Chapter XXIII: Garoet and Papandayang 312 (6)

A turn in the road, a break in the jungle at one side of the highway, disclosed three pyramidal temples in a vast square court, with the ruins of three corresponding temples, all fallen to rubbish-heaps, ranged in line facing them. These ruined piles alone remain of the group of twenty temples dedicated to Loro Jonggran, “the pure, exalted virgin” of the Javanese, worshiped in India as Deva, Durga, Kali, or Parvati. Even the three temples that are best preserved have crumbled at their summits and lost their angles; but enough remains for the eye to reconstruct the symmetrical piles and carry out the once perfect lines. The structures rise in terraces and broad courses, tapering like the Dravidian gopuras of southern India, and covered, like them, with images, bas-reliefs, and ornamental carvings. Grand staircases ascend from each of the four sides to square chapels or alcoves half-way up in the solid body of the pyramid, and each chapel once contained an image. The main or central temple now remaining still enshrines in its west or farther chamber an image of Ganesha, the hideous elephant-headed son of Siva and Parvati. Broken images of Siva and Parvati were found in the south and north chambers, and Brahma is supposed to have been enshrined in the great east chapel. An adjoining temple holds an exquisite statue of Loro Jonggran, “the maiden with the beautiful hips,” who stands, graceful and serene, in a roofless chamber, smiling down like a true goddess upon those who toil up the long carved staircase of approach. Her particular temple is adorned with bas-reliefs, where the _gopis_, or houris, who accompany Krishna, the dancing youth, are grouped in graceful poses. One of these bas-reliefs, commonly known as the “Three Graces” has great fame, and one and two thousand gulden have been vainly offered by British travelers anxious to transport it to London. Another temple contains an image of Nandi, the sacred bull; but the other shrines have fallen in shapeless ruins, and nothing of their altar-images is to be gathered from the rubbish-heaps that cover the vast temple court.

The pity of all this ruined splendor moves one strongly, and one deplores the impossibility of reconstructing, even on paper, the whole magnificent place of worship. The wealth of ornament makes all other temple buildings seem plain and featureless, and one set of bas-reliefs just rescued and set up in line, depicting scenes from the Ramayan, would be treasure enough for an art museum. On this long series of carved stones disconsolate Rama is shown searching everywhere for Sita, his stolen wife, until the king of the monkeys, espousing his cause, leads him to success. The story is wonderfully told in stone, the chisel as eloquent as the pen, and everywhere one reads as plainly the sacred tales and ancient records. The graceful figures and their draperies tell of Greek influences acting upon those northern Hindus who brought the religion to the island; and the beautifully conventionalized trees and fruits and flowers, the mythical animals and gaping monsters along the staircases, the masks, arabesques, bands, scrolls, ornamental keystones, and all the elaborate symbols and attributes of deities lavished on this group of temples, constitute a whole gallery of Hindu art, and a complete grammar of its ornament.

These temples, it is believed, were erected at the beginning of the ninth century, and fixed dates in the eleventh century are also claimed; but at least they were built soon after the completion of Boro Boedor, when the people were turning back to Brahmanism, and Hindu arts had reached their richest development at this great capital of Mendang Kumulan, since called Brambanam. The fame of the Javanese empire had then gone abroad, and greed for its riches led Khublai Khan to despatch an armada to its shores; but his Chinese commander, Mengki, returned without ships or men, his face branded like a thief’s. Another expedition was defeated, with a loss of three thousand men, and the Great Khan’s death put an end to further schemes of conquest. Marco Polo, windbound for five months on Sumatra, then Odoric, and the Arab Ibn Batuta, who visited Java in the fourteenth century, continued to celebrate the riches and splendor of this empire, and invite its conquest, until Arab priests and traders began its overthrow. Its princes were conquered, its splendid capitals destroyed, and with the conversion of the people to Mohammedanism the shrines were deserted, soon overgrown, and became hillocks of vegetation. The waringen-tree’s fibrous roots, penetrating the crevices of stones that were only fitted together, and not cemented, have done most damage, and the shrines of Loro Jonggran went fast to utter ruin.

A Dutch engineer, seeking to build a fort in the disturbed country between the two native capitals, first reported these Brambanam temples in 1797; but it was left for Sir Stamford Raffles to have them excavated, surveyed, sketched, and reported upon. Then for eighty years—until the year of our visit—they had again been forgotten, and the jungle claimed and covered the beautiful monuments. The Archæological Society of Djokja had just begun the work of clearing off and rescuing the wonderful carvings, and groups of coolies were resting in the shade, while others pottered around, setting bas-reliefs in regular lines around the rubbish-heaps they had been taken from. This salvage corps chattered and watched us with well-contained interest, as we, literally at the very boiling-point of enthusiasm, at three o’clock of an equatorial afternoon, toiled up the magnificent staircases, peered into each shrine, made the rounds of the sculptured terraces, or processional paths, and explored the whole splendid trio of temples, without pause.

Herr Perk, the director of the works, and curator of this monumental museum, roused by the rumors of foreign invasion, welcomed us to the grateful shade of his temporary quarters beside the temple, and hospitably shared his afternoon tea and bananas with us, there surrounded by a small museum of the finest and most delicately carved fragments, that could not safely be left unprotected. While we cooled, and rested from the long walk and the eager scramble over the ruins, we enjoyed too the series of Cephas’s photographs made for the Djokja Society, and in them had evidence how the insidious roots of the graceful waringen-trees had split and scattered the fitted stones as thoroughly as an earthquake; yet each waringen-gripped ruin, the clustered roots streaming, as if once liquid, over angles and carvings, was so picturesque that we half regretted the entire uprooting of these lovely trees.

When the director was called away to his workmen, we bade our guiding Mohammedan lead the way to Chandi Sewou, the “Thousand Temples,” or great Buddhist shrine of the ancient capital. “Oh,” he cried, “it is far, far from here—an hour to walk. You must go to Chandi Sewou in a boat. The water is up to here,” touching his waist, “and there are many, many snakes.” Distrusting, we made him lead on in the direction of Chandi Sewou; perhaps we might get at least a distant view. When we had walked the length of a city block down a shady road, with carved fragments and overgrown stones scattered along the way and through the young jungle at one side, we turned a corner, walked another block, and stood between the giant images that guard the entrance of Chandi Sewou’s great quadrangle.

The “Thousand Temples” were really but two hundred and thirty-six temples, built in five quadrilateral lines around a central cruciform temple, the whole walled inclosure measuring five hundred feet either way. Many of these lesser shrines—mere confessional boxes in size—are now ruined or sunk entirely in the level turf that covers the whole quadrangle, and others are picturesque, vine-wreathed masses, looking most like the standing chimneys of a burnt house. This Buddhist sanctuary of the eleventh century has almost the same general plan as Boro Boedor, but a Boro Boedor spread out and built all on the one level. The five lines of temples, with broad processional paths between them, correspond to the five square terraces of Boro Boedor; and the six superior chapels correspond to the circles of latticed dagobas near Boro Boeder’s summit. The empty central shrine at Chandi Sewou has crumbled to a heap of stones, with only its four stepped-arch entrance-doors distinct; and the smaller temples, each of them eleven feet square and eighteen feet high, with inner walls covered with bas-reliefs, are empty as well. When the British officers surveyed Chandi Sewou, five of the chapels contained cross-legged images seated on lotus pedestals—either Buddha, or the _tirthankars_, or Jain saints; but even those headless and mutilated statues are missing now. Every evidence could be had of wilful destruction of the group of shrines, and the same mysterious well-hole was found beneath the pedestal of the image in each chapel—whether as receptacle for the ashes of priests and princes; a place for the safe keeping of temple treasures; as an empty survival of the form of the earliest tree-temples, when the mystery of animate nature commanded man’s worship; or, as M. de Charnay suggests, the orifice from which proceeded the voice of the concealed priest who served as oracle.

With these Brambanam temples, when Sivaism or Jainism had succeeded Buddhism, and even before Mohammedanism came, the decadence of arts and letters began. The Arab conquest made it complete, and the art of architecture died entirely, no structures since that time redeeming the people and religion which in India and Spain have left such monuments of beauty.

From Sir Stamford Raffles’s “History of Java.”]

The ruins of the “Thousand Temples” are more lonely and deserted in their grassy, weed-grown quadrangle, more forlorn in their abandonment, than any other of the splendid relics of Java’s past religions. The glorious company of saintly images are vanished past tracing, and the rows of little sentry-box chapels give a different impression from the soaring pyramids of solid stone, with their hundreds of statues and figures and the wealth of sculptured ornament, found elsewhere. The vast level of the plain around it is a lake or swamp in the rainy season, and the damp little chapels, with their rubbish-heaps in dark corners and the weed-grown well-hole, furnish ideal homes for snakes. As our Mohammedan had suggested snakes, we imagined them everywhere, stepping carefully, throwing stones ahead of us, and thrusting our umbrellas noisily into each chapel before we ventured within; but the long-anticipated, always expected great snake did not materialize to give appropriate incident to a visit to such complete ruins. Only one small wisp of a lizard gave the least starting-point for a really thrilling traveler’s tale. The only other moving object in sight at Chandi Sewou was a little girl, with a smaller sister astride of her hip, who followed us timidly and sat for a time resting on the knee of one of the hideous gate guardians—one of the Gog and Magog stone monsters, who, although kneeling, is seven feet in height, and who, with a club in his right hand, a snake wound around his left arm, and a ferocious countenance, should frighten any child into spasms rather than invite familiarity.

Herr Perk pointed out to us, on the common between the two great temples, a formless green mound which he would excavate the following week, and showed us also the Chandi Lompang, a temple cleared off eighty years ago, but covered with a tangle of underbrush and a few tall trees—a sufficient illustration of what all the Loro Jonggran temples had been when the Djokja Society began its work of rescue and preservation. The British engineers could see in 1812 that Chandi Lompang had been a central shrine surrounded by fourteen smaller temples, whose carved stones have long been scattered to fence fields and furnish foundation-stones for the neighborhood. It was hoped that the kind mantle of vegetation had preserved a series of bas-reliefs of Krishna and the lovely gopis, wrought with an art equal to that employed by the sculptors of the “Three Graces” at Loro Jonggran which the British surveyors uncovered. Every one must rejoice that a period of enlightenment has at last come to the colony, and that steps are being taken to care for the antiquities of the island.

There are other regions of extensive temple ruins in Java, but none where the remains of the earlier civilization are so well preserved, the buildings of such extent and magnificence, their cults and their records so well known, as at Boro Boedor and Brambanam. The extensive ruins of the Singa Sari temples, four miles from Malang, near the southeastern end of the island, are scattered all through a teak and waringen forest, half sunk and overgrown with centuries of vegetation. Images of Ganesha, and a colossal Nandi, or sacred bull of Siva, with other Brahmanic deities, remain in sight; and inscriptions found there prove that the Singa Sari temples were built at about the same time as the Loro Jonggran temples at Brambanam. The mutilation and signs of wanton destruction of the recha suggest that it was not a peaceful conversion from Brahmanism to Mohammedanism in that kingdom either.

On the Dieng plateau, southwest of Samarang, and not far from Boro Boedor, there are ruins of more than four hundred temples, and the traces of a city greater than any now existing on the island. This region has received comparatively little attention from archæologists, although it has yielded rich treasures in gold, silver, and bronze objects, a tithe of which are preserved in the museum of the Batavian Society. For years the Dieng villagers paid their taxes in rough ingots of gold melted from statuettes and ornaments found on the old temple sites, and more than three thousand florins a year were sometimes paid in such bullion. The Goenoeng Praoe, a mountain whose summit-lines resemble an inverted praoe, or boat, is the fabled home of the gods; and the whole sacred height was once built over with temples, staircases of a thousand steps, great terraces, and embankment walls, now nearly lost in vegetation, and wrecked by the earthquakes of that very active volcanic region. These Dieng temples appear to have been solid structures, whose general form and ornamentation so resemble the ruins in Yucatan and the other states of Central America that archæologists still revolve the puzzle of them, and hazard no conjectures as to the worshipers and their form of worship, save that the rites or sacrifices were very evidently conducted on the open summits or temple-tops. I could not obtain views of these ruined pyramid temples from any of the Batavia photographers, to satisfy me as to their exact lines even in decay. There are other old Siva temples in that region furtively worshiped still, and the “Valley of Death,” where the fabled upas grew, was long believed to exist in that region, where the cult of the destroyer was observed.

M. de Charnay did not visit these pyramid temples of the Dieng plateau; but after seeing the temple of Boro Boedor, and those at Brambanam, he summed up the resemblances of the Buddhist and Brahmanic temples of Java to those at Palenque and in Yucatan as consisting: in the same order of gross idols; the pyramid form of temple, with staircases, like those of Palenque and Yucatan; the small chapels or oratories, with subterranean vaults beneath the idols; the same interior construction of temples; the stepped arches; the details of ornamentation, terraces, and esplanades, as in Mexico and Yucatan; and the localization of temples in religious centers far from cities, forming places of pilgrimage, as at Palenque, Chichen-Itza, and, in a later time, at Cozumel.[5]

XVIII

SOLO: THE CITY OF THE SUSUNHAN

As the two native states of Middle Java, the _Vorstenlanden_, or “Lands of the Princes,” were last to be brought under Dutch rule, Djokjakarta and Soerakarta are the capitals and head centers of native supremacy, where most of Javanese life remains unchanged. The Sultan of Djokja, and the so-called emperor, or _susunhan_, of Solo, were last to yield to over-sea usurpers, and, as tributary princes enjoying a “protected and controlled independence,” accept an “advisory elder brother,” in the person of a Dutch resident, to sit at their sovereign elbows and by “suggestions” rule their territories for the greater good of the natives and the Holland exchequer. All the region around Djokja and Solo is classic ground, and the oldest Javanese myths and legends, the earliest traditions of native life, have their locale hereabout. These people are the Javanese, and show plainly their Hindu descent and their higher civilization, which distinguish them from the Sundanese of West Java; yet the Sundanese call themselves the “sons of the soil,” and the Javanese “the stranger people.” The glories of the Hindu empire are declared by the magnificent ruins so lately uncovered, but the splendor of the Mohammedan empire barely survives in name in the strangely interesting city of the susunhan set in the midst of the plain of Solo—a plain which M. Désiré de Charnay described as “a paradise which nothing on earth can equal, and neither pen, brush, nor photography can faithfully reproduce.”

At this Solo, second city of the island in size, one truly reaches the heart of native Java—the Java of the Javanese—more nearly than elsewhere; but Islam’s old empire is there narrowed down to a kraton, or palace inclosure, a mile square, where the present susunhan, or object of adoration, lives as a restrained pensioner of the Dutch government, the mere shadow of those splendid potentates, his ancestors.

The old susunhans were descended from the Moormen or Arab pirates who harried the coast for a century before they destroyed the splendid Hindu capital of Majapahit, near the modern Soerabaya. They followed that act of vandalism with the conquest of Pajajaran, the western empire, or Sundanese end of the island; and religious conversion always went with conquest by the followers of the prophet. There was perpetual domestic war in the Mohammedan empire, which by no means held the unresisting allegiance of the Javanese at any time, and the Hindu princes of Middle Java were never really conquered by them or the Dutch. The Java war of the last century between the Mohammedan emperor, the Dutch, and the rebellious native prince, Manko Boeni, lasted for thirteen years; and in this century the same sort of a revolt cost the Dutch as imperial allies more than four millions of florins, and made the British rejoice that their statesmen had wisely handed back such a troublesome and expensive possession as Java proved to be. The great Mataram war of the last century, however, established the family of the present susunhan on the throne, after dividing his empire with a rebellious younger brother, who then became Sultan of Djokjakarta, and a new capital was built on the broad plain cut by the Bengawan or Solo River, which is the largest river of the island. At the death of the susunhan, Pakoe Bewono II (“Nail of the Universe”), in 1749, his will bequeathed his empire to the Dutch East India Company, and at last gave Holland control of the whole island. Certain lands were retained for the imperial family, and its present head, merely nominal, figurehead susunhan that he is, receives an annuity of one hundred thousand florins—a sum equal to the salary of the governor-general of Netherlands India.

The present susunhan of Solo is not the son of the last emperor, but a collateral descendant of the old emperors, who claims descent from both Mohammedan and Hindu rulers, the monkey flag of Arjuna and the double-bladed sword of the Arab conquerors alike his heirlooms and insignia. His portraits show a gentle, refined face of the best Javanese type, and he wears a European military coat, with the native sarong and Arab fez, a court sword at the front of his belt, and a Solo kris at the back. Despite his trappings and his sovereign title, he is as much a puppet and a prisoner as any of the lesser princes, sultans, and regents whom the Dutch, having deposed and pensioned, allow to masquerade in sham authority. He maintains all the state and splendor of the old imperialism within his kraton, which is confronted and overlooked by a Dutch fort, whose guns, always trained upon the kraton, could sweep and level the whole imperial establishment at a moment’s notice. The susunhan may have ten thousand people living within his kraton walls; he may have nine hundred and ninety-nine wives and one hundred and fifty carriages, as reported; but he may not drive beyond his own gates without informing the Dutch resident where he is going or has been, with his guard of honor of Dutch soldiers, and he has hardly the liberty of a tourist with a toelatings-kaart. He may amuse himself with a little body-guard of Javanese soldiers; but there is a petty sultan of Solo, an ancient vassal, whose military ambitions are encouraged by the Dutch to the extent of allowing him to drill and command a private army of a thousand men that the Dutch believe would never by any chance take arms against them, as allies of the susunhan’s fancy guard. Wherever they have allowed any empty show of sovereignty to a native ruler, the Dutch have taken care to equip a military rival, with the lasting grudge of an inherited family feud, and establish him in the same town. But little diplomacy is required to keep such jealousies alive and aflame, and the Dutch are always an apparent check, and pacific mediators between such rivals as the susunhan and the sultan at Solo, and the sultan and Prince Pakoe Alam at Djokja.

The young susunhan maintains his empty honors with great dignity and serenity, observing all the European forms and etiquette at his entertainments, and delighting Solo’s august society with frequent court balls and fêtes. Town gossip dilates on his marble-floored ball-room, the fantastic devices in electric lights employed in illuminating the palace and its maze of gardens on such occasions, and on the blaze of heirloom jewels worn by the imperial ladies and princesses at such functions. The susunhan sometimes grants audiences to distinguished strangers, and one French visitor has told of some magnificent Japanese bronzes and Chinese porcelains in the kraton, which were gifts from the Dutch in the early time when the Japanese and Javanese trade were both Holland monopolies. No prostrations or Oriental salaams are required of European visitors at court, although the old susunhans obliged even the crown prince and prime minister to assume the dodok, and sidle about like any cup-bearer in his presence. The princes and petty chiefs were so precisely graded in rank in those days that, while the highest might kiss the sovereign’s hand, and those of a lower rank the imperial knee, there were those of lesser pretensions who adoringly kissed the instep, and, last of all, those who might only presume to kiss the sole, of the susunhan’s foot. The susunhan is always accompanied on his walks in the palace grounds, and on drives abroad, by a bearer with a gold pajong, or state umbrella, spreading from a jeweled golden staff. The array of pajongs carried behind the members of his family and court officials present all the colors of the rainbow, and all the variegations a fancy umbrella is capable of showing—each striped, banded, bordered, and vandyked in a different way, that would puzzle the brain of any but a Solo courtier, to whom they speak as plainly as a door-plate.

Solo has the same broad streets and magnificent shade-trees as the other towns of Java, and some of the streets have deep ditches or moats on either side of the drive, with separate little bridges crossing to each house-front, which give those thoroughfares a certain feudal quaintness and character of their own. At the late afternoon hour of our arrival we only stopped for a moment to deposit the luggage at the enormously porticoed Hotel Sleier, and then drove on through and about the imperial city. The streets were full of other carriages,—enormous barouches, “milords,” and family carryalls, drawn by big Walers,—with which we finally drew up in line around the park, where a military band was playing. We had seen bewildering lines of palace and fort and barrack walls, marching troops, and soldiers lounging about off duty, until it was easy to see that Solo was a vast garrison, more camp than court. Later, when we had returned to the hotel portico, to swing at ease in great broad-armed rocking-chairs,—exactly the Shaker piazza-chairs of American summer life,—there was still sound of military music off beyond the dense waringen shade, and the fanfare of bugles to right and to left.

Solo’s hotel, with its comforts, offered more material inducements for us to make a long stay, than any hotel we had yet encountered in Java; and the clear-headed, courteous landlady was a hostess in the most kindly sense. The usual colonial table d’hôte assembled at nine o’clock in the vast inner hall or pavilion, looking on a garden; and in this small world, where every one knows every one, his habitat and all his affairs, the new-comers were given a silent, earnest attention that would have checked any appetites save those engendered by our archæological afternoon at Brambanam. When beefsteak was served with a sauce of pineapple mashed with potato, and the succeeding beet salad was followed by fried fish, and that by a sweet pudding flooded with a mixture of melted chocolate and freshly ground cocoanut, we were oblivious to all stares and whispers and open comments in Dutch, which these colonials take it for granted no alien understands or can even have clue to through its likeness to German. While we rocked on the great white portico we could see and hear that Solo’s lizards were as gruesome and plentiful as those of other towns. While tiny fragilities flashed across white columns and walls, and arrested themselves as instantaneous traceries and ornaments, a legion of toads came up from the garden, and hopped over the floor in a silence that made us realize how much pleasanter companions were the croaking and bemoaning geckos, who keep their ugliness out of sight.

At sunrise we set out in the company of an American temporarily in exile at Solo, and drove past the resident’s great garden of palms and statues and flower-beds, into the outer courts of the emperor’s and the sultan’s palaces, watching in the latter the guard-mount and drill of a fine picked body of his troops. The palace of one of the younger princes of the imperial house was accessible through kind favor, as the owner is pleased to let uitlanders enjoy the many foreign features of these pleasure-grounds. This foreign garden did not, however, make us really homesick by any appealing similarity to the grounds of citizens or presidents on the American side of the globe; for the progressive prince has arranged his demesne quite after the style of the gardens of the cafés chantants of the lower Élysée in Paris—colored-glass globes and all, marble-rimmed flower-beds, and a cascade to be turned on at will and let flow down over a marble staircase set with colored electric bulbs. Colored globes and bulbs hang in festoons and arches about the bizarre garden, simulate fruits and flowers on the trees and bushes, glow in dark pools and fountain basins, and play every old fantastic trick of al-fresco cafés in Europe. A good collection of rare beasts and birds is disposed in cages in the grounds, and there are countless kiosks and pavilions inviting one to rest. In one such summer-house, with stained-glass walls, the attendants showed photographs of the prince, his father and family, the solemn old faces and the costumes of these elders almost the only purely Javanese things to be seen in this fantastic garden, since even the recha, gray old images from Boro Boedor and Brambanam, have been brightened with red, white, and blue paint and made to look cheerful and decorative—have been restored, improved, brought down to modern times, and made to accord better with their café-chantant surroundings.

Quite unexpectedly, we saw the princely personage himself receive his early cup of coffee—attracted first to the ceremony by noticing a man carrying a gold salver and cup, and followed by an umbrella-bearer and two other attendants, enter an angle of the court in whose shady arcade we were for the moment resting. Suddenly all four men dropped to their heels in the dodok, and, crouching, sidled and hopped along for a hundred feet to the steps of a pavilion. The cup-bearer insinuated himself up those four steps, still squatting on his heels, and at the same time balancing his burden on his two extended hands, and proffered the gold salver to a shadowy figure half reclining in a long chair. We stood motionless, unseen in our dark arcade, and watched this precious bit of court comedy through, and saw the cup-bearer retire backward down the steps, across the court, to the spot where he might rise from his ignoble attitude and walk like a human being again. While exacting this much of the old etiquette, this prince of European education and tastes has the finest ball-room in Solo—a vast white-marble-floored _pringitan_, or open-sided audience-hall, which is lighted with hundreds of electric lights, and on whose shining surface great cotillions are danced, and rich favors distributed to companies blazing with diamonds.

XIX

THE LAND OF KRIS AND SARONG

The stir of camp and court, the state and pomp and pageantry of three such grandees as emperor, sultan, and resident in the one city, made such street-scenes in Solo as tempted the kodaker to constant play while the sun was high. Bands and marching troops were always to be seen in the street, and the native officials of so many different kinds made pictures of bewildering variety. The resident, returning from an official call, dashed past in a coach and four, with pajong-bearers hanging perilously on behind, and a mounted escort clattering after. Members of the imperial household staff were distinguished by stiff sugar-loaf caps or fezzes of white leather; and such privileged ones stalked along slowly, magnificently, each with a kris at the back of his belt, and always followed by one or two lesser minions. Those of superior rank went accompanied by a pajong-bearer balancing the great flat umbrella of rank above the distinguished one’s head; and the precision with which the grandee kept his head within the halo of shadow, or the bearer managed to keep such a true angle on the sun, were something admirable, and only to be accomplished by generations of the two classes practising their respective feats. The emperor’s mounted troops were objects of greater interest, these dragoons wearing huge lacquered vizors or crownless caps over their turbaned heads, the regulation jackets, sarongs, and heavy krises, and bestriding fiery little Timor ponies. The native stirrup is a single upright bar of iron, which a rider holds between the great toe and its neighbor; and these troopers seemed to derive as much support from this firm toe-grip as booted riders do from resting the whole ball of the foot on our stirrups.

There is a labyrinthine passer at Solo, where open sheds and rustic booths have grown upon one another around several open court spaces, which are dotted with the huge mushrooms of palm-leaf umbrellas, and whose picturesqueness one cannot nearly exhaust in a single morning’s round. The pepper- and fruit- and flower-markets are, of course, the regions of greatest attraction and richest feasts of color. The horn of plenty overflowed royally there, and the masses of bananas and pineapples, durians, nankos, mangosteens, jamboas, salaks, dukus, and rambutans seemed richer in color than we had ever seen before; and the brass-, the basket-, the bird-, the spice-, and the gum-markets had greater attractions too. The buyers were as interesting as the venders, and a frequent figure in these market groups that tempted the kodaker to many an instantaneous shot, regardless of the light,—better any muddy impression of that than none at all,—was the Dutch housewife on her morning rounds. I braved sunstroke and apoplexy in the hot sunshine, and trailed my saronged subjects down crowded aisles to open spots, to fix on film the image of these sockless matrons in their very informal morning dress. I lurked in booths and sat for endless minutes in opposite shops, with focus set and button at touch, to get a good study of Dutch ankles, when certain typical Solo _hausfraus_ should return to and mount their carriage steps—only to have some loiterer’s back obscure the whole range of the lens at the critical second.

From Sir Stamford Raffles’s “History of Java.”]

We found pawnshops galore in this city full of courtiers and hangers-on of greatness, and such array of krises and curious weapons that there was embarrassment of choice. We left the superior shops of dealers in arms, where new blades, fresh from Sheffield or German works, were pressed upon us, and betook ourselves to the junk-shops and pawnshops, where aggregations of discarded finery and martial trappings were spread out. Books, silver, crystal, cutlery, jeweled decorations, medals, epaulets, swords, and krises in every stage of rust and dilapidation were found for sale.

The kris is distinctively the Malay weapon, and is a key to much of Malay custom and lore; and if the Japanese sword was “the soul of the Samurai,” as much may be said for the kris of the Javanese warrior. The cutler or forger of kris-blades ranked first of all artisans. There are more than one hundred varieties of the kris known, the distinctive Javanese types of kris differing from those of the Malay Peninsula and the other islands, and forty varieties of kris being used in Java and its immediate dependencies. The kris used in Bali differs from that of Madura or Lombok, and that of Solo from that used in West or Sundanese Java. These differences imply many curiously fine distinctions of long-standing importance in etiquette and tradition; yet the kris is a comparatively modern weapon—modern as such things go in Asia. No kris is carved on Boro Boedor or Brambanam walls, and its use cannot be traced further back than the thirteenth century, despite the legends of mythical Panji, who, it is claimed, devised the deadly crooked blade and brought it with him from India. When it was introduced from the peninsula it was instantly adopted, and all people wearing the kris were counted by that badge as subjects of Java. The kris is worn by all Javanese above the peasant class and over fourteen years of age, and is a badge of rank and station which the wearer never puts aside in his waking hours. Great princes wear two and even four krises at a time, and women of rank are allowed to display it as a badge. It is always thrust through the back of the girdle or belt, a little to the left, and at an angle, that the right hand may easily grasp the hilt; and its presence there, ready for instant use, has proved a great restraint to the manners of a spirited, hot-blooded people, and lent their intercourse that same exaggerated formality, mutual deference, and high decorum that equally distinguished the old two-sworded men of Japan. The kris is the warrior’s last refuge, as the Javanese will run amuck, like other Malays, when anger, shame, or grief has carried him past all bounds, and, stabbing at every one in the way, friend or enemy alike, is ready then to take his own life.

The Javanese are still the best metal-workers in the archipelago, and long displayed wonderful skill in tempering steel, in welding steel and iron together, and in giving the wavy blade fine veinings and damascenings. Those beautiful veinings, grained and knotted in wood, and other curious patternings of the blade, were obtained by soaking the blades, welded of many strips of hard and soft metal, in lime-juice and arsenic until the surface iron was eaten out. A wound from such a weapon is, of course, as deadly as if the kris were dipped in poison for that purpose solely; and from this arises the common belief that all kris-blades are soaked in toxic preparations. With the more general use of firearms, and the arming of the troops with European rifles, the kris remains chiefly a personal adornment, an article of luxury, and a badge of rank.

Solo has always been considered a later Toledo for its blades, and in the search for a really good, typical Solo kris I certainly looked over enough weapons to arm the sultan’s guard. The most of them were disappointingly plain as to sheath and hilt, the boat-shaped wooden hilts having only enough carving on the under part to give the hand a firm grasp. We could not find a single Madura kris, with the curious totemic carvings on the handle; and all the finely ornamental krises, with gold, silver, or ivory handles inlaid with jewels, have long since gone to museums and private collections. One may now and then chance upon finely veined blades with mangosteen handles in plain, unpromising wood, and brass Sundanese sheaths; but after seeing the treasures of krises in the Batavia museum, one is little satisfied with such utilities, mere every-day serviceable weapons. Increasing tourist travel will soon encourage the manufacture of ornamental krises, and in numbers to meet the certain fixed demand, so that later tourists will have better souvenirs than can be had now.

There is one whole street of sarong-shops in Solo, each little shop or open booth glowing with cloths of brilliant colors, and each shop standing in feudal dignity behind a tiny moat, with a mite of a foot-bridge quite its own. Solo sarongs presented many designs quite new to us, and the sarong-painters there employ a rich, dull, dark red and a soft, deep green in the long diamonds and pointed panels of solid color, relieved with borders of intricate groundwork, that tempt one to buy by the dozen. There were many sarongs, painted with four and five colors in fine, elaborate designs, that rose to ten and twenty United States gold dollars in value; but one’s natural instincts protested against paying such prices for a couple of yards of cotton cloth, mere figured calico, forsooth, despite its artistic and individual merits. Our landlady at the Sleier had inducted us into much of the sarong’s mysteries, qualities, and details of desirability, and we had the museum’s rare specimens in mind; but we were distracted in choice, and the thing I desired, just any little scrap as an example of the _prang rusa_, or deer-fight, pattern, which only the imperial ones may wear, was not to be had anywhere in Solo. We looked in upon many groups of little women tracing out fine, feathery, first-outline designs in brown dye with their tiny funnel arrangements that are the paint-brushes of their craft; and we found one great cement-floored fabrik of sarongs, a regular factory or wholesale establishment, with many Chinese and native workmen. There whole sections of the sarong pattern were stamped at a stroke by lean Chinese, who used the same kind of tin stamping-blocks as are used in stamping embroidery patterns in Western lands. We knew there was such a factory for block-printed sarongs on Tenabang Hill in Batavia, but it was a shock, a disillusionment, to come upon such an establishment of virtually ready-made, “hand-me-down” sarongs in Solo.

There is a large Chinese population in Solo; and one has sufficient evidence of the wealth and prosperity of these Paranaks as one sees them driving past in handsome victorias, wearing immaculate duck suits, patent-leather shoes, and silk hose, with only the ignoble pigtail, trailing away from the derby hat and disappearing shamefully inside the collar, to betray them. These rich Paranaks sit rigid and imperturbable, with folded arms, the very model of good form, smoking long black cheroots, and viewing all people afoot with undisguised scorn. One need not possess a Californian’s bitter anti-Chinese sentiments to have this spectacle irritate him, and to almost wish to see the plutocrats pitched out of their “milords” and the Javanese Jehu drive over them. One easily understands the hatred that Dutch and natives alike entertain for these small traders, middlemen, and usurers, who have driven out all competitors, and fatten on the necessities of the people. Although these island-born Chinese have adopted so many European fashions in dress and luxurious living, they are still Celestials, never cutting the queue nor renouncing the tinseled household altars.

Solo’s Chinatown, or Tjina kampong, is a little China complete, barring its amazing cleanliness and order without odors other than those of the cook-shops, where sesame-oil sizzles and smells quite as at home in “big China.” There were three great weddings in progress on one “lucky day” in Solo, and each house-front was trimmed with flags, lanterns, garlands, and tinsel flowers; orchestras tinkled and thumped, and great feasts were spread in honor of the brides’ coming to the new homes. Every one was bidden to enter and partake; and we were hospitably urged to enter at each gorgeous door, and rice-wine, champagne, painted cakes, and all the fruits of two zones were generously pressed upon us. The thumps of an approaching band drew us from one sarong-shop, and we saw a procession advancing, with banners and huge lanterns borne aloft. One felt sure the remarkable train must have issued from the palace gates until the faces were in range, and there followed the gorgeous red Chinese wedding-chair, and all the bride’s jewels and gowns and gilded slippers, carried about on cushions like sovereign regalia. Men in uniform bore palanquins full of varnished pig, and mountains of the pies and cakes and nameless things of Chinese high-holiday appetites, that roused the gaping envy of the street crowds. Urchins cheered and danced and ran with the band much as they do elsewhere; and the strangers, captivated with the sights, drove beside the gaudy procession until sated with the Oriental splendors and Celestial opulence of a Solo marriage feast.

The street life of Solo could well entertain one for many days. Native life is but the least affected by foreign ways, and the local color is all one could wish. There are drives of great beauty about the town, with far views of those two lovely symmetrical peaks, Merapi and Merbaboe, on one side, and of the massive Mount Lawu on the other. The temple ruins at Suku, at the foot of Mount Lawu, twenty-six miles southeast of Solo, are the most puzzling to archæologists, least known and visited of all such remains in Java. They are of severe form and massive construction, without traces of any carved ornament, and the solid pylons, truncated pyramids, and great obelisks, standing on successive platforms or terraces, bear such surprising resemblance to the monuments of ancient Egypt and Central America that speculation is offered a wide range and free field. The images found there are ruder than any other island sculptures, and everything points to these strange temples having been the shrines of an earlier, simpler faith than any now observed or of which there is any record. These Suku temples were discovered in 1814 by Major Johnson, the British officer residing at the native court of Solo. They were then unknown to the natives; there were no inscriptions found, nothing in native records or traditions to lead to any solution of their mysteries; and no further attempts have been made toward discovering the origin of these vast constructions since Sir Stamford Raffles’s day.

When M. Désiré de Charnay came to Java, in 1878, to study the temple ruins whose puzzling resemblance to Central American structures had puzzled archæologists, all of government assistance was lent him. He had driven only eight leagues from Solo toward Mount Lawu, when his carriage broke down; he spent the night at a village, and returned the next morning to Solo, “sufficiently humiliated with” his “failure,” he wrote. He did not repeat the attempt, as there was a great fête occurring at the emperor’s palace which occupied his remaining days. He says that every one at Solo consoled him for his failure to reach the Suku temples by saying that the visible ruins there were only the attempted restorations of an epoch of decadence, and dated only from the fourteenth century. M. de Charnay quotes all that Sir Stamford Raffles and Fergusson urge as to the striking and extraordinary resemblance of these particular temples to those of Mexico and Yucatan; and as ethnologists admit that the Malays occupied the archipelagos from Easter Island to Madagascar, he thinks it easy to believe that they or a parent race extended their migrations to the American continent, and that if this architectural resemblance be an accident, it is the only one of its kind in the universe.[6]

The three-domed summit of the mountain is visited now by Siva worshipers, who make offerings and burn incense to the destroying god who manifests himself there, and the region is one to tempt a scientist across the seas to exploit it, and should soon invite the attention of the exploring parties which Mr. Morris K. Jesup has enlisted in the search for proofs of early Asiatic and American contact.

XX

DJOKJAKARTA

As the heat of Solo was but little less than that of Batavia, and we had only worse accounts and solemn warnings given of the sickening, unendurable heat of Soerabaya, where fever and cholera most often abide, it seemed wisest to give up the visit to that east end of the island, to forego that torrid shore where first the Arabs landed and conquered the Hindu rulers of Majapahit, to be succeeded in their turn by the Portuguese, and then the Dutch. The ruins of Majapahit, and the tombs of its princes, and the graves of the Arab priests who were the first rulers of the conquered empire are attractions in Soerabaya’s neighborhood; but the great object was the Mount Bromo of the Tengger plateau, where the exhausted residents may take refuge from the steaming plain and breathe again. Tosari, the great sanatorium, on one of the sharp spurs of the Tengger, is over five thousand feet in air, and commands one of the most famous views in Java, with the plains, the sea, and groups of islands in one direction, and the great Bromo, smoking splendidly, in another. The great crater of the Bromo, with several smoking cones rising from a level of rippling, wind-swept “sandy sea,” is three miles in diameter, and is claimed, despite Kilauea, as the largest crater in the world, as it is certainly the largest in Java. A colony of Siva worshipers, who fled to the Tengger that they might pursue their religion unmolested by Arab rulers, live there in long communal houses, tend the sacred fire once brought from India, and sacrifice regularly to Brama, the “God of Fire,” at his smoking temple. In this modern day living sacrifices are not offered, save of fowl; and priests and people content themselves with offerings of fruit and foods, and make other great ceremonies of burning lumps of fragrant benzoin, the “Java frankincense,” at the crater’s edge.

The most serious sacrifices in the Bromo’s neighborhood are of those unfortunate natives who are seized by tigers as they work in clearings or walk mountain paths alone. The briefest stay at Tosari equips a visitor with tiger stories fit for tropical regions; and my envy was roused when some Tosari tourists told of having seen a child who had been seized and slightly mangled by a tiger, but a day before, on a road near the village, over which they themselves had passed.

The short railway ride back from Solo to Djokja, past the familiar ground of Brambanam, was a morning’s delight. We could see from the train that the railway did run close past the temple courts; and with the brief glimpse of the ruined pyramids, we viewed our exploit of walking to Loro Jonggran’s fane at midday, and clambering over the temples through the long afternoon, with great complacency—a feat that nothing could induce us to repeat, however.

It is all historic and sacred soil in the region around Djokja, and we returned with the greater interest for our real visit to the city, where one touches the age of fable in even the geographic names of the place and its environs, since the modern Dutch rendering of Djokjakarta, and the older Yugya-Karta of Sir Stamford Raffles, are only variants of the native Ayogya-Karta, the Ayudya mentioned in the Javanese Parvas, or Ramayan, as the capital established by Rama. The exploits of Na-yud-ya, the earliest ruler of Djokja, are described in the same sacred Parvas, and this was the center of the early Hindu empire, whose princes were great builders and for ten centuries were busy erecting temples, palaces, and towers in the region around this their city of Mataram.

Na-yud-ya’s descendants resisted the Arab invaders to the last, and the Hindu princes of Middle Java retained their independence long after Islam’s susunhan had declared himself supreme over the eastern empire of Majapahit[7] and the western empire of Pajajaran.[8] These Hindu or native princes, as they were considered, resisted susunhan and Dutch alike, and the Java war of the last century against the two usurpers was a long and bitter struggle, lasting from 1745 to 1758. The susunhan’s brother, the second prince, who had joined the native or Hindu princes, was won back to family allegiance by Dutch intrigue and influence; and the susunhan, dividing his eastern or Majapahit empire with his troublesome brother, made the latter a ruler, under the title of Sultan of Djokjakarta. The Dutch had been given the site of Samarang for their aid in such wars, and soon after the division of the eastern empire, the susunhan made that remarkable will of 1749, deeding his empire to the Dutch East India Company after his decease. The region between Djokja and Solo remained a seat of war for the rest of the century, the old princes, different heirs, claimants, and factions, always resorting to arms, and the Dutch always having an interest in the struggles. Marshal Daendels had his campaigns against and his sieges of Djokja, and the British had to besiege and bombard it before it admitted Sepoy occupation. After the restoration of Java to the Dutch there was a thirteen years’ war with this eastern empire,—the Mataram or Majapahit war,—and then, by treaty, the Dutch gained final control of the whole island and became absolute masters of Java; susunhan and sultan accepted annuities; each paid a revenue in products of the soil, and admitted Dutch residents to “make recommendations.” The Sultan of Djokja is only another of the puppet rulers. He maintains the outward show and trappings of his ancestors’ estate, and, with fine irony, is termed one of the “independent princes.”

The city of Djokja, fifth in size of the cities of the island, and reputed as more Javanese than Solo, less influenced by Chinese and European example, is in the center of the residency, and but twelve miles from the shores of the Indian Ocean. It is approached by railway from either side over a plain planted chiefly with indigo and tapioca, whose low, uninteresting plants in myriad rows, and the frequent roofs and tall chimneys of fabriks, speak of abundant prosperity for all classes. The broad streets of the provincial capital are beautifully shaded, and the residency, a great, low, white building with a classical portico, is set in a luxuriant garden, where Madagascar palms and splendid trees make halos and shadow for the grim stone images, the pensive Buddhas and fine bas-reliefs, brought from neighboring ruins. The government offices adjoin, and on any court day one may see the crowds of litigants and witnesses sitting around on their heels beneath a shadowing waringen-tree that would be fit bench for Druids’ justice. The majority of the cases tried before the assistant resident, who there balances the scales, are of petty thieving; for notwithstanding the severity of the penalties for such offenses, the inherent bias of the Malay mind is toward acquiring something for nothing—transmuting _tuum_ into _meum_. The death sentence is pronounced upon the burglar caught with a weapon on his person, and twenty years in chains is prescribed for the unarmed burglar; for in this eternal summer, where people must live and sleep with open doors and windows, or at most with flimsy lattices, some protection must be assured to those who own portable properties and valuables. But with the great advances made in the security of property, the innate propensities of the race are not to be eradicated by even three centuries of stern Dutch justice; and there is the same mass-meeting of witnesses and lookers-on squatting under the big waringen-tree at Djokja, when the scales are to be balanced by the blind lady, as before every petty court-room on the island. An ingenious little firefly lamp, taken from a Djokja burglar, was given me as a souvenir of one such a court day. It was a veritable fairy’s dark lantern—a half of a nutshell, with a flat cover sliding on a pivot and concealing at will the light of two fireflies struggling in a dab of pitch. The burglar carried a reserve supply of fireflies in a bit of hollow bamboo stoppered at the ends, and added a fresh illuminator whenever the dark lantern’s living glow diminished.