The moist heat of Java’s plains and seaports, even when the interest of a
place is just a little more remarkable than the temperature, soon turns
one to thoughts of escape, in the bare hope that Java somewhere in its
garden has a bower which has not the peculiar virtue of a vapor bath.
“Why, if you go to Garut,” I was told in a voice which suggested a wonder
that I was not required to believe without Thomas’s proof, “you will want
a blanket at night!”
I had never heard of Garut, but one place is as good as another to a
traveler who is rewarded by whatever he can get. I found Garut in the
mountains of central Java, somewhere behind Tjilatjap. There was no
trouble in finding it. Everybody seemed to know it. But I shall remember
Garut as I remember Sfax, Taormina, Chartres, Tlemçen, and other odd
corners of the earth, some without even a name on the map, where we
arrived by chance and disconsolate, and from which we departed with
something in our memory, forgotten till then, that had been lighted
briefly by what may have been a ray of moonshine. Can such an experience
be communicated? But how shall a man define his faith?
Yet there Garut is—or there it was, for I am not going to assert the
existence of any spot on earth that was, for all I know, revealed to me
briefly by lunar means—there Garut is for me at least, high on a ridge
above a confusion of tracks through rice and tobacco plantations. The
bearings of the place as I saw it can be only vague, and are probably
wrong. The women of its _campongs_ cast down their eyes as you approach,
the children run into their huts, and the men raise their big hats of
grass politely. It is secluded within ranges of dark peaks, but its own
fields are bright and have the warm smell of new earth. From a grove of
bamboos which fringes the highest ledge of a vast amphitheater terraced
with steps of rice you look out into space and down to an inclosed plain.
The plain is remote enough to be the ceremonious setting for the drama of
a greater race of beings; men would be insignificant there. But the stage
is empty; only the cicadas and frogs fill that immense arena with their
songs just before the day goes. The ridge of the opposite side of the
theater dissolves in rainstorms and is reformed momentarily by lightning.
The night was cold. I had to get up to find that blanket. It was still
colder before dawn, when a knocking at my door warned me that I had
arranged to go to a village called Jiporai, where it was said I could
find a horse and so could ride to some mysterious height where there were
hot springs in a forest. That folly was of my doing—it came of my easy
compliance to a foolish suggestion made when my mood, induced by Garut
and wine, was inclusive and grateful. Nor would it be any use, I found,
to ignore that knocking. The native outside was going to keep it up. In
the bleak small hours my need for a horse had vanished. I did not feel
it. I did not want a horse.
Yet there it was; and out of the village of Jiporai the track mounted
quickly, while from the saddle of a stout pony—he was as petulant as
myself over this preposterously early excursion—I looked at the darkness
which filled the amphitheater of mountains; it was a starless lake of
night. We were only just above the level of that expanse of chilling
shadow, and its depth, straight down from where the pony’s feet clattered
the stones on the edge of it, was unseen and unknown. But I stopped
him when the sun came. He turned his head, too, with his ears cocked
eastward. We both watched. The great space below us quickly filled with
light. We could see to the bottom of it. Without a movement, rider and
horse were at once placed by the dawn at a dizzy height, on an aërial
path.
The pony snorted and shook his head. It was morning, it was warm, and
suddenly the earth began to exhale odors. We went through a flimsy
_campong_, with relics of totems over its huts, and shy women with babies
straddled on their hips pretended they could not see us. The men were in
the padi fields beyond. We came upon some of these workers making coffee
and cooking rice under a thatch propped on four poles. They accepted us
as though they had always known us, and I may have had a better breakfast
than that at some time or other, but I don’t remember it.
We had to pass through a deep ravine remarkable with the fronds of
immense ferns arched from its rocks. There was an outlook at times
over steep places, where distant lower Java was framed in immediate
tree-ferns, grotesque leaves, and orchids. We passed up to a grassy
plateau, which might have been an English ducal park. The flowers
there were of another climate—raspberry, brambles, the yellow heads of
composite plants, and labiate herbs. In a hollow of a forest beyond there
were forbidding and incrusted recesses where the foliage was veiled
in bursts of steam. But we did not pause by those caldrons of boiling
mud. The smell of sulphur is not good. Those pools were not designed
for the rustic wonder of travelers, nor even to admonish them of what
follows after sin. I do not know for what they were designed, but a few
years ago, so I was told, they boiled over and obliterated forty of the
villages where the people are so good-natured.
So we learn that the rich and beautiful island of Java is not, after
all, a creation especially intended to support the flamboyant posters
of Batavia. Sometimes it does things on its own account. It was even
with a degree of pleasure, later, that I learned I should not be allowed
to leave Sourabaya without a visit to the port’s medical officer. It
broke the spell of the Garden of Eden to find that that corner of it
is infected by the plague, and that anyone emerging from the garden is
suspect of subtle evil. But what attraction would there be in a snakeless
Paradise?