Chapter XXIII: Garoet and Papandayang 312 (4)

We were led past flower-beds nodding with strange lilies, past rose-gardens and oleander-hedges, down a paved path that was a steep tunnel through dense shrubbery and overarching trees, to a great white marble tank, or swimming-pool, as large as a ball-room; though few ball-rooms can ever have such lavish decorations of palms, bamboos, and tree-ferns as screen that pool around, with the purple summit of Salak showing just above the highest plumes and fronds—a landscape study just fitted for a theatrical drop-curtain. We might swim or splash, dive or float, or sit on marble steps and comfortably soak at will in that great white tank, the clear spring water warmed by the sun to a soothing temperature for the long, luxurious afternoon bath, and cooled sufficiently through the night to give refreshing shock to early morning plungers. Only the approaching storm, the nearer rumbles of thunder, and finally the first small raindrops induced us to leave that fairy white pool, deep sunk in its tropic glen.

After a half-hour of soft rain, accompanied by three sharp thunder-claps, the climate had done its perfect work; every tree, bird, flower, and insect rejoiced, and all nature literally sang. The warm red earth breathed pleasant fragrance, every tree had its aroma, and the perfumed flowers were overpowering with fresh sweetness. Then the master led the house party for a long walk, first through the oldest tea-gardens, where every leaf on every plant was erect, shining, as if ready for dress-parade, and more intensely, softly green than ever after the daily shower-bath and wind toilet. We strolled on through a toy village under a kanari avenue, where all the avocations and industries of Javanese life were on view, and the little people, smiling their welcome, dropped on their heels in the permanent courtesy of the _dodok_, the squatting attitude of humility common to all Asiatics. The servants who had brought notes to the master, as he sat on the porch, crouched on their heels as they offered them, and remained in that position until dismissed; and the villagers and wayfarers, hastily dropping on their haunches, maintained that lowly, reverent attitude until we had passed—an attitude and a degree of deference not at all comfortable for an American to contemplate, ineradicable old Javanese custom as it may be. The tiny brown babies, exactly matching the brown earth in tone, crawled over the warm lap of nature, crowing and gurgling their pleasure, their plump little bodies free from all garments, and equally free from any danger of croups or colds from exposure to the weather. We took a turn through the great cement-floored _fabrik_, with its ingenious machines all silent for that night, and only the electric-light dynamos whirling to illuminate the great settlement of outbuildings around the residence. The stables were another great establishment by themselves, and fifty odd Arabian and Australian thoroughbreds, housed in a long, open-fronted stable, were receiving their evening rub and fare from a legion of grooms. Morphine, Malaria, Quinine, Moses, and Aaron, and other cup-winners, arched their shining necks, pawed to us, and nibbled their reward of tasseled rice-heads, brought on carrying-poles from the granaries, where legions of rice-sparrows twittered in perpetual residence. We sat on a bank near the little race-course, or manège, where the colts are trained, and the favorites were led past and put through their paces and accomplishments one by one. It was almost dusk, with the swiftness with which day closes in the tropics, when the banteng, or wild cow (_Bos sondaicus_), was trotted out—a clumsy, dun-colored creature, with a strange, musky odor, that was brought as a calf from the wild south-coast country, and was at once mothered and protected by a fussy little sheep, “the European goat,” as the natives call the woolly animal from abroad, that was still guiding and driving it with all the intelligence of a collie.

The bachelor planter partner showed us his bungalow, full of hunting-trophies—skulls and skins of panthers, tigers, and wild dogs; tables made of rhinoceros-hide resting on rhinoceros and elephant skulls, and tables made of mammoth turtle-shells resting on deer-antlers. The great prizes were the nine huge banteng skulls, trophies of hunting-trips to the South Preanger, the lone region bordering on the Indian Ocean. There were also chandeliers of deer-antlers, and a frieze-like wall-bordering of python-skins, strange tusks and teeth, wings and feathers galore, and dozens of kodak pictures as witnesses and records of the many camps and battues of this sportsman—all gathered in that same wild region of big game, as much as fifty or a hundred miles away, but referred to in the Buitenzorg neighborhood as New York sportsmen used to speak of the buffalo country—“the south coast” and “out West,” equally synonyms for all untamed, far-away wildness. Elephant-hunting must be enjoyed in Sumatra, since that animal has never existed in a wild state in Java.

With the younger people of the master’s family, his young managers and assistants, fresh from Amsterdam schools and European universities, speaking English and several other languages, _au courant_ with all the latest in the world’s music, art, literature, and drama, plantation life and table-talk were full of interest and varied amusements. By a whir of the telephone, two of the assistants were bidden ride over from their far corner of the estate for dinner, and afterward a quartet of voices and instruments made the marble-floored music-room ring, while the elder men smoked meditatively, or clicked the billiard-balls in their deliberate, long-running tourney. The latest books and the familiar American magazines strewed boudoir and portico tables, and naturally there was talk of them.

“Ah, we like so much your American magazines—the ‘Century’ and the others. We admire so much the pictures. And then all those stories of the early Dutch colonists at Manhattan! We like, too, your great American novelists—Savage, Howells, Gunter—‘The Rise of Silas Lapham,’ ‘Mr. Potter of Texas,’ and all those. We read them so much.”

They were undoubtedly disappointed that we did not speak Dutch, or at least read it, since all Hollanders know that Dutch is the language of the best families in New York, of the cultivated classes and all polite society in the United States, since from the mynheers of Manhattan came the first examples of refined living in the New World. “The English colonists were of all sorts, you know, like in Australia,” said our informants at Buitenzorg and everywhere else on the island, “and that is why you Americans are all so proud of your Dutch descent.”

XI

PLANTATION LIFE

After the sunrise cup of coffee at Sinagar—such coffee as we had dreamed of and confidently expected to enjoy, but never did encounter anywhere else in Java—all the men of the household appeared in riding-gear, and were off to inspect and direct work in the many gardens and sections of the estate. The ladies took us for a walk across the tea-fields to the great landmark of a Sinagar palm, which gave the name to the estate, and from which lookout we could view the miles of luxuriant fields between it and Parakan Salak’s group of white houses, and also, chief feature in every view, the splendid blue slopes and summit of Salak clear cut against a sky of the palest, most heavenly turquoise. It was a very dream of a tropic morning, and a Java tea-garden seemed more than ever an earthly paradise.

Tea-bushes covered thousands of acres around and below us, as the ground dropped away from that commanding ridge, their formal rows decreasing in perspective until they shaded the landscape like a fine line-engraving. For mile after mile one could walk in direct line between soldierly files of tea-bushes—Chinese, Assam, and hybrids. The Chinese plant, descended by generations from that same wild bush discovered in Assam near the Yunnan frontier by English botanists in 1834, has, by centuries of cultivation, been brought to grow in low, compact little mats, or mere rosettes of bushes. It has a thick, woody stem, gnarled and twisted like any dwarf tree, and some of the Chinese tea-bushes at Sinagar are fifty or sixty years of age, the pioneers and patriarchs of their kind in Java, original seedlings and first importations from China. The Assam or wild Himalayan tea-plant is a tall spindling bush with large, thin leaves, and grafted on Chinese stock produces the tall hybrid commonly grown in the tea-gardens of Java. The red soil of these gardens is always being raked loose around the tea-plants, and at every dozen or twenty feet a deep hole, or trench, is dug to admit air and water more freely to the roots. Constant care is given lest these little open graves, or air-holes, fill up after heavy rains, and not a weed nor a stray blade of grass is allowed to invade these prim, orderly gardens and rob the soil of any of its virtues. Each particular bush is tended and guarded as if it were the rarest ornamental exotic, and the tea-gardens, with their broad stripings of green upon the red ground, and skeleton lines of palms outlining the footpaths and the divisional limits of each garden, are like a formal exhibit of tea-growing, an exposition model on gigantic scale, a fancy farmer’s experimental show-place.

In the unending summer of the hill-country there is no “tea season,” no “spring leaf,” “first pickings,” or “fire-fly crop,” as in China and Japan. Two years after the young seedling has been transplanted to the formal garden rows its leaves may be gathered; and there are new leaves every day, so that picking, curing, firing, and packing continue the year round. The tea-pickers, mostly women, gather the leaves only when the plants are free from dew or rain. They pick with the lightest touch of thumb and finger, heaping the leaves on a square cloth spread on the ground, and then tying up the bundle and “toting” it off on their heads, for all the world like the colored aunties of our southern states. The bright colors of their jackets and sarongs, and of their bundles, that look like exaggerated bandana turbans, give gay and picturesque relief to the green-striped gardens, whose exact lines converge in long, monotonous perspective whichever way one looks. There is great fascination in watching these bobbing figures among the bushes gradually converge to single lines, and the procession of lank, slender sarongs file through the gardens, down the avenues of palm and tamarind, to the fabrik.

The long, red-tiled buildings of the fabrik, in their order and speckless neatness, with the array of ingenious and intelligent machines, seem yet more like part of an exposition exhibit—a small machinery hall of some great international industrial aggregation. The picking and the processes of converting the tea-leaves into the green, oolong, and black teas of commerce, and of packing them into large and small, air-tight, leaded packages for export, occupy, at the most, but two days in ordinary working seasons. Less green tea is sold each year, and soon the entire Java crop of tea will be cured to the half black, or oolong, and the standard black tea, which alone can find sale in England or in Russia, the largest and most critical tea-consuming countries of Europe. An especially fine black tea is made at these Preanger tea-fabriks, and for this the green leaves are first exposed to the sun in wicker trays for wilting, then rolled by machinery to free the juices in the leaf-cells, and fermented in heaps for four or eight hours, until by their turning a dark reddish brown there is evidence that the rank theine, the active principle or stimulating alkaloid in the leaves, has been oxidized, and so modified into something less injurious to human nerves and the digestive system. The bruised red leaves are dried in a machine where hot blasts and revolving fans make quick, clean work of the “firing,” that perspiring coolies do by hand over charcoal pans in China and Japan. All the sifting, sorting, packing, and labeling, the pressing of the broken leaves and dust into bricks, go on as neatly, swiftly, and surely; and the cases are hauled away to the railway-station and shipped from Batavia to their special markets. The leaves to be made into green teas are given a first toasting, almost as they come in from the bushes, are rolled on great trays ranged on tables in an open court, and fired again, and more thoroughly, before packing. As the taste of the world’s tea-drinkers becomes more cultivated, green tea will lose favor, and the Java tea-fabriks will be employed in directly competing with the factories of India and Ceylon, from whose culture experiments they have profited, and whose ingenious machines they have so generally adopted for curing and preparing black teas. Often the profuse “flushing” of the tea-bushes forces the fabrik to run all night to dispose of the quantity of fresh leaves; and one gets an idea of the world’s increasing consumption of tea in this quarter of a century since Java, India, and Ceylon entered into competition in the tea-trade with China and Japan. Parakan Salak teas are advertised and sold in Shanghai and Yokohama, and the appeal to those great tea-marts is significant of a progressive spirit in Java trade, that is matched by the threat that petroleum from Java’s oil-wells will soon compete seriously with American and Russian oil.

The coffee harvest is a fixed event in the plantation’s calendar, and occurs regularly in April and May, at the close of the rainy season. Now that the finer Arabian shrub has been so largely replaced by the hardy Liberian tree, coffee-culture is a little less arduous than before. The berries are brought to the mill, husked by machinery, washed, dried on concrete platforms in the sun, sacked, and shipped to Batavia, and nothing more is heard of that crop until the next spring comes around. The trees are carefully tended and watched, of course, throughout the year, and scrutinized closely for any sign of scale or worm, bug or blight. The glowing red volcanic soil is always being weeded and raked and loosened, the trees trimmed, young plants from the great nursery of seedlings set out in place of the old trees, and the coffee area extended annually by clearings.

The Sundanese who live in their ornamental little fancy baskets of houses beneath Sinagar’s tall tamarinds and kanari-trees are much to be envied by their people. The great estate is a world of its own, an agricultural Arcadia, where life goes on so happily that it is most appropriate that they should have presented model Javanese village life at the Chicago Exposition in 1893. These little Sinagar villagers have their frequent passers on one side or the other of the demesne by turn, with theater and _wayang-wayang_, or puppet-shows, lasting far into the night. Professional raconteurs thrill them with classic tales of their glorious past, while musicians make sweet, sad melodies to rise from _gamelan_, or _gambang kayu_, from fiddle, drum, bowls, bells, and the sonorous _alang-alang_—a rude instrument of most ancient origin, made of five or eight graduated bamboo tubes, cut like organ-pipes, and hung loosely in a frame, which, shaken by a master hand, or swinging in the breeze from some tree-branch, produces the strangest, most weird and fascinating melodies in all the East.

The play of village life about Sinagar is so prettily picturesque, so well presented and carried out, that it seems only a theatrical representation—a Petit Trianon sort of affair at the least. The smiling little women, who rub and toss tea-leaves over the wilting-trays at the fabrik, seem only to be playing with the loose leaves like a larger sort of intelligent, careful children. In the same way the plucking in the tea-gardens and the march to the fabrik in long, single file, with bundles balanced on their heads, are mere kindergarten exercises to develop the muscles of the back and secure an erect and graceful carriage—the secret, perhaps, of their splendid bearing, although all Javanese walk as kings and queens are supposed to walk, as the result of not being hampered by useless garments, and thus having control of every member and muscle of the body from earliest years. The same supple ease and grace distinguish their manners too, and one young planter said: “After living a few years among these gentle, graceful, winning natives, you cannot know how Europe jarred upon me. All the hard, sad, scowling faces and the harsh, angry voices oppressed me and made me so homesick for Java that I was really glad to turn away from it. I never before was so aware of the poverty, misery, distress, and vice of Europe.”

Visitors to the Paris Exposition of 1889 and the Chicago Exposition of 1893 had a typical model Javanese village set before them, and all were unstinted in their praises of the _mise en scène_ and the human features of the exhibit. The Chicago village was peopled by families from the Sinagar and Parakan Salak estates, and, as a purely ethnological exhibit, was the one success of that kind among the many trifling side-shows that detracted from the character of the Midway Plaisance. The trip to America was the prize and reward allotted to the most industrious and deserving villagers, who with their properties and industrial accessories filled two sailing-ships from Batavia to Hong Kong, whence they took steamer to San Francisco and railway across the continent to Chicago. There was a large outlay required at the start, and the best workmen were away from the estates for a year; and between a dishonest shipping-agent at Batavia and the heavy commissions upon all receipts levied by the exposition’s managers at Chicago, and the free admissions which those same generous American managers bestowed so widely, the village did not nearly pay its current expenses, and the venture stands as an entire loss, or a gift to the American people from the two public-spirited Preanger planters who paid for it.

The good little Javanese who went to Chicago returned from their great outing as simple and unspoiled as before, settled down contentedly under their kanari-trees, and resumed their routine life in field and fabrik. And what tales they had to tell to open-mouthed villagers and neighbors, who sat around the traveled ones, to the neglect of wayang-wayang and provincial professional story-tellers, listening to their accounts of the very remarkable things on that other side of the world! For the first time ever in their lives these Javanese saw white men at work in the fields, drudging in city streets, and doing every kind of menial, coolie labor. They saw a few black men, blacker than Moormen, but they were great personages, wearing fine uniforms and having command of the railway-trains, and riding in the most magnificently gilded cars—individuals treated always with great respect, who came to the Midway Plaisance in rich clothing, with gold watch-chains, jeweled scarf-pins, and much loose money in their pockets—a superior and a moneyed, if not the ruling class, in that topsy-turvy country, America.

A striped cat of the common roof-and-fence variety was given to one of the village managers, and made the journey back to Java with the party. Everything else in Chicago had been paid for so dearly that this tabby could be fairly said to represent the entire profit and result of the Chicago village venture. The cat was named “Chicago,” and soon became the pet of the whole plantation, roaming freely everywhere, and feasting on small rice-mice and tropical birds. “Chicago” came to us on our arrival, rubbed in friendly fashion against one and another American knee, and purred loudly, as if recognizing us for compatriots. The morning we left Sinagar there was hubbub and running to and fro in the great quadrangle of the residence. “Chicago,” while walking the well-curb with gesticulating tail, had lost her balance, and with frightful cries and a splash ended her existence—by unpleasant coincidence, just as we were making our farewells to our kindly host. “In despair at being unable to return to America with you,” said one mourner, “she has thrown herself in the well. It is plainly suicide.” And this domestic tragedy saddened our leave-taking from those charming people, the fine flavor of whose hospitality, courtesy and kindliness took the edge from many of our disagreeable experiences in Java, and gave us pleasant memories with which to offset those of the other kind.

XII

ACROSS THE PREANGER REGENCIES

One may ride all day by train from Buitenzorg before reaching the limits of the Preanger regencies, where native princes still hold pretended sway; and it is a continuous landscape feast from the sunrise start to the sunset halt of the through-train. The railway line, after curving around the shoulder of Salak, runs through the vaunted hill-country, the region of the great tea, coffee, and kina estates; and from Soekaboemi to Bandong, the two great headquarters for planters, one perceives that the planter is paramount, the cultivator is king. The new cultures have not dispossessed the old, however, and the _sawas_, or flooded rice-fields, break the level of plain and valley floor with their myriad waving lines of division, and climb by terraces to the very hilltops—a system of cultivation and irrigation as old as the human race, and followed in these same valleys by these same Sundanese since the beginning of their recorded time. To them rice is a holy grain, the offspring of a god, and the gods’ best gift to man; a grain both cultivated and worshiped. It argues for the industry of a tropical race that they should grow this troublesome grain at all, the grain that demands more back-breaking toil and constant attention from planting to harvest-time than any other grain which grows. It would seem discouraging to rice-cultivation, too, when in old times the natives were taxed according to the area of their rice-lands only, and mulcted of a fifth of their rice when it was harvested—all in this happy land, where they might sit under the breadfruit- and banana-trees and doze at their ease, while those kindly fruits dropped in their laps. These picturesque rice-fields have won for Java the name of “the granary of the East,” and enabled it to export that grain in quantities, besides supporting its own great population, one of the densest in the world, and averaging four hundred and fifty inhabitants to each square mile. No fertilizer of any kind is applied to these irrigated rice-fields, save to burn over and plow under the rich stubble, after the _padi_, or ripe ears of grain, have been cut singly with a knife and borne away in miniature sheaves strung on carrying-poles across the peasants’ shoulders.

Beyond the region of the great plantations, where every hillside is cleared and planted up to the kina limit, and only the summits and steepest slopes are left to primeval jungle, there succeed great stretches of wild country, where remarkable engineering feats were required of the railway-builders. With two heavy engines the train climbs to Tjandjoer station, sixteen hundred feet above the sea; and there, if one has telegraphed the order ahead, he may lunch at ease in his compartment as the train goes on. He may draw from the three-storied lunch-basket handed in either a substantial riz tavel, consisting of a little of everything heaped upon a day’s ration of boiled rice, or a “tiffin,” whose _pièce de résistance_ is a huge _bifstek mit ard appelen_, that would satisfy the cravings of any three dragoons. Either feast is followed by bread or bananas, with a generous section of a cheese, with mangosteens or other fruits, and one feels that he has surely reached the land of plenty and solid, solid comforts, where fate cannot harm him—when all this may be handed in to fleeting tourists at a florin and a half apiece.

After this station of abundant rations, all signs of cultivation and occupancy disappear, and the station buildings and the endless lantana-hedges along the railway-track are the only signs of human habitation or energy in the wilderness of hills covered with alang-alang or bamboo-grass, and the coarse _glagah_ reeds which cattle will not touch. The banteng, the one-horned rhinoceros, and the tigers that used to roam these moors, fled when the shriek of the locomotive was heard in the cañons, and the sportsmen have to seek such big game in the jungles and grass-lands of the south coast. The streams that come cascading down from all these green heights have carved out some beautiful scenery, and the Tjitaroem River, foaming in sight for a while, disappears, runs through a mountain by a natural tunnel, and reappears in a deep gorge, of which one has an all-too-exciting view as the train crosses on a spidery viaduct high in air.

A great, fertile green plain surrounds the native capital of Bandong, and on its confines rises the Tangkoeban-Praoe, the Ararat of the natives, who see in its square summit-lines the reversed _praoe_ in which their ancestors survived the flood, and, turning their boat over carefully to dry, descended, as the waters fell, to people the Malay universe. One may ascend the butte-like peak, passing up first through a belt of old coffee-plantations, whose product ranked first in the good old days before the blight, and by the villa and experimental grounds of Herr Junghuhn, the botanist, who first succeeded with the kina-culture and introduced so many other economic plants and trees to the island. At Lembang, ten miles from Bandong, the mountain-climber gives up his pony or carriage, and is carried in a _djoelie_, or sedan-chair, through a magnificent jungle to the edge of the open crater, where bubbling sulphur-pools in an ashy floor, and a wide view over the fertile valley, are sufficient reward for all exertion on the climber’s part.

Bandong itself, as the capital of the Preanger regencies and the home of the native regent and the Dutch resident, is a place of great importance to both races. The regent, as a mere puppet and pensioner of the colonial government, supports the shadow of his old state and splendor in a large _dalem_, or palace, in the heart of the town. He has also a suburban villa in European style, to which are attached large racing-stables, and this progressive regent is a regular cup-winner at the Buitenzorg and Bandong races at every summer, or dry-season, meet, when the “good monsoon” inspires all the islanders to their greatest social exertions.

As one gets farther into the center of the island, native life becomes more picturesque, and every station platform offers one more diverting study. There is more color in costume, and the wayside and platform groups are kaleidoscopic with their gay sarongs and kerchiefs. More men are seen wearing the military jacket of rank with the native sarong, and the boat-handled kris thrust in the belt at the back. The little children, who ride astride of their mothers’ hips and cling and cuddle so confidingly in the slandang’s folds, seem of finer mold, and their deep, dark Hindu eyes tell of a different strain in the Malay blood than we had seen on the coast—these the Javanese, as distinguished from the Sundanese. The clumsy buffalo, or water-ox, is everywhere, plowing the fields, wallowing in mud, or browsing the stubble patch after the gleaners, always with a patient, statuesque, nude little brown boy on his blue-gray back, the fine, polished skins of these small herders glowing in the sun as if they were inanimate bronze figurines.

The train climbs very slowly from Bandong to Kalaidon Pass, and, after toiling with double engines up the steep grades, it rests at a level, and there bursts upon one the view of the plain of Leles—the fairest of all tropical landscapes, a vision of an ideal promised land, and such a dream of beauty that even the leaden blue clouds of a rainy afternoon could not dim its surpassing loveliness. The railway follows a long shelf hewn high on the mountain wall, that encircles an oval plain set with two conical mountains that rise more than two thousand feet above the level of this plain of Leles, itself two thousand feet above the level of the sea. The finely wrought surface of the plain—networked with the living green dikes and terraces of rice-fields, which, flooded, gleam and glitter in the fitful sun-rays, or, sown and harvested, glow with a mosaic of green and gold—is one exquisite symphony in color, an arrangement in greens that holds one breathless with delight. All the golden greens of rice seed-beds, the intense, vivid greens of young rice transplanted, the opaque and darker greens of advanced crops, and the rich tones of stubble are relieved by the clumps and masses of palms and fine-leaved trees, which, like islands or mere ornamental bits of shrubbery, are disposed with the most admirable effect to be attained by landscape art. Each of these tufted clumps of trees, foregrounded with broad, translucent banana-leaves, declares the presence of toy villages, where the tillers of the plain, the landscape-farmers, and the artist-artisans have woven and set up their pretty basketry homes. A masterpiece, a central ornament or jewel, to which the valley is but the fretted and appropriate setting, a very altar of agriculture, a colossal symbol and emblem of abundance, is the conical Goenong-Kalaidon, a mountain which rises three thousand feet from the level of the plain, and is terraced all the way from base to summit with narrow ribbons of rice-fields—the whole mountain mass etched with myriad fine green lines of verdure, wrinkled around and around with the curving parapets and tiny terraces that retain the flooded hanging gardens. Beyond this amazing piece of agricultural sculpture stands Goenong-Haroeman, a more perfect pyramid, a still rarer trophy of the landscape-farmer’s art, even more finely carved in the living green lines of ancient terrace-culture. The rush of the thousand rills, dropping from one tiny terrace to another, fills the air with a peculiar singing undertone, an eerie accompaniment that adds the last magic touch to the fascination of the plain of Leles. Hardly the miles of sculptured bas-reliefs on Boro Boedor and Brambanam temple walls make them any more impressive as monuments and records of human toil than these great green pyramids of Kalaidon and Haroeman, on which human labor has been lavished for all the seasons of uncounted generations—the ascending lines, the successive steps of the great green staircases of rice-terraces, recording ages of toil as plainly as the rings within a tree-trunk declare its successive years of growth.

The railway, dipping nearly to the level of the plain as it describes a great curve around the gloriously green Kalaidon, again ascends along the side of the mountain wall, loops itself around the Haroeman pyramid, and halts at the station of Leles. From that point one has a backward view over the enchanting picture (a line of white bridges and culverts marking the path of the railway along the mountain-side) and he looks directly across at the soft green slopes of Haroeman, which faces him—that vast green dome or pyramid, which is a little world in itself, with uncounted villages nestling under clumps of palm-trees that break the lines of singing terraces, and those peasants of the hanging gardens looking down upon the most pleasing prospect, the most beautiful landscape in all Java, which should be world-famous, and whose charm it is as impossible to exaggerate as to describe.

The sesquipedalian names of the railway-stations throughout the Preanger regencies, are something to fill a traveler’s mind between halts, and almost explain why the locomotives not only toot and whistle nearly all the time they are in motion, but stand on the track before station sign-boards and shriek for minutes at a time, like machines demented. Radjamendala is an easy arrangement in station names for the early hours of the trip, and all that family of names—Tjitjoeroek, Tjibeber, Tjirandjang, Tjipenjeum, Tjitjalenka, and also Tagoogapoe—will slip from the tongue after a few trials; but when one strains his eyes toward the limits of the plain of Leles, he may almost see the houses of Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan. People actually live there and pay taxes, and it is my one regret that I did not leave the train, drive over, and have some letters postmarked with that astonishing aggregation of sound-symbols. Only actual sight, too, could altogether convince one, that one small village of metal-workers could really support so much nomenclature together with any amount of profitable trade. In the intervals of practising the pronunciation of that particular geographic name, the artisans of Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan do hammer out serviceable gongs, bowls, and household utensils of brass and copper. In earlier times Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan was the Toledo of the isles, and the kris-blades forged there had finer edge than those from any other place in the archipelago. In these railroad and tramp-steamer days of universal, wholesale trade rivalry, the blade of the noble kris more often comes from abroad, and the chilled edges from Birmingham or those made in Germany have displaced the blades made at the edge of the plain of Leles, and the glory of Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan has departed.

XIII

“TO TISSAK MALAYA!”

The sun fell at six o’clock, and in the fast-gathering twilight of the tropics the train shrieked past Tjihondje and Radjapolah, stopped but a minute at Indihiang, and panted into Tissak Malaya like an affrighted creature, to put up for the night. We were whirled through avenues of pitch-darkness, with illuminated porticos gleaming through splendid shrubberies, to the _passagrahan_, or government rest-house. At first we thought the Parthenon had been restored and whitened, and leased to some colonial landlord, or at least that we had come to the deserted summer palace of some great sovereign, so lofty were the columns, so enormous the shining white portico before which the sadoes halted. Quite feudal and noble we felt ourselves, too, when the sadoe-drivers crouched on their heels in that abject position of the dodok, or squatting obeisance, and when they raised the coins to their foreheads in a reverent _simbah_, or worshipful thanksgiving. Truly we were reaching the heart of a strange country, and experiences were thickening!

The passagrahan was an object for sight-seers by itself. The great open space under the portico was the usual living-room, with huge tables, reading-lamps, and lounging- and arm-chairs fitted for a giant’s ease. A grand hallway running straight through the center of the building held the scattered and massive furniture of a banquet-hall. Bedrooms with latticed doors opened from either side of this noble hall, the least of these chambers twenty feet square, with ceilings twenty feet high; while the beds, measuring seven by nine feet, suggested Brobdingnagian nightmares to match.

At nine o’clock we followed a silent, beckoning Malay with a lantern off into pitch-darkness, down a deserted street, around a hedge, to a smaller white portico with lamps and rocking-chairs and center-tables. We were dazed as we came suddenly into the glare of lights; and the other guests at the _table d’hôte_ of the little hotel viewed us as they would have viewed sudden arrivals by balloon.

“From America! To Tissak Malaya!” they all exclaimed, and we almost apologized for having come so far. There was an amiable and charming young Dutch woman in the company, who, speaking English, benefited all her compatriots with the details of our present itinerary, our past lives and mutual relationships, after each little conversational turn she took with us.

Having commanded a sunrise breakfast for the next morning, we followed the lantern and the silent Malay back through blackness to our illuminated Parthenon of a passagrahan, and had entomological excitement and entertainment for an hour, while all the strange flying things filled the air and strewed the table beneath the lamps. The usual lizards chuck-chucked and called for “Becky” in the shadows, and thin wraiths of lizards ran over the great columns and walls; but a house-front that was not decorated with lizards would be the strangest night sight in Java. When we had laid ourselves out on the state catafalques in the great bedrooms, stealthy whisperings and rustlings of palm-trees beyond the latticed windows, other strange sounds, and startled bird-calls throughout the night suggested the great snakes we had expected to encounter daily and nightly in Java. The tiny light floating in a tumbler of cocoanut-oil threw weird shadows over the walls, and within the bed-curtains one had space to dance a quadrille or arrange a whole set of ordinary bedroom furniture, while the open construction of the upper partition-walls let one converse at will with the occupant of the farthest apartment.

In the first clear light of the dewy morning we saw that a beautiful garden surrounded the passagrahan, and our vast Parthenon of the darkness did not seem so colossal when seen in the shadow of the magnificent kanari-trees that shaded the street before it. While lost in admiration of this splendid aisle of shade-trees, I saw a solitary pedestrian coming down the green avenue, just the pygmy touch of human life needed to complete the picture and give one measure for the soaring tree-trunks and vast canopy of leaves. The slender figure, advancing with the splendid, slow stride of these people, was visible now in a glorifying shaft of earliest, level yellow sunlight, and then almost invisible against the tall hibiscus-hedges or the green shadows of tree-trunks. A nearer flash of sunlight gilded a tray he was carrying—a tray furnished with three small cups of coffee and a plate with six thin wafers of toast, which, well cooled by the long promenade in the fresh air of the morning, constituted the breakfast of three able-bodied travelers, who were to pass the rest of the day on the train, with only opportunity for a sandwich lunch before the evening’s nine-o’clock dinner. We sent back those thimble cups, and they were refilled with the same lukewarm, indefinite, muddy gray fluid; but finally, by personal exertions and a hasty trip down the magnificent avenue, some solid additions were secured to the usual scant, skeleton, impressionist breakfast of the country—some marmalade, some eggs, and a bit of the cold blue meat of the useful buffalo. Everywhere in Java one’s first, best instincts and finer feelings of the day are hurt and the appetite affronted by just such early morning incidents; protest and prevision are alike useless, and travel on the island is beset with unnecessary hardships.

The semi-weekly passer of Tissak Malaya was then beginning in a park, or open market-place, in front of the passagrahan, and picturesque processions of venders and buyers came straggling down the arched avenues, and filled the shady quadrangle with a holiday hum. There were double panoramas and stages of living pictures along each path in the passer encampment, that grew like magic; and the glowing colors of the fruit-, the flower-, and the pepper-markets, the bright sarongs and turbans, and, above all, the cheerful chatter, were quite inspiring. We bought everywhere—fruits, and a queer three-story basket to hold them; yards of jasmine garlands, bunches of roses, and great double handfuls of the green, lindenish ylang-ylang flowers, pinned with a thorn in a plantain-leaf cornucopia—this last lot of perpetual fragrance for three gulden cents only. Odd bottles of home-made attars of rose and jasmine were sold as cheaply, and gums in straw cases, ready for burning. There was a dry-goods district, where booths were piled high and hung round with Cheribon and other gay sarongs of Middle Java, slandangs and kerchiefs of strongest colors and intricate borderings. We were distracted with the wide choice offered, but could not rouse the phlegmatic dealers to any eagerness or excitement in bargaining; the whole overcharge, reductions, and slow-descending fall in prices proceeding, on the part of the dealers, with a well-assumed indifference, an uninterrupted betel-chewing, a bored and lethargic manner that wore one sadly. A long row of country tailors, thirty or forty of them in a line, sat like so many sparrows around the edges of the passer in the comforting shade of the kanari-trees. All were spectacled like owls, and sat cross-legged before their little American sewing-machines. The customers brought their cloth, the tailors measured them with the eye, and in no time at all the machines were humming up and down the seams of the jackets, that needed no fitting nor trying on, and were made while the candidates sat and smoked and chatted with the sartorial artists. From the chatter-chatter along this tailors’ row one might conclude that what the barbers are to Seville, as purveyors of news, the tailors are to Tissak Malaya.

All too soon we had to tear ourselves away from the fascinating passer, and, loaded down with our mixed marketing, fly by sadoe to the station at the far end of town. We saw then the magnificent aisle of kanari-trees we had passed through in darkness the night before—an avenue more fitted for an emperor’s triumphal procession than for our queer little two-wheeled carts, drawn each by a mite of a pony, that was all but lifted from the ground by the shafts when I stepped on the after foot-board untimely, the driver dodoking like a hop-toad on the ground in respectful humility. The natives were streaming down the great _allée_ and in from all the side streets and by-paths toward the passer, and we half wished we might miss the train when we realized what a spectacle that Tissak Malaya passer was about to be.

In Middle Java, where the railway descends from the Preanger hills to the _terra ingrata’s_ succession of jungle and swamp at the coast-level, one experiences the same dull, heavy, sickening, depressing heat as in Batavia. After the clear, fresh, mildly cool air, the eternal southern-California climate of the hills, this sweltering atmosphere gave full suggestion of the tropics’ deadly perils. Hour after hour the train followed a raised embankment across an endless swamp, the brilliantly flowered lantana-hedges still accompanying the tracks, and a dense forest wall, tangled and matted together with ratans and other creepers, shutting off the view on either side. The malaria and the deadly fever-germs that haunt this region were almost visible, so dense was the air. While this section of the railway was building, even the native workmen were carried back each day to sleep in camps in safer neighborhoods. No white man could work, nor remain there directing work, and Chinese, who are germ-, bacillus-, microbe-, and miasma-proof in every climate, superintended work between the flying visits of European engineers. Beside these tangled and noisome swamps there are quicksand regions, into which car-loads of solid materials were dumped for week after week, and where the track is still always being raised and rebuilt, and the floating earth-crust trembles with each passing train.

As we coursed along past those miles of rankest vegetation, not a waft of perfume reached us, nor did any mass of color or cloak of blossoms delight the eye—a green monotony of uninteresting vegetation, save for the ratan-palms which decorated every tree with their beautiful pinnate leaves. There was one luxuriant vine, half covering a tall tree, which bore clusters of large white blossoms and pendent red berries; but that was the one ideal vine of the imagined tropical jungle’s mad riot of stranger and more gorgeous things than bougainvillea. No clouds, cascades, or festoons of gorgeous flowers, no waves of overpowering perfume, no masses of orchids, rewarded eager scrutiny; no birds of brilliant plumage flashed across the jungle’s front; no splendidly striped tigers licked their chops and snarled in the jungle’s shade; no rhinoceros snorted at the iron horse; and not a serpent raised a hissing head, slid away through dank grass, or looped itself from tree-top to tree-top in proper tropical fashion, as we steamed across the deadly, uninhabitable _terra ingrata_. Nor had even the first construction gangs of railway-builders met with any such sensational incidents, so the chief engineer of the railways afterward informed us. Seeing our disappointment and dejection, this obliging official racked his memory and at last recalled that he himself had once seen a wild peacock walking the track in the _terra ingrata_.

“And yes! so there was. I remember now that one of our engineers, who was running a special locomotive along there, did see a tiger sitting on the track. He whistled loudly, and the tiger trotted up the track until he found the engine gaining on him, and then the royal beast bounded off into the jungle, snarling and spitting like an angry cat.”

“But there are great snakes in the swamps surely? You must run over them often?” we persisted.

“Doubtless; but we rarely see snakes here in Java. There are many in Borneo, Sumatra, and the other islands that are so wild yet. But you will see them all at the zoölogical garden in Batavia.”

Closer questioning could only elicit the statement that, while all the terrible Java snake-stories we had read might be true, we had no need in this modern day to shake the pillows gently each night and morning to dislodge the sleeping cobra or python; nor to draw the bed-curtains closely at sounds like dry leaves blowing over the floor; nor to regard the harmless hop-toad as the certain pilot and advance-guard of a snake. I almost began to doubt, to discredit that standard favorite, that typical tropical snake-story of the man who fell asleep on the edge of a Java sawa, or rice-field, and waking with a sensation of great dampness around one knee, found that a huge but harmless sawa snake had swallowed his leg to that point. I was ready even to hear that there never had been any skeleton-strewn, deadly upas-tree valley on Papandayang’s slope, since every expected sensation had fled my approach—had removed to Borneo, to Sulu, to more remote and impossible islands.

All travel, though, is only such disillusionment and disappointment, and he who would believe and enjoy blood-curdling things should stay by his own fireside. The disillusioned traveler has but to choose, on his return, whether he will truthfully dispel others’ fondest illusions, or, joining that nameless club of so many returned travelers, continue to clothe the more distant parts of the world with the glamour of imagination.

XIV

PRISONERS OF STATE AT BORO BOEDOR

The fact is not generally appreciated that there are ruins of Buddhist and Brahmanic temples in Middle Java surpassing in extent and magnificence anything to be seen in Egypt or India. There, in the heart of the steaming tropics, in that summer land of the world below the equator, on an island where volcanoes cluster more thickly and vegetation is richer than in any other region of the globe, where earthquakes continually rock and shatter, and where deluges descend during the rainy half of the year, remains nearly intact the temple of Boro Boedor, covering almost the same area as the Great Pyramid of Gizeh. It is ornamented with hundreds of life-size statues and miles of bas-reliefs presenting the highest examples of Greco-Buddhist art—a sculptured record of all the arts and industries, the culture and civilization, of the golden age of Java, of the life of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries in all the farther East—a record that is not written in hieroglyphs, but in plainest pictures carved by sculptor’s chisel. That solid pyramidal temple, rising in magnificent sculptured terraces, that was built without mortar or cement, without column or pillar or arch, is one of the surviving wonders of the world. On the spot it seems a veritable miracle.

It is one of the romances of Buddhism that this splendid monument of human industry, abandoned by its worshipers as one cult succeeded another, and forgotten after the Mohammedan conquest imposed yet another creed upon the people, should have disappeared completely, hidden in the tangle of tropical vegetation, a formless, nameless, unsuspected mound in the heart of a jungle, lost in every way, with no part in the life of the land, finally to be uncovered to the sight of the nineteenth century. When Sir Stamford Raffles came as British governor of Java in 1811, the Dutch had possessed the island for two centuries, but in their greed for gulden had paid no heed to the people, and knew nothing of that earlier time before the conquest when the island was all one empire, the arts and literature flourished, and, inspired by Hindu influence, Javanese civilization reached its highest estate; nor did the Hollander allow any alien investigators to peer about this profitable plantation. Sir Stamford Raffles, in his five years of control, did a century’s work. He explored, excavated, and surveyed the ruined temples, and searching the voluminous archives of the native princes, drew from the mass of romantic legends and poetic records the first “History of Java.” His officers copied and deciphered inscriptions, and gradually worked out all the history of the great ruins, and determined the date of their erection at the beginning of the seventh century.

At this time Sir Stamford wrote: “The interior of Java contains temples that, as works of labor and art, dwarf to nothing all our wonder and admiration at the pyramids of Egypt.” Then Alfred Russel Wallace said: “The number and beauty of the architectural remains in Java ... far surpass those of Central America, and perhaps even those of India.” And of Boro Boedor he wrote: “The amount of human labor and skill expended on the Great Pyramid of Egypt sinks into insignificance when compared with that required to complete this sculptured hill-temple in the interior of Java.” Herr Brumund called Boro Boedor “the most remarkable and magnificent monument Buddhism has ever erected”; and Fergusson, in his “History of Indian and Eastern Architecture,” finds in that edifice the highest development of Buddhist art, an epitome of all its arts and ritual, and the culmination of the architectural style which, originating at Barhut a thousand years before, had begun to decay in India at the time the colonists were erecting this masterpiece of the ages in the heart of Java.

There is yet no Baedeker, or Murray, or local red book to lead one to and about the temples and present every dry detail of fact. The references to the ruins in books of travel and general literature are vague or cautious generalities, absurd misstatements, or guesses. In the great libraries of the world’s capitals the archæologists’ reports are rare, and on the island only Dutch editions are available. Fergusson is one’s only portable guide and aid to understanding; but as he never visited the stupendous ruin, his is but a formal record of the main facts. Dutch scientists criticize Sir Stamford Raffles’s work and all that Von Humboldt and Lassen deduced from it concerning Javanese religion and mythology. They entirely put aside all native histories and traditions, searching and accepting only Chinese and Arabic works, and making a close study of ancient inscriptions, upon the rendering of which few of the Dutch savants agree.

We had applied for new toelatings-kaarten, or admission tickets, to the interior of the island; and as they had not arrived by the afternoon before we intended leaving Buitenzorg, we drove to the assistant resident’s to inquire. “You shall have them this evening,” said that gracious and courtly official, standing beside the huge carriage; “but as it is only the merest matter of form, go right along in the morning, ladies, anyhow, and I shall send the papers after you by post. To Tissak Malaya? No? Well, then, to Djokjakarta.”

Upon that advice we proceeded on our journey, crossed the Preangers, saw the plain of Leles, and made our brief visit to Tissak Malaya. We rode for a long, hot day across the swamps and low-lying jungles of the _terra ingrata_ of Middle Java, and just before sunset we reached Djokjakarta, a provincial capital, where the native sultan resides in great state, but poor imitation of independent rulership. We had tea served us under the great portico of the Hotel Toegoe, our every movement followed by the uncivilized piazza stare of some Dutch residents—that gaze of the summer hotel that has no geographic or racial limit, which even occurs on the American littoral, and in Java has a fixedness born of stolid Dutch ancestry, and an intensity due to the tropical fervor of the thermometer, that put it far beyond all other species of unwinking scrutiny. The bovine, ruminant gaze of those stout women, continued and continued past all provincial-colonial curiosity as to the cut and stuff of our gowns, drove us to the garden paths, already twinkling with fireflies. The landlord joined us there, and strolled with us out to the street and along a line of torch-lighted booths and shops, where native products and native life were most picturesquely presented. Our landlord made himself very agreeable in explaining it all, walked on as far as the gates of the sultan’s palace, plying us with the most point-blank personal questions, our whence, whither, why, for how long, etc.; but we did not mind that in a land of stares and interrogative English. He showed us the carriage we could have for the next day’s twenty-five-mile drive to Boro Boedor—“if you go,” with quite unnecessary emphasis on the phrase of doubt. He finally brought us back to the portico, disappeared for a time, and returning, said: “Ladies, the assistant resident wishes to meet you. Will you come this way?” And the courteous one conducted us through lofty halls and porticos to his own half-office parlor, all of us pleased at this unexpected attention from the provincial official.