Three hundred years ago:

The coastline was long and pale and unmarked. A lean strip of sand faded in both directions and the branches of the trees behind it were white like bones. The schooner swung on its anchor line in the running current beyond the turquoise of the shallows.

They had ridden there through four tides; four times the flat stretch of grubby brown reef, picked over by white birds with long black legs, had opened between the boat and the hot shoreline, and four times it had been covered by bright, breeze-cut water.

The boy's name was Salem. He was thirteen. He squatted on the warped planking of the deck where it swept towards the high white prow, squinting in the hard light, peering at the shore. The coarse rigging slapped against the mast in the wind and the schooner smelt of tar and salt and sweat.

The men -- five of them -- were sleeping through the white midday. They lay among the ropes and baskets on deck aft. They were lean and sun-scarred with deep lines on their faces. They wore only short sarongs and white head cloths, bound loosely over cropped black hair.

Salem shaded his eyes and squinted at the long coastline. It was marked by -- nothing. No promontories or river mouths broke the scape; no swelling headlands reared from the shore; and no villages. But they were waiting for something.

His father called this empty coastline the Place of White Wood. Salem understood the name now as he looked out across the reef to the thin trees beyond the sand. They fronted a thicket of deep dust-green, but their trunks and branches were the color of the ash on the hearth in the morning. No hills or mountains rose inland and all that Salem could see of this unknown country was the empty beach and the ash-toned trees.

Salem and his father were Bugis. His father was born in Makassar, Salem was born in Bima. They plied back and forth between the islands in white boats, trading. He had seen many ports before his tenth birthday, but he had never been this way before, had never traveled on this route which his father had learnt from his grandfather: due south across empty ocean to the Place of White Wood.

The journey had been long. After Sumba the sun had beaten away to the north and at night great smears of stars twisted above the schooner's snapping rigging. Once, in the middle of the ocean, they passed a strange stretch of shoal, all boiling white water under a wheeling chaos of seabirds. Beyond that there was nothing, and the trade winds chased them southward while the men spoke less and the light grew sharper every day. Salem had come almost to believe that they were the last men on earth, aboard the last boat in the ocean, until he smelt the land. It smelt of charcoal and honey.

They anchored just beyond the shallow water, the schooner swung to the current with the rigging rattling in the breeze and the reef opened and closed with the tide.

"When will we go ashore?" Salem asked.

"Not yet," said his father.

***

He surveyed the coastline until his eyes ached and flickers of darkness played at the edges of his vision. The slack of the high water at midday came and went, the tide changed and dark blotches of reef began to emerge in the shallows.

And then Salem saw the people.

First there was just one upright outline, black against the white of the sand at the water's edge. Then another came slowly from the edge of the forest. Then another, and another, and two small ones, until there were nine altogether: black silhouettes moving very slowly in the yellow heat.

Salem could see no cloth and no color; they looked like fragments of the dark of the forest's shadow that had broken free and drifted onto the salt-crusted shoreline.

Salem hissed through his teeth. "Look! People!"

The men shifted and stretched among the coiled ropes and baskets as Salem's father hitched and retied his sarong, peering at the beach.

"We'll go ashore now," he said.

They paddled across the reef in a pair of canoes. The smell of charcoal and honey came stronger. The canoes came to ground on the hot white beach and they stepped lightly over the hissing edge of the water. The black figures were standing in ragged formation on the sand, looking towards the Bugis. Each sailor took one of the rough-cloth bundles from the canoes, and they moved towards the black men.

"Assalamu alaikum," Salem's father said, softly.

The black man standing before him did not reply. None of them replied.

Salem stared shyly, nervously.

They were all naked -- four men, three women and two children -- looking like no people Salem had ever seen. Their skin was the color of charcoal which did not shine in the sunlight. Their long arms hung loose at their sides; their thin legs bulged in odd places and their bodies formed bulky blocks against straight spines.

Salem's father unwrapped the cloth bundle he carried. Inside were a pair of iron axes and a machete. He held them out to the man standing in front of the others, who took them, handled them uncertainly, then passed them to the others behind him.

Salem's father hissed and called the rest of the group forward, unwrapping each bundle and passing what was inside to a naked stranger. There were more knives and axes, some strips of good cloth, and blocks of rank tobacco. The island leader handled each object, and passed it along to his companions until all the bundles had been unwrapped. Then, without speaking, nodding or signaling any acknowledgement, all nine turned and moved away slowly down the beach with their strange, bow-legged gait, carrying the gifts with them, axes and knives swinging loose at the ends of long, thin arms.

The Bugis watched them go, blinking in the sunlight.

"We can work now," said Salem's father.

***

Low tide came that evening and the reef was dry and flat and long. The sun had fallen into the west over the empty ocean and the fading light cast purple hues. The wind had dropped away and the sea was smooth offshore. The men were out on the reef, filling their baskets.

Salem set up on the sand beside the beached canoes, cooking the fish they caught. He had had to go a little way into the forest to collect firewood. The ground had rustled dry underfoot and the branches above filled with the strange calls of unknown birds. The forest was open and he could have walked away into it quite easily. The trunks of the trees were white.

Salem's father came up the beach from the edge of the reef with another basket of sea cucumbers. They were strange things, neither animal nor fruit nor plant, but they fetched a good price with the Chinese traders around the islands.

Salem's father sat beside him. "Did you go into the forest?" he asked.

"Just a little way, not far."

His father nodded. "Be careful in there."

Further down the beach the inhabitants had appeared again, but they did not look towards the Bugis, instead moving away slowly in the other direction.

The women walked along the very edge of the reef, pausing to pick up something from time to time; the two children trotted ahead, and a pair of lean, yellow dogs came down out of the wooded area and loped behind them.

"What are these people called?" Salem asked, watching them go.

His father shook his head. "People of the White Wood. I don't know what they call themselves."

They were just black shapes on the fading shore now. "They ... they are people aren't they?" Salem asked, uncertainly.

"Surely."

"But they don't have any villages? Any towns? Do they have kings?"

Again his father shook his head. "Nobody knows."

The fire crackled and Salem turned the fish on the rack of crossed branches he had made. A band of pale orange light rimmed the horizon and the rigging of the schooner, waiting offshore, stood stark against the sky. A flock of black-etched birds beat quickly down the coastline. Salem glanced back at the forest. It was very dark now, but the trunks of the foremost trees seemed whiter than before.

"What's behind the forest?" he asked.

"Nothing," his father said, stretching out on the cooling sand. Your grandfather told me that when our people first came here they went with the black men. They wanted to meet their king to ask permission to fish along this coast. The black men took them into the forest."

"What happened?"

"They traveled for many, many days."

"Did they meet the king?"

Salem's father smiled. "There was no king. There was nothing but forest. It didn't end; it went on forever. They traveled away from the coast, always into the forest. Sometimes they crossed shallow rivers, but the water was never good. My grandfather said when the people here made camp at night they didn't even have blankets; they just slept on the ground with nothing to cover them.

"Eventually, when they were already far from the sea, our people realized that these people weren't taking them to their king or to their village. They weren't taking them anywhere. They just didn't know how to tell us to stop following them."

The locals were again thin sticks in the distant dusk, still moving on down the beach. The other Bugis were coming in off the reef, lugging their baskets loaded with sea cucumbers towards the beach, following the inviting smell of cooking fish.

"I don't understand," said Salem. There are people everywhere in our islands. If this place has got good fishing, and if there's no king, why don't we build villages here?"

Salem's father smiled and his teeth showed white in the dusk. "This is not our country."

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