust were brushed off, the nests were seen to be of an almost iridescent whiteness; it was evident at a glance that they were made of a substance that was utterly different from the materials which other birds use in fabricating their dwellings – they had the look of works of exquisite craftsmanship, being constructed from fine filaments, laid in a circular pattern. They were so small and light that seventy together scarcely weighed as much as one Cantonese gan or a Chinese catty – about the equivalent of twenty-one English ounces.

We collected thousands of them and then helped to carry them down to the village. In return for our work, they allowed us to keep a certain quantity – not enough to make us rich, but certainly enough to afford us onward passages.

So there we were, with the wherewithal to travel onwards – and we discovered now that we had more choices than we had imagined. Northwards lay the coast of Tenasserim in Burma, and the busy port of Mergui; to the south lay the Sultanate of Aceh, one of the wealthiest realms in the region; and to the east, a few days journey away, were Singapore and Malacca.

For all of us to travel together would have drawn unnecessary attention so we knew we would have to split up. Serang Ali wanted to go to Mergui and Jodu chose to go with him. Ah Fatt on the other hand, decided to head east, to Singapore, and then Malacca, where he had relatives – his sister and her husband had moved there some years before.