Chapter XXIII: Garoet and Papandayang 312 (2)

Native life swarms in this land of the betel and banana, where there seems to be more of inherent dream and calm than in other lands of the lotus. The Javanese are the finer flowers of the Malay race—a people possessed of a civilization, arts, and literature in that golden period before the Mohammedan and European conquests. They have gentle voices, gentle manners, fine and expressive features, and are the one people of Asia besides the Japanese who have real charm and attraction for the alien. They are more winning, too, by contrast, after one has met the harsh, unlovely, and unwashed people of China, or the equally unwashed, cringing Hindu. They are a little people, and one feels the same indulgent, protective sense as toward the Japanese. Their language is soft and musical—“the Italian of the tropics”; their ideas are poetic; and their love of flowers and perfumes, of music and the dance, of heroic plays and of every emotional form of art, proves them as innately esthetic as their distant cousins, the Japanese, in whom there is so large an admixture of Malay stock. Their reverence for rank and age, and their elaborate etiquette and punctilious courtesy to one another, are as marked even in the common people as among the Japanese; but their abject, crouching humility before their Dutch employers, and the brutality of the latter to them, are a theme for sadder thinking, and calculated to make the blood boil. When one actually sees the quiet, inoffensive peddlers, who chiefly beseech with their eyes, furiously kicked out of the hotel courtyard when mynheer does not choose to buy, and native children actually lifted by an ear and hurled away from the vantage-point on the curbstone which a pajamaed Dutchman wishes for himself while some troops march by, one is content not to see or know any more.

These friendly little barefoot people are of endless interest, and their daily markets, or _passers_, are panoramas of life and color that one longs to transplant entire. Life is so simple and primitive, too, in the sunshine and warmth of the tropics. A bunch of bananas, a basket of steamed rice, and a leaf full of betel preparations comprise the necessaries and luxuries of daily living. With the rice may go many peppers and curried messes of ground cocoanut, which one sees made and offered for sale in small dabs laid on bits of banana-leaf, the wrapping-paper of the tropics. Pinned with a cactus-thorn, a bit of leaf makes a primitive bag, bowl, or cup, and a slip of it serves as a sylvan spoon. All classes chew the betel- or areca-nut, bits of which, wrapped in betel-leaf with lime, furnish cheer and stimulant, dye the mouth, and keep the lips streaming with crimson juice. In Canton and in all Cochin China, across the peninsula, and throughout island and continental India, men and women have equal delight in this peppery stimulant. The Javanese lays his quid of betel tobacco between the lower lip and teeth, and so great seem to be the solace and comfort of it that dozing venders and peddlers will barely turn an eye and grunt responses to one’s eager “_Brapa?_” (“How much?”)

Peddlers bring to one’s doorway fine Bantam basketry and bales of the native cotton cloth, or _battek_, patterned in curious designs that have been in use from time out of mind. These native art fabrics are sold at the passers also, and one soon recognizes the conventional designs, and distinguishes the qualities and merits of these hand-patterned cottons that constitute the native dress. The sarong, or skirt, worn by men and women alike, is a strip of cotton two yards long and one yard deep, which is drawn tightly around the hips, the fullness gathered in front, and by an adroit twist made so firm that a belt is not necessary to native wearers. The sarong has always one formal panel design, which is worn at the front or side, and the rest of the surface is covered with the intricate ornaments in which native fancy runs riot. There are geometrical and line combinations, in which appear the swastika and the curious latticings of central Asia; others are as bold and natural as anything Japanese; and in others still, the palm-leaves and quaint animal forms of India and Persia attest the rival art influences that have swept over these refined, adaptive, assimilative people. One favorite serpentine pattern running in diagonal lines does not need explanation in this land of gigantic worms and writhing crawlers; nor that other pattern where centipedes and insect forms cover the ground; nor that where the fronds of cocoa-palm wave, and the strange shapes of mangos, jacks, and breadfruit are interwoven. The deer and tapir, and the “hunting-scene” patterns are reserved for native royalty’s exclusive wear. In village and wayside cottages up-country we afterward watched men and women painting these cloths, tracing a first outline in a rich brown waxy dye, which is the foundation and dominant color in all these batteks. The parts which are to be left white are covered with wax, and the cloth is dipped in or brushed over with the dye. This resist, or mordant, must be applied for each color, and the wax afterwards steamed out in hot water, so that a sarong goes through many processes and handlings, and is often the work of weeks. The dyes are applied hot through a little tin funnel of an implement tapering down to a thin point, which is used like a painter’s brush, but will give the fine line- and dot-work of a pen-and-ink drawing. The sarong’s value depends upon the fineness of the drawing, the elaborateness of the design, and the number of colors employed; and beginning as low as one dollar, these brilliant cottons, or hand-painted calico sarongs, increase in price to even twenty or thirty dollars. The Dutch ladies vie with one another in their sarongs as much as native women, and their dishabille dress of the early hours has not always economy to recommend it. The battek also appears in the _slandang_, or long shoulder-scarf, which used to match the sarong and complete the native costume when passed under the arms and crossed at the back, thus covering the body from the armpits to the waist. It is still worn knotted over the mother’s shoulder as a sling or hammock for a child; but Dutch fashion has imposed the same narrow, tight-sleeved _kabaia_, the _baju_, or jacket, that Dutch women wear with the sarong. The _kam kapala_, a square handkerchief tied around men’s heads as a variant of the turban, is of the same figured battek, and, with the slandang, often exhibits charming color combinations and intricate Persian designs. When one conquers his prejudices and associated ideas enough to pay seemingly fancy prices for these examples of free-hand calico printing, the taste grows, and he soon shares the native longing for a sarong of every standard and novel design.

The native silversmiths hammer out good designs in silver relief for betel- and tobacco-boxes, and exhibit great taste and invention in belt- and jacket-clasps, and in heavy knobs of hairpins and ear-rings, that are often made of gold and incrusted over with gems for richer folk.

There are no historic spots nor show-places of native creation in Batavia; no _kratons_, or _aloon-aloons_, as their palaces and courtyards are called; and only a sentimental interest for a virtual exile pining in his own country is attached to the villa of Raden Saleh. This son of the regent of Samarang was educated in Europe, and lived there for twenty-three years, developing decided talents as an artist, and enjoying the friendship of many men of rank and genius on the Continent, among the latter being Eugène Sue, who is said to have taken Raden Saleh as model for the Eastern Prince in “The Wandering Jew.” In Java he found himself sadly isolated from his own people by his European tastes and habits; and he had little in common with the coarse, rapacious mynheers whose sole thoughts were of crops and gulden. “Coffee and sugar, sugar and coffee, are all that is talked here. It is a dreary atmosphere for an artist,” said Raden Saleh to D’Almeida, who visited him at Batavia sixty odd years ago. He has left a monument of his taste in this charming villa, in a park whose land is now a vegetable-patch, its shady pleasance a beer-garden and exposition-ground, and the sign “_Tu Huur_” (“To Hire”) hung from the royal entrance. The exposition of arts and industries in these grounds in 1893 was a great event in Java, the governor-general Van der Wyk opening and closing the fair by electric signal, and the natives making a particularly interesting display of their products and crafts.

V

TO THE HILLS

One’s most earnest desire, in the scorch of Batavian noondays and stifling Batavian nights, is to seek refuge in “the hills”—in the dark-green groves and forests of the Blue Mountains, that are ranged with such admirable effect as background when one steams in from the Java Sea. At Buitenzorg, only forty miles away and seven hundred and fifty feet above the sea, heat-worn people find refuge in an entirely different climate, an atmosphere of bracing clearness tempered to moderate summer’s warmth. Buitenzorg (“without care”), the Dutch Sans Souci, has been a general refuge and sanitarium for Europeans, the real seat of government, and the home of the governor-general for more than a century. It is the pride and show-place of Java, the great center of its social life, leisure interests, and attractions. The higher officials and many Batavian merchants and bankers have homes at Buitenzorg, and residents from other parts of the island make it their place of recreation and goal of holiday trips.

Undressed Batavia was just rousing from its afternoon nap, and the hotel court was surrounded with barefoot guests in battek pajamas and scant sarongs, a sockless, collarless, unblushing company, that yawned and stared as we drove away, rejoicing to leave this Sans Gêne for Sans Souci. The Weltevreden Station, on the vast Koenig’s Plein, a spacious, stone-floored building, whose airy halls and waiting- and refreshment-rooms are repeated on almost as splendid scale at all the large towns of the island, was enlivened with groups of military officers, whose heavy broadcloth uniforms, trailing sabers, and clanking spurs transported us back from the tropics to some chilly European railway-station, and presented the extreme contrast of colonial life. The train that came panting from Tandjon Priok was made up of first-, second-, and third-class cars, all built on the American plan, in that they were long cars and not carriages, and we entered through doors at the end platforms. The first-class cars swung on easy springs; there were modern car-windows in tight frames, also window-frames of wire netting; while thick wooden venetians outside of all, and a double roof, protected as much as possible from the sun’s heat. The deep arm-chair seats were upholstered with thick leather cushions, the walls were set with blue-and-white tiles repeating Mauve’s and Mesdag’s pictures, and adjustable tables, overhead racks, and a dressing-room furnished all the railroad comforts possible. The railway service of Netherlands India is a vast improvement on, and its cars are in striking contrast to, the loose-windowed, springless, dusty, hard-benched carriages in which first-class passengers are jolted across British India. The second-class cars in Java rest on springs also, but more passengers are put in a compartment, and the fittings are simpler; while the open third-class cars, where native passengers are crowded together, have a continuous window along each side, and the benches are often without backs. The fares average 2.2 United States cents a kilometer (about five eighths of a mile) for first class, 1.6 cents second class, and 6 mills third class. The first-class fare from Batavia to Sourabaya, at the east end of the island, is but 50 gulden ($20) for the 940-kilometer journey, accomplished in two days’ train-travel of twelve and fourteen hours each, so that the former heavy expense (over a dollar a mile for post-horses, after one had bought or rented a traveling-carriage) and the delays of travel in Java are done away with.

The railways have been built by both the government and private corporations, connecting and working together, the first line dating from 1875. The continuous railway line across the island was completed and opened with official ceremonies in November, 1894. The gap of one hundred miles or more across the “_terra ingrata_,” the low-lying swamp and fever regions either side of Tjilatjap, had existed for years after the track was completed to the east and west of it. Dutch engineers built and manage the road, but the staff, the working force of the line, are natives, or Chinese of the more or less mixed but educated class filling the middle ground between Europeans and natives, between the upper and lower ranks. Wonderful skill was shown in leading the road over the mountains, and in building a firm track and bridges through the reeking swamps, where no white man could labor, even if he could live. The trains do not run at night, which would be a great advantage in a hot country, for the reason that the train crews are composed entirely of natives (since such work is considered beneath the grade of any European), and the cautious Dutch will not trust native engineers after dark. Through trains start from either end of the line and from the half-way stations at five and six o’clock each morning, and run until the short twilight and pitch-darkness that so quickly succeed the unchanging six-o’clock tropical sunset. These early morning starts, and the eight- and nine-o’clock dinner of the Java hotels, make travel most wearisome. One may buy fruit at every station platform, and always tea, coffee, chocolate, wine and schnapps, bread and biscuits at the station buffets. At the larger stations there are dining-rooms, or a service of lunch-baskets, in which the Gargantuan riz tavel, or luncheon, is served hot in one’s compartment as the train moves on.

The hour-and-a-half’s ride from Batavia to Buitenzorg gave us an epitome of tropical landscapes as the train ran between a double panorama of beauty. The soil was a deep, intense red, as if the heat of the sun and the internal fires of this volcanic belt had warmed the fruitful earth to this glowing color, which contrasted so strongly with the complemental green of grain and the groves of palms and cacao-trees. The level rice-fields were being plowed, worked, flooded, planted, weeded, and harvested side by side, the several crops of the year going on continuously, with seemingly no regard to seasons. Nude little boys, astride of smooth gray water-buffaloes, posed statuesquely while those leisurely animals browsed afield; and no pastoral pictures of Java remain clearer in memory than those of patient little brown children sitting half days and whole days on buffalo-back, to brush flies and guide the stupid-looking creatures to greener and more luscious bits of herbage. Many stories are told of the affection the water-ox often manifests for his boy keeper, killing tigers and snakes in his defense, and performing prodigies of valor and intelligence; but one doubts the tales the more he sees of this hideous beast of Asia. Men and women were wading knee-deep in paddy-field muck, transplanting the green rice-shoots from the seed-beds, and picturesque harvest groups posed in tableaux, as the train shrieked by. Children rolled at play before the gabled baskets of houses clustered in toy villages beneath the inevitable cocoa-palms and bananas, the combination of those two useful trees being the certain sign of a kampong, or village, when the braided-bamboo houses are invisible.

At Depok there was a halt to pass the down-train, and the natives of this one Christian village and mission-station, the headquarters of evangelical work in Java, flocked to the platform with a prize horticultural display of all the fruits of the season for sale. The record of mission work in Java is a short one, as, after casting out the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, the Dutch forbade any others to enter, and Spanish rule in Holland had perhaps taught them not to try to impose a strange religion on a people. During Sir Stamford Raffles’s rule, English evangelists began work among the natives, but were summarily interrupted and obliged to withdraw when Java was returned to Holland. All missionaries were strictly excluded until the humanitarian agitation in Europe, which resulted in the formal abolition of slavery and the gradual abandonment of the culture system, led the government to do a little for the Christianization and education of the people. The government supports twenty-nine Protestant pastors and ten Roman Catholic priests, primarily for the spiritual benefit of the European residents, and their spheres are exactly defined—proselytizing and mutual rivalries being forbidden. Missionaries from other countries are not allowed to settle and work among the people, and whatever may be said against this on higher moral grounds, the colonial government has escaped endless friction with the consuls and governments of other countries. The authorities have been quite willing to let the natives enjoy their mild Mohammedanism, and our Moslem servant spoke indifferently of mission efforts at Depok, with no scorn, no contempt, and apparently no hostility to the European faith.

Until recently, no steps were taken to educate the Javanese, and previous to 1864 they were not allowed to study the Dutch language. All colonial officers are obliged to learn Low Malay, that being the recognized language of administration and justice, instead of the many Javanese and Sundanese dialects, with their two forms of polite and common speech. These officials receive promotion and preferment as they make progress in the spoken and written language. Low Malay is the most readily acquired of all languages, as there are no harsh gutturals or difficult consonants, and the construction is very simple. Children who learn the soft, musical Malay first have difficulty with the harsh Dutch sounds, while the Dutch who learn Malay after their youth never pronounce it as well or as easily as they pronounce French. The few Javanese, even those of highest rank, who acquired the Dutch language and attempted to use it in conversation with officials, used to be bruskly answered in Malay, an implication that the superior language was reserved for Europeans only. This helped the conquerors to keep the distinctions sharply drawn between them and their subject people, and while they could always understand what the natives were saying, the Dutch were free to talk together without reserve in the presence of servants or princes. Dutch is now taught in the schools for natives maintained by the colonial government, 201 primary schools having been opened in 1887, with an attendance of 39,707 pupils. The higher schools at Batavia have been opened to the sons of native officials and such rich Javanese as can afford them, and conservatives lament the “spoiling” of the natives with all that the government now does for them. They complain that the Javanese are becoming too “independent” since schoolmasters, independent planters, and tourists came, just as the old-style foreign residents of India, the Straits, China, and Japan bemoan the progressive tendencies and upheavals of this era of Asiatic awakening and enlightenment; and tourist travel is always harped upon as the most offending and corrupting cause of the changes in the native spirit.

Once above the general level of low-lying rice-lands, cacao-plantations succeeded one another for miles beyond Depok; the small trees hung full of fat pods just ripening into reddish brown and crimson. The air was noticeably cooler in the hills, and as the shadows lengthened the near green mountains began to tower in shapes of lazuli mist, and a sky of soft, surpassing splendor made ready for its sunset pageant. When we left the train we were whirled through the twilight of great avenues of trees to the hotel, and given rooms whose veranda overhung a strangely rustling, shadowy abyss, where we could just discern a dark silver line of river leading to the pale-yellow west, with the mountain mass of Salak cut in gigantic purple silhouette.

The ordinary bedroom of a Java hotel, with latticed doors and windows, contains one or two beds, each seven feet square, hung with starched muslin curtains that effectually exclude the air, as well as lizards or winged things. The bedding, as at Singapore, consists of a hard mattress with a sheet drawn over it, a pair of hard pillows, and a long bolster laid down the middle as a cooling or dividing line. Blankets or other coverings are unneeded and unknown, but it takes one a little time to become acclimated to that order in the penetrating dampness of the dewy and reeking hours before dawn. If one makes protest enough, a thin blanket will be brought, but so camphorated and mildew-scented as to be insupportable. Pillows are not stuffed with feathers, but with the cooler, dry, elastic down of the straight-armed cotton-tree, which one sees growing everywhere along the highways, its rigid, right-angled branches inviting their use as the regulation telegraph-pole. The floors are made of a smooth, hard cement, which harbors no insects, and can be kept clean and cool. Pieces of coarse ratan matting are the only floor-coverings used, and give an agreeable contrast to the dirty felts, dhurries, and carpets, the patches of wool and cotton and matting, spread over the earth or wooden floors of the unspeakable hotels of British India. And yet the Javanese hotels are disappointing to those who know the solid comforts and immaculate order of certain favorite hostelries of The Hague and Amsterdam. Everything is done to secure a free circulation of air, as a room that is closed for a day gets a steamy, mildewed atmosphere, and if closed for three days blooms with green mold over every inch of its walls and floors. The section of portico outside each room at Buitenzorg was decently screened off to serve as a private sitting-room for each guest or family in the hours of startling dishabille; and as soon as the sun went down a big hanging-lamp assembled an entomological congress. Every hotel provides as a night-lamp for the bedroom a tumbler with an inch of cocoanut-oil, and a tiny tin and cork arrangement for floating a wick on its surface. For the twelve hours of pitch-darkness this little lightning-bug contrivance burns steadily, emitting a delicious nutty fragrance, and allowing one to watch the unpleasant shadows of the lizards running over the walls and bed-curtains, and to look for the larger, poisonous brown gecko, whose unpleasant voice calling “_Becky! Becky! Becky!_” in measured gasps, six times, over and over again, is the actual, material nightmare of the tropics.

British tourists, unmindful of the offending of their own India in more vital matters, berate and scorn the tiny water-pitcher and basin of the Java hotels, brought from the continent of Europe unchanged; and rage at the custom of guests in Java hotels emptying their basins out of doors or windows on tropical shrubbery or courtyard pavings at will. There are swimming-pools at some hotels and in many private houses, but the usual bath-room of the land offers the traveler a barrel and a dipper. One is expected to ladle the water out and dash it over him in broken doses, and as the swimming-pool is a rinsing-tub for the many, the individual is besought not to use soap. Naturally the British tourist’s invectives are deep and loud and long, and he will not believe that the dipper-bath is more cooling than to soak and soap and scour in a comfortable tub of his own. He will not be silenced or comforted in this tubless tropical land, which, if it had only remained under British rule, might be—would be—etc. All suffering tourists agree with him, however, that the worst laundering in the world befalls one’s linen in Java, the cloth-destroying, button-exterminating _dhobie_ man of Ceylon and India being a careful and conscientious artist beside the clothes-pounder of Java. In making the great circle of the earth westward one leaves the last of laundry luxury at Singapore, and continues to suffer until, in the sub-stratum of French civilization in Egypt, he finds the _blanchisseuse_.

The order of living is the same at the up-country hotels as at Batavia, and the charges are the same everywhere in Java, averaging about three dollars gold each day, everything save wine included; and at Buitenzorg corkage was charged on the bottle of filtered water which a dyspeptic tourist manufactured with a patent apparatus he carried with him. Landlords do not recognize nor deal with fractions of days, if they can help it, in charging one for board on this “American plan”; but when that reckless royal tourist, the King of Siam, makes battle over his Java hotel bills, lesser travelers may well take courage and follow his example. The King of Siam has erected commemorative columns crowned with white marble elephants, as souvenirs of his visits to Singapore and Batavia, and after the king’s financial victory over Buitenzorg and Garoet hotels, the tourist sees the white elephant as a symbol of victory more personally and immediately significant than the lion on the Waterloo column. It has been said that “no invalid nor dyspeptic should enter the portals of a Java hotel,” and this cannot be insisted upon too strongly, to deter any such sufferers from braving the sunrise breakfasts and bad coffee, the heavy riz tavel, and the long-delayed dinner-hour, solely for the sake of tropical scenery and vegetation, and a study of Dutch colonial life.

VI

A DUTCH SANS SOUCI

At daylight we saw that our portico looked full upon the front of Mount Salak, green to the very summit with plantations and primeval forests. Deep down below us lay a valley of Eden, where thousands of palm-trees were in constant motion, their branches bending, swaying, and fluttering as softly as ostrich-plumes to the eye, but with a strange, harsh, metallic rustle and clash, different from the whispers and sighs and cooing sounds of temperate foliage. As stronger winds threshed the heavy leaves, the level of the valley rippled and tossed in green billows like a barley-field. There was a basket village on the river-bank, where tropic life went on in as plain pantomime as in any stage presentation. At sunrise the people came out of their fragile toy houses, stretched their arms to the sky and yawned, took a swim in the river, and then gathered in the dewy shade to eat their morning curry and rice from their plantain-leaf plates. Then the baskets and cooking-utensils were held in the swift-flowing stream,—such a fastidious, ideal, adorable sort of dish-washing!—and the little community turned to its daily vocations. The men went away to work, or sat hammering and hewing with implements strangely Japanese, and held in each instance in the Japanese way. The women pounded and switched clothing to and fro in the stream, and spread it out in white and brilliant-colored mosaics on the bank to dry. They plaited baskets and painted sarongs, and the happy brown children, in nature’s dress, rolled at play under the cocoanut-trees, or splashed like young frogs in and out of the stream.

While this went on below, and we watched the dark indigo mass of Salak turning from purple and azure to sunlit greens in the light of early day, the breakfast of the country was brought to our porch: cold toast, cold meats, eggs, fruit, tea or the very worst coffee in all the world—something that even the American railway restaurant and frontier hotel would spurn with scorn. Java coffee, in Java, comes to one in a stoppered glass bottle or cruet, a dark-brown fluid that might as well be walnut catsup, old port, or New Orleans molasses. This double extract of coffee, made by cold filtration, is diluted with hot water and hot milk to a muddy, gray-brown, lukewarm drink, that is uniformly bad in every hotel and public place of refreshment that a tourist encounters on the island. In private houses, where the fine Arabian berry is toasted and powdered, and the extract made fresh each day, the morning draught is quite another fluid, and worthy the cachet the name of Java gives to coffee in far countries.

Buitenzorg, the Bogor of the natives, who will not call it by its newer name, is one of the enchanted spots where days can slip by in dateless delight; one forgets the calendar and the flight of time, and hardly remembers the heavy, sickening heat of Batavia stewing away on the plains below. It is the Versailles of the island, the seat of the governor-general’s court, and the social life of the colony, a resort for officials and the leisure class, and for invalids and the delicate, who find strength in the clear, fresh air of the hills, the cool nights, and the serenely tempered days, each with its reviving shower the year round. Buitenzorg is the Simla of Netherlands India, but it awaits its Kipling to record its social life in clear-cut, instantaneous pictures. There are strange pictures for the Kipling to sketch, too, since the sarong and the native jacket are as much the regular morning dress for ladies at the cool, breezy hill-station as in sweltering Batavia, a fact rather disproving the lowland argument that the heat demands such extraordinary concessions in costume. But as that “Bengal Civilian” who wrote “_De Zieke Reiziger_; or, Rambles in Java in 1852,” and commented so freely upon Dutch costume, cuisine, and Sabbath-keeping, succeeded, Mr. Money said, in shutting every door to the English traveler for years afterward, and added extra annoyances to the toelatings-kaart system, budding and alien Kiplings may take warning.

The famous Botanical Garden at Buitenzorg is the great show-place, the paradise and pride of the island. The Dutch are acknowledgedly the best horticulturists of Europe, and with the heat of a tropical sun, a daily shower, and nearly a century’s well-directed efforts, they have made Buitenzorg’s garden first of its kind in the world, despite the rival efforts of the French at Saigon, and of the British at Singapore, Ceylon, Calcutta, and Jamaica. The governor-general’s palace, greatly enlarged from the first villa of 1744, is in the midst of the ninety-acre inclosure reached from the main gate, near the hotel and the passer, by what is undoubtedly the finest avenue of trees in the world. These graceful kanari-trees, arching one hundred feet overhead in a great green cathedral aisle, have tall, straight trunks covered with stag-horn ferns, bird’s-nest ferns, ratans, creeping palms, blooming orchids, and every kind of parasite and air-plant the climate allows; and there is a fairy lake of lotus and _Victoria regia_ beside it, with pandanus and red-stemmed Banka palms crowded in a great sheaf or bouquet on a tiny islet. When one rides through this green avenue in the dewy freshness of the early morning, it seems as though nature and the tropics could do no more, until he has penetrated the tunnels of waringen-trees, the open avenues of royal palms, the great plantation of a thousand palms, the grove of tree-fern, and the frangipani thicket, and has reached the knoll commanding a view of the double summit of Gedeh and Pangerango, vaporous blue volcanic heights, from one peak of which a faint streamer of smoke perpetually floats. There is a broad lawn at the front of the palace, shaded with great waringen-, sausage-, and candle-trees, and trees whose branches are hidden in a mantle of vivid-leafed bougainvillea vines, with deer wandering and grouping themselves in as correct park pictures as if under branches of elm or oak, or beside the conventional ivied trunks of the North.

It is a tropical experience to reverse an umbrella and in a few minutes fill it with golden-hearted white frangipani blossoms, or to find nutmegs lying as thick as acorns on the ground, and break their green outer shell and see the fine coral branches of mace enveloping the dark kernel. It is a delight, too, to see mangosteens and rambutans growing, to find bread, sausages, and candles hanging in plenty from benevolent trees, and other fruits and strange flowers springing from a tree’s trunk instead of from its branches. There are thick groves and regular avenues of the waringen, a species of _Ficus_, and related to the banian- and the rubber-tree, a whole family whose roots crawl above the ground, drop from the branches and generally comport themselves in unconventional ways. Bamboos grow in clumps and thickets, ranging from the fine, feathery-leafed canes, that are really only large grasses, up to the noble giants from Burma, whose stems are more nearly trunks easily soaring to a hundred feet in air, and spreading there a solid canopy of graceful foliage.

The creepers run from tree to tree, and writhe over the ground like gray serpents; ratans and climbing palms one hundred feet in length are common, while uncommon ones stretch to five hundred feet. There is one creeper with a blossom like a magnified white violet, and with all a wood-violet’s fragrance; but with only Dutch and botanical names on the labels, one wanders ignorantly and protestingly in this paradise of strange things. The rarer orchids are grown in matted sheds in the shade of tall trees; and although we saw them at the end of the dry season, and few plants were in bloom, there was still an attractive orchid-show.

But the strangest, most conspicuous bloom in that choice corner was a great butterfly flower of a pitcher-plant (a _nepenthes_), whose pale-green petals were veined with velvety maroon, and half concealed the pelican pouch of a pitcher filled with water. It was an evil-looking, ill-smelling, sticky thing, and its unusual size and striking colors made it haunt one longest of all vegetable marvels. There were other more attractive butterflies fluttering on pliant stems, strange little woolly white orchids, like edelweiss transplanted, and scores of delicate Java and Borneo orchids, not so well known as the Venezuelan and Central American orchids commonly grown in American hothouses, and so impossible to acclimate in Java.

Lady Raffles died while Sir Stamford was governor of Java, and was buried in the section of the palace park that was afterward (in 1817) set apart as a botanical garden, and the care of the little Greek temple over her grave near the kanari avenue was provided for in a special clause in the treaty of cession. The bust of Theismann, who founded the garden and added so much to botanical knowledge by his studies in Java and Borneo, stands in an oval pleasance called the rose-garden; and there one may take heart and boast of the temperate zone, since that rare exotic, the rose, is but a spindling bush, and its blossoming less than scanty at Buitenzorg, when one remembers California’s, and more especially Tacoma’s, perennial prodigalities in showers of roses. In 1895 Professor Lotsy of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, was called to assist the learned curator, Dr. Treub, in the management of this famous _Hortus Bogoriensis_, which provides laboratory and working-space for, and invites foreign botanists freely to avail themselves of, this unique opportunity of study. Over one hundred native gardeners tend and care for this great botanic museum of more than nine thousand living specimens, all working under the direction of a white head-gardener. The Tjiliwong River separates the botanic garden from a culture-garden of forty acres, where seventy more gardeners look to the economic plants—the various cinchonas, sugar-canes, rubber, tea, coffee, gums, spices, hemp, and other growths, whose introduction to the colony has so benefited the planters. Experiments in acclimatization are carried on in the culture-garden, and at the experimental garden at Tjibodas, high up on the slopes of Salak, where the governor-general has a third palace, and there is a government hospital and sanatorium.

Theismann’s famous museum of living twig- and leaf-insects was abandoned some years ago, the curator deciding to keep his garden strictly to botanical lines. One no longer has the pleasure of seeing there those curious and most extraordinary freaks of nature—the fresh green or dry and dead-looking twigs that suddenly turn their heads or bend their long angular legs and move away; or leaves, as delusive in their way, that detach themselves from a tree-branch and fly away. These insects bearing so astonishing a resemblance to their environment may be purchased now and then from Chinese gardeners; but otherwise, if one asks where they can be found or seen, there comes the usual answer, “In Borneo or Celebes,”—always on the farther, remoter islands,—tropic wonders taking wing like the leaf-insects when one reaches their reputed haunts.

All Java is in a way as finished as little Holland itself, the whole island cultivated from edge to edge like a tulip-garden, and connected throughout its length with post-roads smooth and perfect as park drives, all arched with waringen-, kanari-, tamarind-, or teak-trees. The rank and tangled jungle is invisible, save by long journeys; and great snakes, wild tigers, and rhinoceroses are almost unknown now. One must go to Borneo and the farther islands to see them, too. All the valleys, plains, and hillsides are planted in formal rows, hedged, terraced, banked, drained, and carefully weeded as a flower-bed. The drives are of endless beauty, whichever way one turns from Buitenzorg, and we made triumphal progresses through the kanari- and waringen-lined streets in an enormous “milord.” The equipage measured all of twenty feet from the tip of the pole to the footman’s perch behind, and with a cracking whip and at a rattling gait we dashed through shady roads, past Dutch barracks and hospitals, over picturesque bridges, and through villages where the native children jumped and clapped their hands with glee as the great Juggernaut vehicle rolled by. We visited the grave of Raden Saleh, a lonely little pavilion or temple in a tangle of shrubbery that was once a lovely garden shaded by tall cocoa-palms; and we drove to Batoe Toelis, “the place of the written stone,” and in the little thatched basket of a temple saw the sacred stone inscribed in ancient Kawi characters, the original classic language of the Javanese. In another basket shrine were shown the veritable footprints of Buddha, with no explanation as to how and when he rested on the island, nor yet how he happened to have such long, distinctively Malay toes. Near these temples is the villa where the poor African prince of Ashantee was so long detained in exile—an African chief whose European education had turned his mind to geology and natural sciences, and who led the life of a quiet student here until, by the exchange from Dutch to British ownership of Ashantee, a way was opened for him to return and die in his own country. There is a magnificent view from the Ashantee villa out over a great green plain and a valley of palms to the peaks of Gedeh and Pangerango, and to their volcanic neighbor, Salak, silent for two hundred years. Peasants, trooping along the valley roads far below, made use of a picturesque bamboo bridge that is accounted one of the famous sights of the neighborhood, and seemed but processions of ants crossing a spider’s web. All the suburban roads are so many botanical exhibitions approaching that in the great garden, and one’s interest is claimed at every yard and turn.

It takes a little time for the temperate mind to accept the palm-tree as a common, natural, and inevitable object in every outlook and landscape; to realize that the joyous, living thing with restless, perpetually threshing foliage is the same correct, symmetrical, motionless feather-duster on end that one knows in the still life of hothouses and drawing-rooms at home; to realize that it grows in the ground, and not in a pot or tub to be brought indoors for the winter season. The arches of gigantic kanari-trees growing over by-lanes and village paths, although intended for triumphal avenues and palace driveways, overpower one with the mad extravagance, the reckless waste, and the splendid luxury of nature. One cannot accept these things at first as utilities, just as it shocks one to have a servant black his shoes with bruised hibiscus flowers or mangosteen rind, or remove rust from kris- or knife-blades with pineapple-juice, thrusting a blade through and through the body of the pine. The poorest may have his hedge of lantana, which, brought from the Mauritius by Lady Raffles, now borders roads, gardens, and the railway-tracks from end to end of the island. The humblest dooryard may be gay with tall poinsettia-trees, and bougainvilleas may pour a torrent of magenta leaves from every tree, wall, or roof. The houses of the great planters around Buitenzorg are ideal homes in the tropics, and the Tjomson and other large tea and coffee estates are like parks. The drives through their grounds show one the most perfect lawns and flower-beds and ornamental trees, vines, and palms, and such ranks on ranks of thriving tea-bushes and coffee-bushes, every leaf perfect and without flaw, every plant in even line, and the warm red earth lying loosely on their roots, that one feels as if in some ornamental _jardin d’acclimatation_ rather than among the most staple and serious crops of commerce. Yet from end to end of the island the cultivation is as intense and careful, entitling Java to its distinction as “the finest tropical island in the world.” It is the gem of the Indies, the one splendid jewel in the Netherlands crown, and a possession to which poor Cuba, although corresponding exactly to it geographically and politically, has been vainly compared.

There were often interesting _table d’hôte_ companies gathered at noon and at night in the long dining-room of the Buitenzorg hotel. While many of the Dutch officials and planters, and their wives, maintained the wooden reserve and supercilious air of those uncertain folk of the half-way strata in society everywhere, there were others whose intelligence and courtesy and friendly interest remain as green spots in the land. There was one most amiable man, who, we thought, in his love of country, was anxious to hear us praise it. We extolled the cool breezes and the charming day, and said: “You have a beautiful country here.”

“This is not my country,” he answered.

“But are you not Dutch?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Then Java is yours. It is the Netherlands even if it is India.”

“Yes; but I am from East Java, near Malang”—a section all of three hundred miles away, off at the other end of the island; but a strong distinction—an extreme aloofness or estrangement—exists between residents of East, West, and Middle Java, and between those of this island and of the near-by Sumatra, Celebes, and Molucca, all Indonesians as they are, under the rule of the one governor-general of Netherlands India, representing the little queen at The Hague.

Often when we spoke of “India” or “southern India,” or referred to Delhi and Bombay as “cities of India,” the Hollanders looked puzzled.

“Ah, when you say ‘India,’ you mean Hindustan or British India?”

“Certainly; that is India, the continent—the greater India.”

“But what, then, do you call this island and all the possessions of the Netherlands out here?”

“Why, we speak of this island as Java. Every one knows of it, and of Sumatra and Borneo, by their own names.”

The defender of Netherlands India said nothing; but soon a reference was made to a guest who had been in official residence at Amboyna.

“Where?” we inquired with keen interest in the unknown.

“Amboyna. Do you in America not know of Amboyna?”

Average Americans must confess if, since early geography days, they have not remembered carefully that one tiny island in the group of Moluccas off the east end of Java—an island so tiny that even on the school atlases used in Buitenzorg it is figured the size of a pea, and on the maps for the rest of the world is but a nameless dot in the clustered dots of the group that would better be named the Nutmeg Isles, since the bulk of the world’s supply of that spicy fruit comes from their shores.

Then, away down there, out of the world, I was taken to task for that chief sin and offending of my country against other countries—the McKinley Bill of so long ago.

“Why, _we_ couldn’t make any money out of tobacco while such a law was in existence,” said one Sumatra planter.

“But we are concerned with the prosperity of our own American tobacco-growers. It is for the Dutch government to make laws to benefit the tobacco-planters of Sumatra.”

“Ah! but you have new and better laws now since that last revolution in the States, and we are all planting all the tobacco we can. We shall be very prosperous now.”

VII

IN A TROPICAL GARDEN

The Buitenzorg passer proper is housed in a long, tiled pavilion facing an open common, on which the country folk gather with their produce twice a week, and, overflowing, stretch in a scattering encampment down the broad street leading from the gate of the Botanical Garden. The permanent passer, or regular bazaar in the covered building, is stocked with the staples and substantials of life, and is open every day. The town tailors have their abode under that cover, and squat in rows before their little American hand-sewing machines, and sew the single seam of a sarong skirt, or reel off a native jacket, while the customer waits. It is the semi-weekly, early morning, outdoor market of chattering country folk that most delights and diverts a stranger, however. The lines of venders, strung along the shady street and grouped under palm-patched umbrellas in the open, provide horticultural and floral exhibits of the greatest interest, and afford the most picturesque scenes of native life. The long street of the Tjina kampong beyond is dull and monotonous by comparison, for when Dutch rules force the Chinese to be clean and orderly all picturesqueness and character are gone from their quarter. All the tasseled lanterns and strips of vermilion paper will not “tell” artistically without their concomitant grease and dirt.

As a very new broom, a clever child pleased with the toy of a new employer, Amat, our mild-mannered Moslem servant, was a treasure and delight during those first days at Buitenzorg. He entered gleefully into the spirit of our reckless purchase from the heaps of splendid fruits poured from the great horn of plenty into the open passer. He gave us the name of each particular strange fruit, taught us the odd tricks and sleight-of-hand methods of opening these novelties of the market-place; and it was quite like kindergarten play when he unbraided and wove together again the ribbed palm-leaf reticules in which _dukus_ and such small fruits are sold. We carried baskets of strange fruits back to the hotel, and Amat added every vegetable curio and market’s marvel he could find to the heaps of fruits and flowers. Our veranda was a testing- and proving-ground, and there seemed to be no end to the delights and surprises the tropics provided.

Tons of bananas were heaped high in the passer each day, the great golden bunches making most decorative and attractive masses of color, and their absurd cheapness tempting one to buy and to buy. The Java _pisang_, or banana, however, is but a coarse plantain with a pinkish-yellow, dry pulp, of a pumpkiny flavor that sadly disappoints the palate. Yet it is nature’s greatest and most generously bestowed gift in the tropics, and it was pleasant to eat it picked ripe in its native home, instead of receiving it steam-ripened from Northern fruiterers’ warehouses. Every tiny village and almost every little native hut in Java has its banana-patch or its banana-tree, which requires nothing of labor in cultivation, save the weeding away of the old stalks. It was intended as a humane concentration of benefits when nature gave man this food-plant, four thousand pounds of whose fruit will grow with so little human aid in the same space of ground required to raise ninety-nine pounds of potatoes or thirty-three pounds of wheat; both those Northern crops acquired, too, only by incessant sweat of the brow and muscular exertion. The pisang is the tropical staff of life for whites as well as natives, as wholesome and necessary as bread, and an equivalent for the latter as a starchy food. It comes to one with the earliest breakfast cup, appears at every meal, arrives with the afternoon tea-tray, and always ends the late dinner as the inevitable accompaniment of cheese, the happiest substitute for bread or biscuits, tropical gourmets insist.

The lovely red rambutans (_Nephelium lappaceum_) we would have bought for their beauty alone—those clusters of seemingly green chestnut-burs, with spines tinted to the deepest rose, affording the most exquisite color-study of all the fruits in the passer. The spiny shell pulls apart easily, and discloses a juicy, half-transparent mass of white pulp around a central core of smooth stones. The duku, looking like a big green grape, a fresh almond, or an olive, contains just such another ball of pulp within its leathery rind, and both fruits much resemble the fresh _lychees_ of China in flavor. The _salak_, or “forbidden fruit,” is a hard, scaly, pear-shaped thing, which very appropriately grows on a prickly bush, and whose strange brown rind reminds one of a pine-cone or a rattlesnake’s skin. This scaly, snaky shell prejudices one against it; but the salak is as solid as an apple, with a nutty flavor and texture. It is not unpleasant, nor is it distinctively anything in flavor—nothing unique or delicious enough to make one seek hard or long for a second taste of it. The _jamboa_, the eugenia or rose-apple (_Eugenia malaccensis_), is a fruit of the same size and shape as the salak, and in spite of its exquisite coloring it impresses one as being an albino, a skinless or some other monstrous and unnatural product of nature. Its outer integument, thinner than any nectarine’s rind, shades from snow-white at the stem to the deepest rose-pink at the blossom end, and it looks as if it were the most fragrant, delicious, and juicy fruit. One bites into the fine, crisp, succulent pulp, and tastes exactly nothing, and never forgives the beautiful, rose-tinted, watery blank for its deluding. The _carambola_ (_Averrhoa_), the five-ribbed yellow “star-fruit,” popularly known in real Cathay as the “Chinese gooseberry,” is a favorite, fragrant study in spherical geometry, and the cutting apart of its triangular sections is the nicest sort of after-dinner amusement and demonstration; but its fine, deliciously acid pulp is usually known to one before he reaches Java. Its relative, the _bilimbi_, is the sharpest of acid fruits, and lends an edge to chutneys and curried conglomerates.

The breadfruit and its gigantic relative, the _nanko_ (_Artocarpus integrifolia_), or jackfruit, which often weighs thirty and even forty pounds, and is sufficient load for a man to bring to market on his back, are the vegetable mainstays of native life; but as both must be cooked to a tasteless mush to be relished, one is satisfied only to look at them in the passer. That swollen monstrosity, the nanko, grows goiter-like on the trunk of a tree, and is supported in ratan slings while the great excrescence ripens. One must speak of the breadfruit with respect, though, after all that scientists have said, philosophers and political economists have argued, concerning it. Since ten breadfruit-trees will support a large family the year round, and a man may plant that many within an hour and need give them no further care, Captain Cook observed that such a man has then “as completely fulfilled his duty to his own and future generations as the native of our less genial climate by plowing in the cold of winter and reaping in the summer heat as often as the seasons return.”