Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

“ The houses of the great planters around Buitenzorg are ideal homes in the tropics, and the Tjomson and other large tea and coffee estates are like parks. The drives through their grounds show one the most perfect lawns and flower-beds and ornamental trees, vines, and palms, and such ranks on ranks of thriving tea-bushes and coffee-bushes, every leaf perfect and without flaw, every plant in even line, and the warm red earth lying loosely on their roots, that one feels as if in some ornamental jardin d’acclimatation rather than among the most staple and serious crops of commerce. ”

“ There are such clubs in every town on the island, the government subsidizing the opera and supporting military bands of the first order; and they furnish society its center and common meeting-place. One sees fine gowns and magnificent jewels; ladies wear the heavy silks and velvets of an Amsterdam winter in these tropical gardens, and men dance in black coats and broadcloth uniforms. Society is brilliant, formal, and by lamplight impressive; but when by daylight one meets the same fair beauties and bejeweled matrons sockless, in sarongs and flapping slippers, the disillusionment is complete. ”

“ There is a little Malay temple surrounded by graves in a frangipani-grove near the great pyramid, where the ground is white with the fallen “blossoms of the dead,” and the tree-trunks are decked with trails of white and palest pink orchids. The little kampong of Boro Boedor hides in a deep green grove—such a pretty, picturesque little lot of basket houses, such a carefully painted village in a painted grove,—the village of the Midway Plaisance, only more so,—such a set scene and ideal picture of Java, as ought to have wings and footlights, and be looked at to slow music. ”

“ Then every day has its afternoon shower, the air is heavy and stifling, all the tropic world is asteam and astew and afloat, vegetation is magnificent, insect life triumphant, and the mountains are hidden in nearly perpetual mist. There are heavy thunderstorms at the turn of the monsoon, and the one we had watched from the sea the Hallowe’en night before our arrival had washed earth and air until the foliage glistened, the air fairly sparkled, nature wore her most radiant smiles, and the tropics were ideal. ”

“ There were always the most decorative palm-trees in the right place to outline themselves against the rosy sunset sky, and the drives back to the hotel through the quick twilight and sudden darkness gave many views into lamp-lighted huts and houses—genre pictures of native life, Dutch-Indies interiors, where candle-light or firelight illuminated family groups and women at their homely occupations, that should inspire a new, a tropical school of Dutch painters. ”

“ Royal folk in wonderful jewels sit enthroned, with minions offering gifts and burning incense before them, warriors kneeling, and maidens dancing. The peasant plows the rice-fields with the same wooden stick and ungainly buffalo, and carries the rice-sheaves from the harvest-field with the same shoulder-poles, used in all the farther East to-day. Women fill their water-vessels at the tanks and bear them away on their heads as in India now, and scores of bas-reliefs show the unchanging customs of the East that offer sculptors the same models in this century. ”

“ 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 common sense and cooler vision of these days since its abandonment have shown that the culture system was an inspiration, a stroke of administrative genius of the first order, accomplishing in a few decades, for the material welfare of the island and its people, what the native race of a tropical country never could or would have done in centuries. The American mind naturally puzzles most over the idea that twenty odd millions of people of one race, language, and religion should ever have submitted to be ruled by a mere handful of over-sea usurpers and speculators. ”

“ The town tailors have their abode under that cover, and squat in rows before their little American hand-sewing machines, and sew the single seam of a sarong skirt, or reel off a native jacket, while the customer waits. It is the semi-weekly, early morning, outdoor market of chattering country folk that most delights and diverts a stranger, however. The lines of venders, strung along the shady street and grouped under palm-patched umbrellas in the open, provide horticultural and floral exhibits of the greatest interest, and afford the most picturesque scenes of native life. ”

“ It was not so very hot,—only 86° by the thermometer,—but the least exertion, to cross the deck, to lift a book, to pull a banana, left one limp and exhausted, with cheeks burning and the breath coming faster, that insidious, deceptive heat of the tropics declaring itself—that steaming, wilting quality in the sun of Asia that so soon makes jelly of the white man’s brain, and that in no way compares with the scorching, dry 96° in the shade of a North American, hot-wave summer day. ”

“ Boro Boedor is most mysterious and impressive in the gray of dawn, in the unearthly light and stillness [212] of that eerie hour. Sunrise touches the old walls and statues to something of life; and sunset, when all the palms are silhouetted against skies of tenderest rose, and the warm light flushes the hoary gray pile, is the time when the green valley of Eden about the temple adds all of charm and poetic suggestion. ”

“ The creepers run from tree to tree, and writhe over the ground like gray serpents; ratans and climbing palms one hundred feet in length are common, while uncommon ones stretch to five hundred feet. There is one creeper with a blossom like a magnified white violet, and with all a wood-violet’s fragrance; but with only Dutch and botanical names on the labels, one wanders ignorantly and protestingly in this paradise of strange things. The rarer orchids are grown in matted sheds in the shade of tall trees ”

“ It is one of the romances of Buddhism that this splendid monument of human industry, abandoned by its worshipers as one cult succeeded another, and forgotten after the Mohammedan conquest imposed yet another creed upon the people, should have disappeared completely, hidden in the tangle of tropical vegetation, a formless, nameless, unsuspected mound in the heart of a jungle, lost in every way, with no part in the life of the land, finally to be uncovered to the sight of the nineteenth century. ”

“ Hardly the miles of sculptured bas-reliefs on Boro Boedor and Brambanam temple walls make them any more impressive as monuments and records of human toil than these great green pyramids of Kalaidon and Haroeman, on which human labor has been lavished for all the seasons of uncounted generations—the ascending lines, the successive steps of the great green staircases of rice-terraces, recording ages of toil as plainly as the rings within a tree-trunk declare its successive years of growth. ”

“ These friendly little barefoot people are of endless interest, and their daily markets, or passers, are panoramas of life and color that one longs to transplant entire. Life is so simple and primitive, too, in the sunshine and warmth of the tropics. A bunch of bananas, a basket of steamed rice, and a leaf full of betel preparations comprise the necessaries and luxuries of daily living. With the rice may go many peppers and curried messes of ground cocoanut, which one sees made and offered for sale in small dabs laid on bits of banana-leaf, the wrapping-paper of the tropics. ”

“ When one rides through this green avenue in the dewy freshness of the early morning, it seems as though nature and the tropics could do no more, until he has penetrated the tunnels of waringen-trees, the open avenues of royal palms, the great plantation of a thousand palms, the grove of tree-fern, and the frangipani thicket, and has reached the knoll commanding a view of the double summit of Gedeh and Pangerango, vaporous blue volcanic heights, from one peak of which a faint streamer of smoke perpetually floats. ”

“ A gray ruin showed indistinctly on a hilltop, and after a run through a long, arched avenue we came out suddenly at the base of the hill-temple. Instead of a mad, triumphant sweep around the great pyramid, the ponies balked, rooted themselves past any lashing or “gr-r-ree-ing,” and we got out and walked under the noonday sun, around the hoary high altar of Buddha, down an avenue of tall kanari-trees, lined with statues, gargoyles, and other such recha, or remains of ancient art, to the passagrahan, or government rest-house. ”

“ Nothing from the outer world disturbed the peace of our Nirvana. No solitary horseman bringing reprieve was ever descried from the summit dagoba. No file of soldiers grounded arms and demanded us for Dutch dungeons. Life held every tropic charm, and Boro Boedor constituted an ideal world entirely our own. The sculptured galleries drew us to them at the beginning and end of every stroll, and demanded always another and another look. ”

“ We were led past flower-beds nodding with strange lilies, past rose-gardens and oleander-hedges, down a paved path that was a steep tunnel through dense shrubbery and overarching trees, to a great white marble tank, or swimming-pool, as large as a ball-room; though few ball-rooms can ever have such lavish decorations of palms, bamboos, and tree-ferns as screen that pool around, with the purple summit of Salak showing just above the highest plumes and fronds—a landscape study just fitted for a theatrical drop-curtain. ”

“ Life goes on in placidity, endless quiet, and routine at Boro Boedor. Visitors come rarely; they most often stop only for riz tavel, and drive on; and not a half-dozen American names appear in the visitors’ book, the first entry in which is dated 1869.
I remember the first still, long lotus afternoon in the passagrahan’s portico, when my companions napped, and not a sound broke the stillness save the slow, occasional rustle of palm-branches and the whistle of birds. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Finally the pale skeleton of an invalid, who was my next neighbor on the long porch, lifted his pitiful voice, and was helped out to his chair, and then our imperturbable Amat stirred from his leisured sleep on the flags beyond, meditated for a while, twisted his kerchief turban anew, disappeared, and returned with the tea-tray, silent, impassive, and automatic, as if under some spell. A graceful little woman peddler came to the porch’s edge—a pretty, gentle creature with dark, starry Hindu eyes, clear-cut features, even little white teeth, and crinkly hair. ”

“ There is a magnificent view from the Ashantee villa out over a great green plain and a valley of palms to the peaks of Gedeh and Pangerango, and to their volcanic neighbor, Salak, silent for two hundred years. Peasants, trooping along the valley roads far below, made use of a picturesque bamboo bridge that is accounted one of the famous sights of the neighborhood, and seemed but processions of ants crossing a spider’s web. All the suburban roads are so many botanical exhibitions approaching that in the great garden, and one’s interest is claimed at every yard and turn. ”

“ The most important buildings were shaken to formless mounds by earthquakes—the last great Djokja earthquake of 1867, when so many lives were lost, making the complete ruins that are covered with vines and weeds. The ornamental waters are choked with weeds and rubbish; the carved stonework is black with mold and lichens; the caves, grottoes, tunnels, staircases, and galleries around the wells are dripping and slippery with green mosses; and the rose-gardens and shrubberies are fast going to jungle. ”

“ Even the untidy Malay and the dirt-loving Chinese, who swarm to this profitable trading-center, and have absorbed all the small business and retail trade of the place, are held to outer cleanliness and strict sanitary laws in their allotted quarters. The stately business houses, the marble palace of a bank, the long iron pavilions shading the daily markets, the splendid Raffles Museum and Library, are all regular and satisfactory sights; but the street life is the fascination and distraction of the traveler before everything else. ”

“ The new cultures have not dispossessed the old, however, and the sawas, or flooded rice-fields, break the level of plain and valley floor with their myriad waving lines of division, and climb by terraces to the very hilltops—a system of cultivation and irrigation as old as the human race, and followed in these same valleys by these same Sundanese since the beginning of their recorded time. To them rice is a holy grain, the offspring of a god, and the gods’ best gift to man ”

“ The arches of gigantic kanari-trees growing over by-lanes and village paths, although intended for triumphal avenues and palace driveways, overpower one with the mad extravagance, the reckless waste, and the splendid luxury of nature. One cannot accept these things at first as utilities, just as it shocks one to have a servant black his shoes with bruised hibiscus flowers or mangosteen rind, or remove rust from kris- or knife-blades with pineapple-juice, thrusting a blade through and through the body of the pine. ”

“ One sees the monster retailed in segments in every passer; the natives are always munching it inconveniently to windward of one, and they not only praise it, but write poems to it, and respectfully salute the tree they see it growing on. This fruit of discordant opinions hangs high upon a tall tree, and is never picked, but allowed to fall to the ground when it becomes perfectly ripe. A falling durian is justly dreaded and guarded against by the natives, who tell of men whose shoulders have been lacerated and heads half crushed by the sudden descent of one of these great green cannon-balls. ”

“ It is a tropical experience to reverse an umbrella and in a few minutes fill it with golden-hearted white frangipani blossoms, or to find nutmegs lying as thick as acorns on the ground, and break their green outer shell and see the fine coral branches of mace enveloping the dark kernel. It is a delight, too, to see mangosteens and rambutans growing, to find bread, sausages, and candles hanging in plenty from benevolent trees, and other fruits and strange flowers springing from a tree’s trunk instead of from its branches. ”

“ Few women since Atalanta’s time have been able to run gracefully; and this thick-ankled young matron, with her flapping mule slippers, scant sarong, and shapeless jacket, outdid all descriptions and caricatures of “the woman who runs.” A friendly cavalier in gaudy battek pajamas, who had been talking to the lady, and blowing clouds of pipe-smoke into her face the while, gaily danced an elephantine fandango as the band went sounding down the street to give its sunset concert in the park. ”