Chapter XXIII: Garoet and Papandayang 312 (8)

There is an interesting passer at Garoet, and besides the lavish display of nature’s products, there are curious baskets brought from a farther valley, which visitors compete for eagerly. The town square, or overgrown village green, is faced by the homes of the native regent and the Dutch resident, and by the quaint little messigit, or Mohammedan mosque. The last mufti, or head priest of the prophet, at Garoet was a man of such intelligence and liberality that he had but one wife, and allowed her to go with face uncovered, to learn Dutch, and to meet and freely converse with all his foreign visitors, men as well as women. Travelers brought letters to this mufti and quoted him in their books, but since his death the more regular, illiberal order has ruled at Mohammedan headquarters.

The great excursion from Garoet is to the crater of Papandayang, a mountain whose extended lines (fifteen miles in length by six in breadth) match its syllables; which has been in vigorous eruption within a century; and which still steams and rumbles, and, like the Goenoeng Goentor, or “Thunder Mountain,” across the plain, may burst forth again at any moment. At the last eruption of Papandayang, in 1772, there was a great convulsion, a solid mass of the mountain was blown out into the air, streams of lava poured forth, and ashes and cinders covered the earth for seven miles around with a layer five feet thick, destroying forty villages and engulfing three thousand people in one day. The scar of the great crater, or “blow-out hole,” near the summit of the mountain, is still visible from the plain, and the plumes and clouds of steam ascending from it remind one of its unpleasant possibilities. We made a start early one rainy morning, and drove twelve miles across the plain, along hard, sandy white roads, continuously bordered with shade-trees. The frequent villages were damp and cheerless, and the little basket houses, that the people weave as they would a hat, were anything but enviable dwellings then. The sling-shooters’ sentry-boxes throughout the fields—perches where men or boys sat to pull sets of strings that reached to scarecrows far away—suggested too much of clammy, rheumatic discomfort to seem as picturesque as usual—strange little Malay companion pieces to the same boxes on stilts that one sees perched in the rice-fields of Hizen and the other southern provinces of Japan.

At Tjisoeroepan, at the foot of the mountain, we changed to clumsy djoelies, or sedan-chairs, each borne by four coolies, whose go-as-you-please gait, not one of them keeping step with any other, was especially trying so soon after coming from the enjoyment of the swift, regular, methodical slap-slap tread of the chair-bearers of South China. Despite their churning motion, the way was enjoyable; and, beginning with a blighted and abandoned coffee-plantation at the base of the mountain, we passed through changing belts of vegetation, as by successive altitudes we passed botanically from the tropic to the temperate zone. The bleached skeletons of the old coffee-trees, half-smothered in undergrowth and vines, interested one more than the beautifully ordered and carefully tended young coffee-trees in newer plantations—sad reminders of those good old days before the war (the Achinese war), the deficit, and the blight. Beyond kina limits there were no more clearings, and then the tree-fern appeared—wan skeletons of trees at first, where much thinning out had left them in range of scorching sunlight; but in the shade of greater trees in the thick of the jungle they stood superb—great, splendid, soft, drooping, swaying, gigantic green fronds, a refined, effeminate, delicate, sensitive sort of palm, the tropic’s most tropical, exquisite, wonderful tree. The upper regions of Papandayang are all clothed with real jungle, the forest primeval, with giant creepers writhing and looping serpent-like about the trees, and doing all the extravagant things they are expected to do. Ratans, or climbing palms, enveloped whole trees with their pendant, gracefully decorative leaves; orchids swung in tasseled sprays, starred mossy trunks and branches, and showed in all the green wonderland overhead and around; and in each ravine, where warm streams sprayed the air, a whole hothouse full of blooming, green, and strange loveliness delighted the eye.

We met strings of coolies descending with baskets of sulphur on their backs, the path was yellow with the broken fragments of years’ droppings, and infragrant, murky sulphur-streams crossed and ran beside the path, in promise of the stifling caldrons we were fast approaching.

We had a magnificent view back over the Garoet plain, with its checker-board of green and glinting fields, marked with the network of white post-roads and dotted with the clumps of palms that bespoke the hidden villages, and then we passed in through a natural gateway or cutting in the solid mountain-side made by the last eruption. The broad passage or defile led to the _kawa_, or crater, a bowl or depression deep sunk in rocky walls, with pools of liquid sulphur bubbling all over the five-acre floor and sending off clouds of nauseous steam. These pools, vats of purest molten gold, boiled violently all the time, scattering golden drops far and wide from their fretted, honey-combed edges. There was always suggestion of the possibility of their suddenly shooting into the air like geysers, and deluging one with the column of molten gold; or of the soft filigree edges of the pools crumbling and precipitating one untimely into the lakelet of fire and brimstone. Steam jets roared and hissed from all parts of the quaking solfatara, and from the rumblings and strange underground noises one could understand the native legends of chained giants groaning inside of the mountain, and their name for Papandayang, “The Forge.” The sulphur coolies stepped warily along the paths between the pools; our shoe-soles were not proof against the steam and scorch of the heaving ground beneath us; and carbonic-acid gas and sulphureted hydrogen were all that one could find to breathe down there on the crater’s floor—the undoubted Guevo Upas, or “Valley of Poison.”

It is said that one can see the shores both of the Indian Ocean and the Java Sea from the summit of Papandayang, which is seven thousand feet above their level. Although the skies were cloudy and doubtful around the horizon edges, we were willing to take the brilliant noonday sun overhead as augury, and attempt the climb. As there was no path beyond the crater’s rest-sheds for the coolies to carry us in djoelies, we started on foot straight up the first steep slope of the crater’s ragged wall, through tangles of bushes and the rank bamboo-grass. We drove our servant on ahead, and the poor indolent creature, cheated of his expected lounge after his arduous pony-ride up the mountain and his midday rice-feast, turned plaintive countenance backward, as he picked his reluctant way barefooted through this prickly underbrush.

“What for go here?” he bleated.

“To get to the top of the mountain and see the two oceans.”

“Dis mountain no got top,” wailed the unconscionable one; but we remembered the waist-deep water he had conjured up to discourage us from Chandi Sewou; nor had we forgotten the Tjilatjap sandwiches with which he had comforted himself such a few days before, and we said, “Go on!”

Then, remembering our perpetual hunt for and expectation of great snakes, he turned mournful countenance and wailed: “_Slanga! slanga!_ [”Snakes! snakes!“] always live dis kind grass.”

“Very well. That’s just what we want to find. Be sure you tell us as soon as you step on one or see it moving.”

But, after pushing and tearing our way through bamboo-grass and bushes to the first ridge, we saw only other and farther ridges to be surmounted, with great ravines and stony hollows between. We took such view of the cloudy plains and ranges to northward and southward as we could, seeing everywhere the murky, blue, misty horizon of the rainy season, and nowhere the silver sea-levels, nor the lines of perpetual surf that fringe the Indian Ocean. We saw again the mosaic of rice-fields and dry fields covering the Garoet plain; and looking down upon the foot of an opposite mountain spur, we could study, like a relief-map or model tilted before us, a vast plantation cultivated from tea to highest coffee and kina level.

Nowhere in the slopes below could we see the vale of the deadly upas-tree, that was last supposed to occupy a retired spot on Papandayang’s remote heights. The imaginative Dr. Foersch, surgeon of the Dutch East India Company at Samarang in 1773, made the blood of all readers of the last century run cold with his description of himself standing alone, “in solitary horror,” on a blasted plain covered with skeletons, with another solitary horror of a deadly upas the only larger object in sight. The Guevo Upas, or “Valley of Poison,” was first said to be on the plain southeast of Samarang, but that region was explored in vain; then it was put upon the Dieng plateau, and found not there; and last the valley was said to be on the side of a high mountain far away in the almost unexplored Preanger regencies. Dr. Horsfield, in his search for volcanic data, routed the upas myth from the Papandayang region and exploded it for all time, and the Guevo Upas has gone to that limbo where the maelstrom and other perils of ante-tourist times are laid away. There is a deadly tree in Java, the antiar (_Antiaris toxicaria_), whose sap is as poisonous as serpent venom if it enters a wound, and will produce deep, incurable ulcers if dropped on the skin; and skeletons of animals may have been found beneath and near it. Erasmus Darwin immortalized the deadly upas, or antiar, in his poem, “The Botanic Garden,” and this antiar is the only actual and accepted upas-tree of the tropics. It is quite possible that some valley or old crater on the mountain-side, where the carbonic-acid and sulphurous gases from the inner caldron could escape, would be strewn with skeletons of birds and animals, a valley of death to man and beast, and as deadly a place, for the same reasons, as the celebrated grotto at Naples; but no tree could live in those fumes either; and the solitary tree on the “blasted plain” of skeletons, and the Dutch doctor in his “solitary horror,” have to be abandoned entire—a last disillusionment in Java.

When we returned from above, our djoelie coolies were squatted under the tiled shed of refuge built for visitors and sulphur-miners, and were as curious a lot of mixed types and races as one could find in an ethnological museum. While the Malays have, as a rule, but scanty beards and no hair on breast or limbs, two of these men were as whiskered and hairy as the wild men of Borneo, or the hirsute ones of Ceylon, the faces narrowed to the countenance of apes by the thick growth of hair, and their breasts shaggy as a spaniel’s back. These wild men came from some farther district, but our medium could not or would not comprehend our queries and establish the exact spot of their birthplace by cross-questioning the man-apes themselves; and the missing links sat comfortably the while, submitting their disheveled heads to one and another’s friendly search and attentions.

We were reluctant to descend Papandayang at the rapid gait the coolies struck for going down hill, but they whisked us through the different belts of vegetation and down to the serried rows of coffee-trees in seemingly no time at all. The head man of Tjisoeroepan had posted the village gamelan, or orchestra, in the little rustic band-stand of the green, and their tinkling, mild, and plaintive melodies reached us through the trees long before we were in sight of them. The musicians played a long program while the djoelies were put away, carts and horses brought round, and the very moderate bill itemized and paid—too modest a bill altogether to need an accompaniment of slow music.

We reached Garoet as the delayed afternoon shower began falling; but the lovely moonlight evening under the shade-trees of Garoet streets was to be remembered, as were the later hours on the porch, with the iron bust of Mozart looking at us from his tropical garden bower. In the middle of the night we heard commotion on our porch, as of bamboo-chairs thrown over and dragged about. “The snake!—at last!” was the first thought and cry; and as the thrashing continued, it was evident that a whole den of pythons must be contorting outside. “A tiger!” and we peered through a crack of the latticed door and saw our Tissak Malaya basket scattered in sections over the garden path, and monkeys capering off with our store of Boro Boedor cocoanut-palm sugar. And this petty larceny of the garden monkeys was our only adventure with wild beasts in the tropics!

XXIV

“SALAMAT!”

The return from the hill-country to Buitenzorg and Batavia was all too hurried, and the soft Malay “_Salamat_” (“Farewell”) found much regretfully left undone. We lingered at the Sans Souci by Salak until the last hour of grace for the necessary steamer preparations at Batavia, as we dreaded the reeking sea-coast with its scorching noondays and stifling nights.

The shady avenues, the wonder-garden, the picturesque passer, and the veranda view of the great blue mountain rising from the valley of palms below were more enchanting than at first. I had come to appreciate and accept the tropics then, to be aware of many fine distinctions unnoted in the first enjoyment of their beauty. I fancied that I could detect greater coolness in the shade of the tamarind than in that of any other tree; the milk of a fresh cocoanut had become the most refreshing and delicious drink; and the palm had established itself in my affections and all associations with the outer world. There had come to be a sense of attachment, almost comradeship, in the constant companion tree, the graceful, restless creature that the natives say will not live beyond the sound of the human voice—dying if the village or habitation it guards is deserted. So nearly human and appealing are these waving cocoas that it is fitting that there should be a census of palms quite as much as of people, and that in the last enumeration it appeared that the people and the palms existed in even numbers—one palm apiece for every one of the millions of inhabitants of the island.

The drives and the scenery about Buitenzorg, the sunset and twilight band-concerts under the great aisles of kanari-trees, had fresh interest, and it was indeed a penance to leave without taking train around to the Preanger side of Mount Gedeh, and driving up to the sanatorium of Sindanglaya, over three thousand feet above sea-level. The cool mountain air at that elevation is cure and tonic for all tropic ills, and with the mercury always 20° lower than at sea-level, Sindanglaya is the one sure refuge for all Malaysia and Cochin China, French officers from Saigon reaching it more quickly than Japan or the highlands of Ceylon. From Sindanglaya one may go to the Gedeh’s crater, and to the summit of its twin peak, Pangerango, the highest mountain of the island, where, surrounded by primroses and violets,—the flora of the European temperate zone, islanded there after the period of great cold had retreated northward,—one may look down upon all the Batavia Residency, and out upon the Java Sea, and southward across Preanger hills to the greater Indian Ocean.

There was always some new or strange thing to pique one’s interest and implore delay, and the promise of the great talipot-palm of the gardens bursting into its magnificent flower, or the great creeper, the _Rafflesia_, producing one of its gigantic six-foot flowers, the biggest blossom known to the world,—was an inducement not put away without a pang. There were bird’s-nest caves near by on a mountain-side, and over in the highlands toward Bantam a strange colony of “Badouins,” more than a thousand refugees from religious persecution, who continue there unhindered the practice of a religion part pagan and part Buddhist, which commands the most severely upright lives. The anthropologist and economist have passed these people by, and one can find little concerning them in English print. Every day held its wonder and surprise, and rumor of more and of greater ones.

Although we were living and walking on the line of one of the great fissures of the earth’s crust all that time, and eleven of the forty-five volcanoes of the island are gently active, we did not once feel the tremor of an earthquake. Table d’hôte talk often turned upon the volcanic phenomena one and another guest had experienced, and the eruption of Krakatau—by no means an old story to these colonials—was a topic for which I had an insatiable appetite. They told one thrilling stories of that summer of Krakatau’s prolonged activity, of Batavian folk running frequent excursion-steamers to the Strait of Sunda to witness the spectacle of a volcano in eruption; and of that August Sunday of horror when the very end of the world seemed to have come to all that part of Java. A dense pall of smoke covered all of Buitenzorg’s sky that day; Salak was lost in the darkness, and it was thought that it or Gedeh was in eruption when crashes and roars beyond those of the most terrific thunderstorms, the bang and boom of the heaviest artillery’s bombardment, and the sound of frightful explosions filled the air, shook and rocked the ground, and rattled houses until conversation was impossible. Compass-needles spun around and around, barometers rose and fell, clouds of sulphurous vapors half strangled the people in the gloom of that awful Sabbath night, and no one slept with this dread cannonading and the end of the world seemingly close at hand. The next daylight brought the climax, a series of prolonged and awful roars, and then the very crack and crash of doom, when half of Krakatau’s island was torn away with the final explosion. None who endured those days of terror can tell of them without excitement; and those whose plantations were near the Sunda Strait had yet more gruesome times during the days of darkness and of greenish, horrid twilight, when the heavens seemed to be falling about them in the rain of ashes and hot stones. Batavian folk had as terrifying experiences, and each entering ship brought more awful tales of being caught by the waves or the eddies of that sickening sea, with hot stones setting decks and rigging afire, and the weight of hot ashes threatening to sink the vessels in the sea of pumice before they could be shoveled away. Pumice covered the ocean for miles away from Krakatau; and it drifted into Batavia harbor in a surface-layer so deep that planks were laid on it and men walked even a mile to shore, they say.

A Dutch scientific commission investigated and collected reports upon the phenomenal events, and its report, “Krakatau,” edited by R. D. M. Verbeek, the eminent geologist and director of mines to the Dutch government, was published at Batavia in 1885, in a quarto volume of 500 pages, in Dutch and French editions, accompanied by charts and an atlas of colored plates that make clear the whole course of the spectacular phenomena.

The Royal Society of Great Britain appointed a “Krakatoa Committee,” composed of thirteen of its most eminent geologists, meteorologists, seismists, and specialists in such lines, to collect data concerning this most remarkable eruption of the century, and its report, a quarto volume of 475 pages, edited by G. J. Symons, and published in London in 1888, embodies the result of their inquiries.

M. René Breon’s report to the French Minister of Public Instruction was published by his government, and he contributed papers to “La Nature,” in the April and May numbers for the year 1885. Mr. H. O. Forbes, the naturalist, was in Batavia in the first weeks of Krakatau’s activity, and the record of his excursion to the island and his observations was read to the Royal Geographic Society, and afterward published in vol. vi. of “Proceedings” (1884, pp. 129, 142).

The many official reports and accounts of the Krakatau eruption are best epitomized in Findlay’s “Sailing Directory for the Indian Archipelago and China” (p. 78):

In an old Dutch work there is an account of a violent eruption
on Krakatau in 1680, since which time it appears to have been
quiescent until May 21, 1883, when smoke was observed rising
from it, and it quickly became very active. On the 23d a vessel
encountered a large accumulation of pumice off Flat Cape,
Sumatra; and on the 24th volcanic cinders fell on the island of
Timor, twelve hundred miles distant.

For the next eight or nine weeks the eruption continued with
great vigor, increasing in activity on August 21st, preparatory
to its final great effort. On the evening of the 26th some
violent explosions took place, audible at Batavia, eighty miles
distant; and between 5 and 7 A. M. on the 27th there was a
still more gigantic explosion, followed about 10 A. M. by a
detonation so terrific as to be heard even in India, Ceylon,
Manilla, and the west coast of Australia, over two thousand
miles away. Following on these came a succession of enormous
waves, which completely swept the shores of the strait, utterly
destroying Anjer, Telok Betong, and numerous villages, the loss
of life being officially estimated at over thirty-six thousand
souls. The coasts and islands in the vicinity were buried under
a layer of mud and ashes.

The effects of this eruption were felt all over the world.
Ashes fell at Singapore, 519 miles distant, Bengkalis, 568
miles distant, and the Cocos Islands, 764 miles to the
southwestward; and undulations of the sea were recorded at
Ceylon, Aden, Mauritius, South Africa, Australia, and in
the Pacific. A wave of atmospherical disturbance was also
generated, which has been traced three times completely round
the world, traveling at the speed of sound. Many months
afterward pumice was cast ashore on Zanzibar Island and
Madagascar, supposed to have drifted from the Strait of Sunda.

The height of the column of steam and smoke given off by the
volcano is estimated at from nine to twelve miles,[9] the
consequence being that large quantities of fine dust were
discharged into the upper regions of the atmosphere, giving
rise to those beautiful sunset effects observed all over the
world for several months afterward. The amount of solid matter
ejected has been computed at over four and a quarter cubic
miles.

Such a convulsion has naturally greatly altered the features
of the surrounding sea and islands. The northern portion of
Krakatau has completely disappeared, and several banks and
shoals have been formed between it and Bezee Island, rendering
the passage between almost impracticable. It has not otherwise
affected the navigation of Sunda Strait, and its activity has
now ceased (1889)....

Krakatau Island, lying in the middle of Sunda Strait, has been
reduced in size from thirteen to six square miles, the site
of the northern part of the island now being covered by deep
water, no bottom being obtained at 164 fathoms at one spot.
The island is now three and a half miles in length, east and
west, and two miles wide at its east end. Mount Radaka, its
fine conical peak, which still remains, rising boldly up to the
height of 2657 feet, may be seen at a considerable distance,
and serves as a fairway mark for ships entering the strait
from the westward. It is in latitude 6° 9′ S., longitude 105°
27′ E., and its northern side is now a sheer precipice about
2550 feet high.... The island was uninhabited, but visited
occasionally by fishermen....

Verlaten Island has increased in size from about one and a
half to four and a half square miles. Lang Island has altered
somewhat in shape, but not much in size. The round islet named
Polish Hat has disappeared, but another islet now lies three
quarters of a mile west a half-mile from its south point, with
deep water between.

Bezee or Tamarind Island, lying ten and a half miles north by
east from Krakatau peak, has altered a little in shape, but not
in size, and appears to be the northern limit of the volcanic
disturbance.... Bezee Island formerly produced pepper.... The
village was on the east side opposite Little Tamarind Island,
but the volcanic eruption smothered the island with mud and
ashes.

Although we traveled on the island through all the November weeks, we did not experience any of the sensational downpours promised for the beginning of the rainy season, nor the terrific thunderstorms warranted to rend the heavens at the turn of the monsoon, nor any inconvenience or disarrangement of plans through the first instalments of the annual precipitation. The black clouds of the Java Sea did not suddenly envelop our ship in such sheets of rain that the vessel was forced to lay to, the lookout in the bows unable to see ten feet ahead of him, and the double sail-cloth awnings over the decks serving no more purpose than so much gauze. The rain did not descend in a flood or cloud-burst’s fury at precisely three o’clock every afternoon, penetrating carriage-curtains and -aprons, filling the carriage-boxes like tanks, and saturating every garment and article. Nor any more did we play billiards by lightning, without lamps, like that British planter who eventually scared away a party of Americans by his account of thunderstorms in Java. This British resident assured the tourists that at his Preanger plantation the thunder-claps shook the house, rocked the furniture, and stopped clocks, and that he had often turned out the reeling lamps for safety’s sake, and continued his games of billiards by the lightning’s incessant, blinding green glare. And the Americans believed it, and remained away from Java—British humor and American credulity matched to equally surprising extremes.

There were gentle, intermittent drizzles and light showers on several days; many days when the gray skies sulked and seemed about to weep; but the only hard showers were at night. The one vaunted sensational, tropical downpour, with blue-and-green lightning’s illumination, made my last Batavian midnight memorable, and put me at last in line with my climatic expectations. Yet that was at the end of November, when the monsoon was supposed to have sent off its irregular fireworks and settled down to the fixed program of a three-o’clock shower every afternoon, in order to precipitate its annual eighty inches of rain.

Even the thermometer disappointed one in this land comprised between the parallels of 5° and 8° south of the equator. Not once in my stay did it register as great a heat as I have once seen it register in Sitka in July—94° Fahrenheit; but as the column of mercury is often small gage or warrant for one’s own sensations, he must believe, even if with mental reservations, that Batavia’s mean temperature was but 78.69° for twelve years, with a monthly mean range of but two degrees. If one has been out in the sun at that hour, he feels skeptical about Batavia’s annual average noonday temperature being but 83°, all of four degrees cooler than Samarang’s and Sourabaya’s average noon temperature. He may believe that the thermometer very seldom falls below 70° or rises above 90°, but a quality in the air, a weight and appreciable humidity, make Batavia’s mean, exhausting, lifeless 83° noondays the climax of one’s discomfort.

With the upas-tree, the great snakes, the tigers, the pirates, and the good coffee exposed as myths; the white ants never eating out the contents of a trunk overnight; mildew ignoring the luggage left for over a fortnight at Buitenzorg; and the trunks left at Singapore for more than a month equally innocent of fungus-mold, I felt that the tropics had defrauded me a bit—or else that I had lent too willing an ear to returned travelers’ imaginations. Taking my own experience as proof, there might be written a brief chapter about snakes to match that famous one in Horrebow’s “History of Iceland.” But the disillusionment of disillusionments awaited us on the borders of Bantam, when the last Batavian day brought information that our so-called tiny bantam cock is not from Bantam at all. It was first seen on board a Japanese junk trading at Bantam in the long ago, and the Malays, who are natural and long-descended cock-fighters, saw in these little fowls combatants more spirited than any of their own breed, and of more manageable size. The true bantam cocks to the province born are nearly as large as turkeys; long ago Dr. Marsden told of their being as large as Norfolk bustards, and of their standing high enough to peck off the dinner-table, and said that when they sat down on the first joint of the leg they were taller than any common fowls. The introduction of the pretty Japanese fowls revolutionized cock-fighting, and the Dutch imported them through their Nagasaki factory, and introduced them to Europe.

The equator was proved not such a terrible thing as it had been made out to be—a thing that might be spoken of very disrespectfully because of that misplaced awe and veneration; and the tropics not at all as astonishing as they used to be, when illustrated books of travel, museum collections and models, and exposition villages had not made their life and scenery so familiar; when hothouses had not brought even orchids to common acquaintance, and Northern markets to displaying oranges and bananas as commonly and regularly as apples or potatoes.

With the other India—the whole continent of the real, the greater, or British India—before us, we could not delay on the Netherlands isle; and that strange, haunting, indefinite fear, the dread of some unknown, undefinable evil, that shadows and oppresses one so in the tropics, asserted itself more strongly as we approached Batavia. One is not sure whether this vague fear which possesses one under the line is due to the sense of extreme distance, to dread of the many diseases that lie in wait, to fear of the sudden deaths of so many kinds that may snatch one in the lands where the sun swings nearest, or to the peril of volcanic forces that may instantly overwhelm one in some disaster like that of Krakatau. At least, there was always a sensation of oppression, a dread of some impending danger in the midst of one’s enjoyment, and an unconscious looking-forward to free breathing and the sensation of safety, when once across the line again, back to the grand route and the world again, safe under the British flag at friendly Singapore, at home again with the English language.

Yet Java, the peerless gem in “that magnificent empire of Insul-Inde which winds about the equator like a garland of emeralds,” is the ideal tropical island, the greenest, the most beautiful, and the most exquisitely cultivated spot in the East, the most picturesque and satisfactory bit of the tropics anywhere near the world’s great routes of travel. Now that the dark days of Dutch rule are ended and enlightened modes prevail; now that the culture system has developed the island’s resources and made it all one exquisite, fruitful garden, and the colonists have begun to take an interest in uncovering and protecting the ancient monuments, the interest and attractions of Java are greater each year. It is alike the scientist’s greatest storehouse and the traveler’s unequaled tropical pleasure-resort and playground in the East. The antiquities have been merely scratched, explorations in that line are only well begun, leaving to archæologists and anthropologists a field of incalculable richness—more especially to those bent upon arriving at some solution of the great puzzle, some proof of Asiatic and American contact in pre-Columbian times. The puzzling resemblance of the older Javanese ruins to those of Central America has yet to be explained, and the alluring theory of migration from the rich “food-ponds” of the waters within the archipelago to other and farther inclosed seas teeming with fishes, until the Malays had followed with the great currents up one shore of the Pacific Ocean and down the other, must be proved. Dutch scientists naturally desire to explore and exploit this treasure-house of Java for themselves; but with a questioning world and many eager inquirers bent on solving all the mysteries and problems of race origin and migrations, the prize must be won by the swiftest.

If Baedeker or Murray would only go to Java and kindly light the tourist’s way; if the Dutch government would relax the useless vexations of the toelatings-kaart system, and the colonists welcome the visitor in more kindly spirit, Java would rank, as it deserves to, as a close second to Japan, an oasis in travel, an island of beauty and delight to the increasing number of round-the-world travelers, who each year are discouraged from visiting the country by less heedful ones who have ventured there.

Whether, as pessimists foretell, a Mohammedan rebellion shall desolate the isle; whether it remains in Dutch leading-strings, arrives at even the limited independence of a British colony, or succumbs to Germany’s colonial ambitions, as the French so freely prophesy, Java is certain soon to loom larger in the world’s view, and for a time at least to occupy the stage.

FOOTNOTES

[1] See Sir Stamford Raffles’s “History of Java,” Appendix A.

[2] “Max Havelaar,” by Edouard Douwes Dekker (Multatuli); translation by Baron Nahuys (Edinburgh, 1868).

[3] See “A Visit to Java,” W. Basil Worsfold, London, 1893.

[4] Holland has a population of 359 to the square mile (December 31, 1892), and Belgium a population of 540 to the square mile. French statisticians are confident that Java will soon surpass Belgium in the density of its population.

[5] Vide “Six Semaines à Java,” par Désiré de Charnay (“Le Tour du Monde,” volume for 1880).

[6] “Le Tour du Monde,” “Six Semaines à Java,” par M. Désiré de Charnay, volume for 1880.

[7] Majapahit, capital of the eastern empire, was near the modern Soerabaya.

[8] Pajajaran, capital of the western empire, was near the modern Batavia.

[9] The Royal Society gives an estimate of seventeen miles as the height of this great column of smoke.

INDEX

Achin, 4, 10.

Antiar. See UPAS.

Arabs, 37, 38, 227, 265.

Ashantee, 10, 72.

Asoka, 194.

Ayudya, 269.

Badouins, 326.

Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan, 154.

Bananas, 8, 80.

Bandong, 150.

Bantam, 42, 333.

Banteng, 133.

Batavia, 21, 25-48.

Batavian Society, Museum of, 34, 35, 36.

Baths, 60, 131.

Battek, 42, 45, 46.

Betel-nut, 42.

Bilimbi, 84.

Birds’ nests, 304.

Birds, tropic, 13, 130.

Block-printing, 261.

Boro, Boedor, 167-169, 182-202.

Botanical Garden, 66-70.

Brambanam, 218.

Breadfruit, 85.

Breon, M. René, 328.

Bromo, Mount, 265, 299.

Brumund, Herr, 169, 197.

Buddhism, 168, 169, 187, 190, 193, 194.

Buddhist art, 36, 167, 190, 223, 224.

Buffalo, water-, 55.

Buitenzorg, 49, 62-76, 79, 324.

Burglary, 271.

Cacao, 58, 129.

Carambola, 84.

Central America, 186, 232, 238, 263.

Chandi Sewou, 228-234.

Chicago Exposition, 143, 144, 145.

Chinese, 22, 37, 38, 39, 40, 80, 261, 262, 290.

Christianity, 55, 56.

Cinchona-culture, 70, 104, 150.

Climate, 21, 49, 127, 331, 332.

Coffee, 65, 115, 116.

Coffee-culture, 95, 103, 104, 142, 317.

Coinage, 20.

Courts of law, 271.

Culture system, 94-125.

Daendels, Marshal, 22, 95, 97, 270, 275, 276.

Dancing-girls, 188, 288.

De Charnay, M. Désiré, 186, 232, 238, 263, 264.

Delsarte, 293.

Depok, 65.

Dhyani, 193.

Dieng plateau, 237, 238.

Dishabille, 26, 66.

Djokjakarta, 170, 213, 269-282.

Dodok, 132, 156, 163, 246, 252, 297.

Duku, 83.

Durian, 85, 86.

Education, 56, 57.

Egypt, 263.

Fergusson’s “History of Indian and Eastern Architecture,” 169, 189,
220, 264.

Ferns, tree-, 317.

Findlay’s “Sailing Directory,” 328-330.

Forbes, H. O., 328

Frangipani, 68, 92, 93.

Fruits, 80-91.

Gamelan, 143, 287, 290, 297, 322.

Garoet, 312, 313.

Gautama Buddha, Prince Siddhartha, 187.

Gecko, 59, 212.

Gedeh, 325.

Government, colonial, 31, 32, 119, 120.

Gulden, 20.

Heyden, General Van der, 11.

Hotel life, 25, 26, 29, 58, 59, 61, 313.

Indigo-culture, 104.

Jamboa, 84.

Kalaidon, 151, 152, 153.

Kali, Goddess. See LORO JONGGRAN.

Kanari-trees, 67, 158, 302, 304.

Kawi language, 72, 283, 284, 293.

Khublai Khan, 227.

Kina. See CINCHONA.

Krakatau, 11, 326-330.

Kris, 35, 154, 242, 257, 258, 259, 272, 289.

Land laws, 119.

Laundering, 60.

Lawu, Mount, 263.

Leemans, Dr., 197.

Leles, plain of, 152, 153.

Literature, native, 283, 284.

Lizards, 59, 212, 248, 305.

Lombok, 278.

Loro Jonggran, 220, 223.

Macartney, Lord, 21, 289.

Mahabharata, 283, 284.

Majapahit, 241, 265, 269.

Malacca, Straits of, 1, 3, 8.

Malays, 2, 3, 41, 42, 121.

Mangosteen, 30, 87, 88.

Marco Polo, 227.

Mataram, 269, 278.

“Max Havelaar,” 110.

McKinley Bill, 77.

“Menac,” 298, 299.

Mendoet, 209, 210.

Merapi, 180, 263.

Merbaboe, 180, 263.

Metzger, Emile, 273.

Missions, 55.

Mohammedans, 38.

Money, J. W. B., 113, 114.

Monkeys, 224, 282, 323.

Monsoon, 18.

Mortality, 21.

Music, 143, 287, 290.

Nanko, 85.

No dance, 293.

Noesa Kambangan, 303.

North, Marianne, 126, 186.

Opium, 107.

Pajajaran, 241, 269.

Pajong, 174, 209, 246, 253, 254, 274, 296.

Pakoe Alam, Prince, 278, 290, 294-300.

Palaces, 36, 67, 246, 249.

Palms, 62, 72, 91, 205.

Pangerango, 325.

Panji, 258, 290.

Papandayang, 314, 319.

Papaya, 86, 87.

Parakan Salak, 128, 136.

Paranaks, 39, 261, 290.

Passer, 42, 79, 161, 176, 206, 254, 272, 313.

Passports. See TOELATINGS-KAART.

Pawnshops, 257, 273.

Perk, Herr, 228.

Pineapple, 87, 308.

Polo, Marco, 227.

Pomelo, 87.

Population, 17, 21, 22, 176.

Raden Saleh, 47, 71.

Raffles, Lady, 69, 75.

Raffles, Sir Stamford, 1, 3, 96, 97, 168, 169, 227, 264, 269, 283.

Railway, 5, 50, 51, 52, 164, 307.

Ramayan, 283.

Rambutan, 83.

Rice-fields, 52, 53, 147, 312.

Riz tavel, 30.

Royal Society of Great Britain, 328.

Sadoe, 19.

Salak (fruit), 84.

Salak, Mount, 18, 62, 127, 128.

Salt monopoly, 105.

Sarong, 26, 45, 46, 66, 257, 260, 281, 289, 312.

Siddhartha, Prince, 187.

Sinagar, 128-146.

Sindanglaya, 325.

Singapore, 1.

Singa Sari, 237.

Slavery, 101.

Snakes, 165, 166, 320.

Social life, 30, 33, 66, 129, 289, 294, 295, 313.

Soembung, 180.

Soerabaya, 265.

Soerakarta. See SOLO.

Solo, 240-264.

Staunton, 21, 289.

Steamships, 7.

Stirrup, 254.

Sugar-culture, 98, 115, 205.

Suku, 263, 264.

Sultan of Djokja, 274.

Sumatra, 9-11.

Susunhan, 241-246, 269, 270.

Tailors, 79, 162.

Tandjon Priok, 18, 19.

Tapioca, 310.

Tea-culture, 102, 103, 137, 138, 141.

Tengger, 265.

_Terra ingrata_, 163, 164.

“Thousand Temples.” See CHANDI SEWOU.

Tissak Malaya, 156-162.

Tjilatjap, 301, 302.

Toekoe Oemar, 11.

Toelatings-kaart, 23, 170, 211, 215.

Topeng, 278.

Tosari, 265.

Upas, 319, 321.

Verbeek, R. D. M., 328.

Volcanoes, 18, 67, 150, 180, 265, 309, 314, 318.

Vorstenlanden, 240.

Wallace, Alfred Russel, 12, 23, 114, 126, 169.

“Wandering Jew,” 47.

Water Kastel, 257, 277.

Wayang-wayang, 143, 287, 288.

Wilsen, Herr, 198.

Ylang-ylang, 92.

Yucatan, 238, 239, 264.