When a scholarly English traveler I met at Batavia found in me no warm
regard for the ancient Buddhist tope at Borobudor, and only a loose wish
to see it before I died, he adjusted his monocle to get me into a sharper
focus. I tried to meet his sudden critical interest with an aspect
hastily mustered of original intelligence, but I could see my reputation
had perished. He was disappointed. An unfortunate sign now showed in me
that he had hitherto overlooked. I should have to make a fight for this,
or it would end in my seeing the famous curiosity.
The archæologist was severe, and spoke slowly, like one who knows the
truth. “Remember, you have come many thousands of miles. It is probably
the only chance in your life to see one of the most remarkable temples in
the world.”
“But I don’t want to distort my brief span by trying to cram every
experience into it. I know I can be happy without Borobudor.”
“Eh? Pardon me. But this relic is unique.”
“So am I, sir; so are you. We are even older than that old tope by about
seven hundred years. Besides, I have seen its portraits, and they fill me
with despair.”
His monocle dropped from his raised eyebrow. “Despair? It’s a wonderful
mass. It’s an amazing pile. I do not understand so incurious a man.
You astonish me. Everybody sees it who comes to Java. Despair? Why,
dammit, think of the industry, think of the devotion of those people who
converted the rocks of a hilltop into a huge temple!”
“I have thought of it. That’s what disheartens me. It is horrible. Those
stones with their carvings commemorate calm and settled error....”
The archæologist held up his right hand and waved it gently in the way a
policeman stops the traffic. I stopped.
“Excuse me. If they erred, what is that to us? It is their art which
matters, not its cause. And even its cause—such devotion to their faith,
carried to its topmost pinnacle, crowning a hill with the proof of man’s
yearning mind, deserves more than your flippant indifference. Borobudor
was a temple to God.”
“That’s the trouble with it. That’s the nearest to God we ever get. If
I went, I know I should only have it rubbed in that we seem unable to
receive a simple lesson in wisdom without at once beginning to elaborate
it into a system to justify what we want to do. Why, if Buddha were to
come to Java, Borobudor is probably the one place he would be careful to
avoid!”
“Sir, you have no reverence for your fellows. Those sincere stones
celebrate faith.”
“What of that? Have you ever had to jump for it when faith dropped one
of its sincere bombs? Those fervid stones embarrass me like fetiches and
patriotic songs.”
“I’ve never heard anything like it. You can’t mean what you say. I won’t
listen to you. Here is man struggling upward through the ages, and he
reaches something so wonderful as Borobudor, and you talk as though it
were a symptom of a disease. Monstrous! Why ever do you travel, sir?”
“I don’t know, but I prefer to enjoy it, if I can.”
“But how can you enjoy it if you miss the most important things in
travel? What do you learn?”
“The confirmation of my prejudices, I suppose. What else could I learn?”
“Ah, the war has destroyed respect and worship in you younger men. You
want to begin everything again, but you cannot, you cannot. Borobudor is
there, and it is too strong for you. You think you can forget it, but it
won’t let you.”
“Why was that temple ever dug out of the jungle to which it belonged? A
fixed tangle of dark and incurable thoughts!”
“I cannot discuss this with you, sir. There is nothing else like
Borobudor in the world.”
“This poor world is overloaded with Borobudors. We struggle beneath them,
yet nothing will satisfy you but you must dig out another from the forest
which had fortunately hidden it. There it is, to distress any wretched
traveler who passes it with the idea that man will never escape from
himself. Borobudor is a nightmare.”
Shortly after this interview I was on my way to the ruins. It was not
by intention. My affairs drifted that way, somehow, perhaps because the
roads of the world are clandestine with their memory of the past, and so
we move in the old direction of humanity without ever knowing why. The
archæologist was right. The Borobudors are too strong for us. There is no
escape.
But we entered a region of Java where it was raining—where it had rained,
apparently, for a period approaching forty days. Gray clouds were
close to us. If we saw a mountain it had the appearance of the severe
personification of the Creator at the Flood presiding over the drowning
of the earth. The hurrying rivers were alarming. Their yellow floods
were above the lower branches of the forests. The toy hamlets, which had
looked so delightful in the sun, stood in shadow and inundation, with
the water up to the veranda ladders, and from their perches on those
ladders the dejected natives watched the rain still falling. Then the
railway track dissolved ahead of us and we had to wait till another was
made. So we were very late in reaching Jokyacarta, and it began to appear
as though the rain would wash away the Buddhist temple, so far as I was
concerned. Jokyacarta is an old native capital of Java, and the place
where the last rebellion of the island broke out against the Dutch, in
1825. It must have been a good rebellion. It lasted for five years.
Though I was not anxious to see historic relics, I was at least curious
to see the Javanese in an ancient center of their culture, because their
mild and docile demeanor elsewhere no more suggested rebellion than do
the timid orphans of a charity school.
In the hotel at night I argued myself into a corner. What about visiting
this temple, and doing what all travelers do? At length I surrendered. It
was clear I could not dispute with everybody who asked me what I thought
of Borobudor—for it would come to that; it would be assumed that I had
seen it and was awed—so I ordered a conveyance for the morning. The
temple was thirty miles distant. I had better get it over.
In the morning, before my very door, the folk of Jokyacarta were going
to market. They were gossiping, and looking this way and that, as casual
as though all days were holidays and obsessions of the human mind had
never been perpetuated in monumental stone and enduring empires. Nothing
was dark in that throng. It was as varied as a garden and as engaging as
birds on a June morning. I joined it. It is pleasant to go to market, for
markets are places where people live and where even small change is more
important than lost and awful fortunes. A motor-car stood at my door and
its driver salaamed, but I gave him good morning and passed on.
Jokyacarta, even to my inexperienced eye, was an important city, for its
people seemed unaware of the urgency of the outer world. They were going
their own way. The walls of the Sultan’s palace, about which even the
great trees are trimmed and subdued to the shape of the Royal Umbrella,
the Javanese sign of right and might, are said to inclose the ten
thousand people of his court. It was easy to believe it of such walls,
for they were prolonged beyond the extent of a merely ordinary interest
in walls, beyond a modern indifference to the prerogatives of divine
right, and beyond a simple wayfarer’s knowledge of the requirements
of a thousand wives and concubines. Such walls will arise, of course,
out of an intricate compost of Brahma, Buddha, and Mohammed, when the
many laboring rice-growers of a country are industrious, tolerant,
and credulous. Something like it can be done almost anywhere. Other
nations have made an ornate muddle not so vastly inferior out of the
worship of the steam engine and the cotton jenny. Those portentous
gates and buildings, and whispers of an elaborate royal ritual within
so overwhelming and anciently traditional as to appear insane to an
uninstructed stranger, were confidently supposed to be inducements to me
to enter. Yet, no. I could see no hope there; and I was traveling on the
bare chance of finding plain daylight. I did hear that in all affairs of
state in Jokyacarta to-day a Dutchman sits potent but unobtrusive, and
that thus the impressive display of divine right is almost sterilized of
its divinity; yet for all I could hear, that Dutchman might represent
only another kind of righteous power, and, as compulsion of any kind will
almost certainly rouse resistance in my wicked heart and I did not want
to excite evil on a pleasant day, I turned aside.
How faithful and bounteous a spring of original life—common humanity
everywhere! It is like rain and grass and the sun. To read the history of
Java from the Hindu to the Dutch would lead a distant student to imagine
that its people must have had every spark and airy bubble compressed out
by the strong governments of fifteen centuries, and that there is left
but a flat and doleful residue of homogeneous obedience. But some joy
will remain after the strongest governance has done its best. That market
place, though at least as old as sultanic prejudice in concubines, and
vastly more ancient than the Prophet’s victories in Java, might only that
morning have come into bloom. Its leisurely throng had forgotten that
the military roads of their island garden are built of their bones. They
have risen again. You may look for their conquerors in the old library
of the museum at Batavia, if you so much as remember their names; but
the unimportant victims of great triumphs, secure with a secret which is
hidden from mogulship no matter what its cavalry and batteries, looked
as though they, after all, were the favorites of the sun. I don’t know
what the positive evidence for immortality may be. I have never seen it.
I don’t know how it can be proved that we are the sons and daughters
of God. But when I remember the sergeant who called to his men toiling
through the mud and wire where the shells were falling, “Come on, you! Do
you want to live forever?” and when I recall, as I must when most fearful
for the meek at heart, the smiling forbearance of another man when he
looked at the error and hate that were to extinguish his good will, then
I think there must be a light that can never go out.
That was an assurance worth going to market to get. It was procurable
at any stall in Jokyacarta. What you bought was wrapped up in it. It
was certain these people could do very well without the aid of sultans,
priests, or governors, whose assistance, somehow, they had survived, so
far. What promise of Java’s development could be better than the figures
and poise of those girls who were selling their _batik_ to a Chinaman?
They were there when the Hindus came, they had survived every conquest,
and there they were still, with eternity in which to have their own way
if Chinamen were obdurate. Their gestures and pose proved them to be of
an ancient and noble line. The great dove-colored bull beside them, his
nose and ears of black velvet and his eyes tranquil with drowsy pride,
had come with them all the way from the past. That market place, with
its craftsmen and women, could light the fire of humanity again on the
abandoned hearths of a bare continent.
I was already settled with this comfortable thought in the train for
Sourabaya next day when an official from my hotel, whose anxious face was
peering into every coach, presently found me. There had been a mistake. I
had not paid for my motor-car to Borobudor. It had waited for me all day.
Borobudor?