Playing with Water Read Free

thin polythene air-hose stuck in my mouth.
    Of course the island could not assume an identity before it had acquired a position. My memory of that first visit was of a lost and roaring beach nowhere in particular. The view then had been what any stranded tourist might have seen. But a traveller works to let a place into his imagination (or maybe to chip it free) else he becomes weary and discouraged by an endlessness of mere location. Even on that first unpromising landfall something of Tiwarik’s significance must have struck me. It was after all an inveterate childhood sketcher of imaginary islands who had watched the South China Sea fling tons of coral chips into the air and tried to light driftwood fires in the lee of the boat to cook rice. Even that partial view from beneath the flapping eyelid of a tarpaulin had been enough for the boy within: he had recognised from a series of glimpses an entire terrain and the man without had had no choice but to return. The jungle, the cave, the pathways later to be dotted by his feet across the grassfield, all were already there in his head. Conventional child, though, he had once pencilled beacons on all his islands’ high points to light when the speck of a schooner appeared at the universe’s rim. He could not have guessed that in later life rescue was the very last thing he would want; that, on the contrary, in his desire to be lost he would long to light an anti-beacon of enchanted kindling whose invisible smoke would envelop his world and render it transparent. The island’s image would waver and be gone, leaving the captain of the distant schooner thoughtfully to push together his telescope and enter ‘mirage’ in the ship’s log.
    Tiwarik lies little more than a mile off the coast, immediately opposite the fishing village of Sabay which from the seaward side appears as a straggle of huts on stilts half lost among the coconut groves. In front of them on the stony beach boats are drawn up, each of which in time becomesidentifiable so it is possible on any particular day to read the beach and know who is doing what. The island is uninhabited (uninhabitable, practically, since there is no water) and tiny, being about a quarter of a mile across. But its size on a map – and I have never seen a map large-scale enough to mark it – would be deceptive, for it rises to a peak off in one corner which cannot be less than four hundred feet above the sea. There are no beaches, merely that one shifting coral strand on which we camped, maybe a hundred yards long and facing the mainland. The rest of Tiwarik rises from gurgling boulders more or less vertically up volcanic cliffs of black rock. From one quarter there is a steep sweep of coarse tall
cogon
* grass up to the forest which caps the peak. Seen from the strait on a breezy day the sunlight goes running up and up through this wild grassfield. It is the same effect as with young hair and similarly afflicts me with deepest melancholy, affection and pleasure.
    The island is normally used by fishermen in transit. The locals from Sabay and from Sirao and Malubog a few miles up the coast stop there and cook their lunch over driftwood fires lit between lumps of coral. They sit and repair their spear guns and lie up under the thin shade of the thorn bushes to snooze away the noon. Some of Tiwarik’s transients are from much farther afield, coming from provinces and islands in the south, Visayans speaking motley dialects and burnt black by the sun, journeying for weeks on end through the archipelago and selling their catches as they go. These are nomads whose boats have a subtly different cut and the left-over scraps of whose food are red with chili. They may sit out a storm on Tiwarik or appear at dusk to drape their nets among the corals. By dawn they have gone, leaving only the long scars of their keels.
    At any time a pair of dots might appear in the middle of the empty glitter, insectival as the minute twitch of paddles becomes