toiling with double engines up the steep grades, it rests at a level, and
there bursts upon one the view of the plain of Leles—the fairest of all
tropical landscapes, a vision of an ideal promised land, and such a dream
of beauty that even the leaden blue clouds of a rainy afternoon could not
dim its surpassing loveliness. The railway follows a long shelf hewn high
on the mountain wall, that encircles an oval plain set with two conical
mountains that rise more than two thousand feet above the level of this
plain of Leles, itself two thousand feet above the level of the sea.
The finely wrought surface of the plain—networked with the living green
dikes and terraces of rice-fields, which, flooded, gleam and glitter
in the fitful sun-rays, or, sown and harvested, glow with a mosaic of
green and gold—is one exquisite symphony in color, an arrangement in
greens that holds one breathless with delight. All the golden greens of
rice seed-beds, the intense, vivid greens of young rice transplanted,
the opaque and darker greens of advanced crops, and the rich tones of
stubble are relieved by the clumps and masses of palms and fine-leaved
trees, which, like islands or mere ornamental bits of shrubbery, are
disposed with the most admirable effect to be attained by landscape
art. Each of these tufted clumps of trees, foregrounded with broad,
translucent banana-leaves, declares the presence of toy villages, where
the tillers of the plain, the landscape-farmers, and the artist-artisans
have woven and set up their pretty basketry homes. A masterpiece, a
central ornament or jewel, to which the valley is but the fretted and
appropriate setting, a very altar of agriculture, a colossal symbol and
emblem of abundance, is the conical Goenong-Kalaidon, a mountain which
rises three thousand feet from the level of the plain, and is terraced
all the way from base to summit with narrow ribbons of rice-fields—the
whole mountain mass etched with myriad fine green lines of verdure,
wrinkled around and around with the curving parapets and tiny terraces
that retain the flooded hanging gardens. Beyond this amazing piece of
agricultural sculpture stands Goenong-Haroeman, a more perfect pyramid,
a still rarer trophy of the landscape-farmer’s art, even more finely
carved in the living green lines of ancient terrace-culture. The rush of
the thousand rills, dropping from one tiny terrace to another, fills the
air with a peculiar singing undertone, an eerie accompaniment that adds
the last magic touch to the fascination of the plain of Leles. 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.
The railway, dipping nearly to the level of the plain as it describes a
great curve around the gloriously green Kalaidon, again ascends along the
side of the mountain wall, loops itself around the Haroeman pyramid, and
halts at the station of Leles. From that point one has a backward view
over the enchanting picture (a line of white bridges and culverts marking
the path of the railway along the mountain-side) and he looks directly
across at the soft green slopes of Haroeman, which faces him—that vast
green dome or pyramid, which is a little world in itself, with uncounted
villages nestling under clumps of palm-trees that break the lines of
singing terraces, and those peasants of the hanging gardens looking down
upon the most pleasing prospect, the most beautiful landscape in all
Java, which should be world-famous, and whose charm it is as impossible
to exaggerate as to describe.
The sesquipedalian names of the railway-stations throughout the Preanger
regencies, are something to fill a traveler’s mind between halts, and
almost explain why the locomotives not only toot and whistle nearly
all the time they are in motion, but stand on the track before station
sign-boards and shriek for minutes at a time, like machines demented.
Radjamendala is an easy arrangement in station names for the early
hours of the trip, and all that family of names—Tjitjoeroek, Tjibeber,
Tjirandjang, Tjipenjeum, Tjitjalenka, and also Tagoogapoe—will slip
from the tongue after a few trials; but when one strains his eyes
toward the limits of the plain of Leles, he may almost see the houses
of Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan. People actually live there and pay
taxes, and it is my one regret that I did not leave the train, drive
over, and have some letters postmarked with that astonishing aggregation
of sound-symbols. Only actual sight, too, could altogether convince
one, that one small village of metal-workers could really support so
much nomenclature together with any amount of profitable trade. In the
intervals of practising the pronunciation of that particular geographic
name, the artisans of Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan do hammer out
serviceable gongs, bowls, and household utensils of brass and copper. In
earlier times Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan was the Toledo of the isles,
and the kris-blades forged there had finer edge than those from any other
place in the archipelago. In these railroad and tramp-steamer days of
universal, wholesale trade rivalry, the blade of the noble kris more
often comes from abroad, and the chilled edges from Birmingham or those
made in Germany have displaced the blades made at the edge of the plain
of Leles, and the glory of Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan has departed.
XIII
“TO TISSAK MALAYA!”
The sun fell at six o’clock, and in the fast-gathering twilight of the
tropics the train shrieked past Tjihondje and Radjapolah, stopped but a
minute at Indihiang, and panted into Tissak Malaya like an affrighted
creature, to put up for the night. We were whirled through avenues of
pitch-darkness, with illuminated porticos gleaming through splendid
shrubberies, to the _passagrahan_, or government rest-house. At first we
thought the Parthenon had been restored and whitened, and leased to some
colonial landlord, or at least that we had come to the deserted summer
palace of some great sovereign, so lofty were the columns, so enormous
the shining white portico before which the sadoes halted. Quite feudal
and noble we felt ourselves, too, when the sadoe-drivers crouched on
their heels in that abject position of the dodok, or squatting obeisance,
and when they raised the coins to their foreheads in a reverent _simbah_,
or worshipful thanksgiving. Truly we were reaching the heart of a strange
country, and experiences were thickening!
The passagrahan was an object for sight-seers by itself. The great open
space under the portico was the usual living-room, with huge tables,
reading-lamps, and lounging- and arm-chairs fitted for a giant’s ease. A
grand hallway running straight through the center of the building held
the scattered and massive furniture of a banquet-hall. Bedrooms with
latticed doors opened from either side of this noble hall, the least
of these chambers twenty feet square, with ceilings twenty feet high;
while the beds, measuring seven by nine feet, suggested Brobdingnagian
nightmares to match.
At nine o’clock we followed a silent, beckoning Malay with a lantern off
into pitch-darkness, down a deserted street, around a hedge, to a smaller
white portico with lamps and rocking-chairs and center-tables. We were
dazed as we came suddenly into the glare of lights; and the other guests
at the _table d’hôte_ of the little hotel viewed us as they would have
viewed sudden arrivals by balloon.
“From America! To Tissak Malaya!” they all exclaimed, and we almost
apologized for having come so far. There was an amiable and charming
young Dutch woman in the company, who, speaking English, benefited all
her compatriots with the details of our present itinerary, our past lives
and mutual relationships, after each little conversational turn she took
with us.
Having commanded a sunrise breakfast for the next morning, we followed
the lantern and the silent Malay back through blackness to our
illuminated Parthenon of a passagrahan, and had entomological excitement
and entertainment for an hour, while all the strange flying things filled
the air and strewed the table beneath the lamps. The usual lizards
chuck-chucked and called for “Becky” in the shadows, and thin wraiths
of lizards ran over the great columns and walls; but a house-front that
was not decorated with lizards would be the strangest night sight in
Java. When we had laid ourselves out on the state catafalques in the
great bedrooms, stealthy whisperings and rustlings of palm-trees beyond
the latticed windows, other strange sounds, and startled bird-calls
throughout the night suggested the great snakes we had expected to
encounter daily and nightly in Java. The tiny light floating in a
tumbler of cocoanut-oil threw weird shadows over the walls, and within
the bed-curtains one had space to dance a quadrille or arrange a whole
set of ordinary bedroom furniture, while the open construction of the
upper partition-walls let one converse at will with the occupant of the
farthest apartment.
[Illustration: A MOHAMMEDAN MOSQUE.]
In the first clear light of the dewy morning we saw that a beautiful
garden surrounded the passagrahan, and our vast Parthenon of the darkness
did not seem so colossal when seen in the shadow of the magnificent
kanari-trees that shaded the street before it. While lost in admiration
of this splendid aisle of shade-trees, I saw a solitary pedestrian coming
down the green avenue, just the pygmy touch of human life needed to
complete the picture and give one measure for the soaring tree-trunks
and vast canopy of leaves. The slender figure, advancing with the
splendid, slow stride of these people, was visible now in a glorifying
shaft of earliest, level yellow sunlight, and then almost invisible
against the tall hibiscus-hedges or the green shadows of tree-trunks. A
nearer flash of sunlight gilded a tray he was carrying—a tray furnished
with three small cups of coffee and a plate with six thin wafers of
toast, which, well cooled by the long promenade in the fresh air of the
morning, constituted the breakfast of three able-bodied travelers, who
were to pass the rest of the day on the train, with only opportunity
for a sandwich lunch before the evening’s nine-o’clock dinner. We sent
back those thimble cups, and they were refilled with the same lukewarm,
indefinite, muddy gray fluid; but finally, by personal exertions and
a hasty trip down the magnificent avenue, some solid additions were
secured to the usual scant, skeleton, impressionist breakfast of the
country—some marmalade, some eggs, and a bit of the cold blue meat of the
useful buffalo. Everywhere in Java one’s first, best instincts and finer
feelings of the day are hurt and the appetite affronted by just such
early morning incidents; protest and prevision are alike useless, and
travel on the island is beset with unnecessary hardships.
The semi-weekly passer of Tissak Malaya was then beginning in a park,
or open market-place, in front of the passagrahan, and picturesque
processions of venders and buyers came straggling down the arched
avenues, and filled the shady quadrangle with a holiday hum. There were
double panoramas and stages of living pictures along each path in the
passer encampment, that grew like magic; and the glowing colors of the
fruit-, the flower-, and the pepper-markets, the bright sarongs and
turbans, and, above all, the cheerful chatter, were quite inspiring.
We bought everywhere—fruits, and a queer three-story basket to hold
them; yards of jasmine garlands, bunches of roses, and great double
handfuls of the green, lindenish ylang-ylang flowers, pinned with a
thorn in a plantain-leaf cornucopia—this last lot of perpetual fragrance
for three gulden cents only. Odd bottles of home-made attars of rose
and jasmine were sold as cheaply, and gums in straw cases, ready for
burning. There was a dry-goods district, where booths were piled high
and hung round with Cheribon and other gay sarongs of Middle Java,
slandangs and kerchiefs of strongest colors and intricate borderings.
We were distracted with the wide choice offered, but could not rouse
the phlegmatic dealers to any eagerness or excitement in bargaining;
the whole overcharge, reductions, and slow-descending fall in prices
proceeding, on the part of the dealers, with a well-assumed indifference,
an uninterrupted betel-chewing, a bored and lethargic manner that wore
one sadly. A long row of country tailors, thirty or forty of them in a
line, sat like so many sparrows around the edges of the passer in the
comforting shade of the kanari-trees. All were spectacled like owls,
and sat cross-legged before their little American sewing-machines. The
customers brought their cloth, the tailors measured them with the eye,
and in no time at all the machines were humming up and down the seams of
the jackets, that needed no fitting nor trying on, and were made while
the candidates sat and smoked and chatted with the sartorial artists.
From the chatter-chatter along this tailors’ row one might conclude that
what the barbers are to Seville, as purveyors of news, the tailors are to
Tissak Malaya.
All too soon we had to tear ourselves away from the fascinating passer,
and, loaded down with our mixed marketing, fly by sadoe to the station at
the far end of town. We saw then the magnificent aisle of kanari-trees we
had passed through in darkness the night before—an avenue more fitted for
an emperor’s triumphal procession than for our queer little two-wheeled
carts, drawn each by a mite of a pony, that was all but lifted from the
ground by the shafts when I stepped on the after foot-board untimely, the
driver dodoking like a hop-toad on the ground in respectful humility. The
natives were streaming down the great _allée_ and in from all the side
streets and by-paths toward the passer, and we half wished we might miss
the train when we realized what a spectacle that Tissak Malaya passer was
about to be.
In Middle Java, where the railway descends from the Preanger hills to
the _terra ingrata’s_ succession of jungle and swamp at the coast-level,
one experiences the same dull, heavy, sickening, depressing heat as
in Batavia. After the clear, fresh, mildly cool air, the eternal
southern-California climate of the hills, this sweltering atmosphere
gave full suggestion of the tropics’ deadly perils. Hour after hour
the train followed a raised embankment across an endless swamp, the
brilliantly flowered lantana-hedges still accompanying the tracks, and
a dense forest wall, tangled and matted together with ratans and other
creepers, shutting off the view on either side. The malaria and the
deadly fever-germs that haunt this region were almost visible, so dense
was the air. While this section of the railway was building, even the
native workmen were carried back each day to sleep in camps in safer
neighborhoods. No white man could work, nor remain there directing work,
and Chinese, who are germ-, bacillus-, microbe-, and miasma-proof in
every climate, superintended work between the flying visits of European
engineers. Beside these tangled and noisome swamps there are quicksand
regions, into which car-loads of solid materials were dumped for week
after week, and where the track is still always being raised and rebuilt,
and the floating earth-crust trembles with each passing train.
As we coursed along past those miles of rankest vegetation, not a waft
of perfume reached us, nor did any mass of color or cloak of blossoms
delight the eye—a green monotony of uninteresting vegetation, save for
the ratan-palms which decorated every tree with their beautiful pinnate
leaves. There was one luxuriant vine, half covering a tall tree, which
bore clusters of large white blossoms and pendent red berries; but
that was the one ideal vine of the imagined tropical jungle’s mad riot
of stranger and more gorgeous things than bougainvillea. No clouds,
cascades, or festoons of gorgeous flowers, no waves of overpowering
perfume, no masses of orchids, rewarded eager scrutiny; no birds of
brilliant plumage flashed across the jungle’s front; no splendidly
striped tigers licked their chops and snarled in the jungle’s shade; no
rhinoceros snorted at the iron horse; and not a serpent raised a hissing
head, slid away through dank grass, or looped itself from tree-top to
tree-top in proper tropical fashion, as we steamed across the deadly,
uninhabitable _terra ingrata_. Nor had even the first construction gangs
of railway-builders met with any such sensational incidents, so the chief
engineer of the railways afterward informed us. Seeing our disappointment
and dejection, this obliging official racked his memory and at last
recalled that he himself had once seen a wild peacock walking the track
in the _terra ingrata_.
“And yes! so there was. I remember now that one of our engineers, who
was running a special locomotive along there, did see a tiger sitting on
the track. He whistled loudly, and the tiger trotted up the track until
he found the engine gaining on him, and then the royal beast bounded off
into the jungle, snarling and spitting like an angry cat.”
“But there are great snakes in the swamps surely? You must run over them
often?” we persisted.
“Doubtless; but we rarely see snakes here in Java. There are many in
Borneo, Sumatra, and the other islands that are so wild yet. But you will
see them all at the zoölogical garden in Batavia.”
Closer questioning could only elicit the statement that, while all the
terrible Java snake-stories we had read might be true, we had no need
in this modern day to shake the pillows gently each night and morning
to dislodge the sleeping cobra or python; nor to draw the bed-curtains
closely at sounds like dry leaves blowing over the floor; nor to regard
the harmless hop-toad as the certain pilot and advance-guard of a snake.
I almost began to doubt, to discredit that standard favorite, that
typical tropical snake-story of the man who fell asleep on the edge of a
Java sawa, or rice-field, and waking with a sensation of great dampness
around one knee, found that a huge but harmless sawa snake had swallowed
his leg to that point. I was ready even to hear that there never had been
any skeleton-strewn, deadly upas-tree valley on Papandayang’s slope,
since every expected sensation had fled my approach—had removed to
Borneo, to Sulu, to more remote and impossible islands.
All travel, though, is only such disillusionment and disappointment,
and he who would believe and enjoy blood-curdling things should stay by
his own fireside. The disillusioned traveler has but to choose, on his
return, whether he will truthfully dispel others’ fondest illusions,
or, joining that nameless club of so many returned travelers, continue
to clothe the more distant parts of the world with the glamour of
imagination.
XIV
PRISONERS OF STATE AT BORO BOEDOR
The fact is not generally appreciated that there are ruins of Buddhist
and Brahmanic temples in Middle Java surpassing in extent and
magnificence anything to be seen in Egypt or India. There, in the heart
of the steaming tropics, in that summer land of the world below the
equator, on an island where volcanoes cluster more thickly and vegetation
is richer than in any other region of the globe, where earthquakes
continually rock and shatter, and where deluges descend during the rainy
half of the year, remains nearly intact the temple of Boro Boedor,
covering almost the same area as the Great Pyramid of Gizeh. It is
ornamented with hundreds of life-size statues and miles of bas-reliefs
presenting the highest examples of Greco-Buddhist art—a sculptured
record of all the arts and industries, the culture and civilization,
of the golden age of Java, of the life of the seventh, eighth, and
ninth centuries in all the farther East—a record that is not written in
hieroglyphs, but in plainest pictures carved by sculptor’s chisel. That
solid pyramidal temple, rising in magnificent sculptured terraces, that
was built without mortar or cement, without column or pillar or arch,
is one of the surviving wonders of the world. On the spot it seems a
veritable miracle.
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.
When Sir Stamford Raffles came as British governor of Java in 1811, the
Dutch had possessed the island for two centuries, but in their greed for
gulden had paid no heed to the people, and knew nothing of that earlier
time before the conquest when the island was all one empire, the arts
and literature flourished, and, inspired by Hindu influence, Javanese
civilization reached its highest estate; nor did the Hollander allow
any alien investigators to peer about this profitable plantation. Sir
Stamford Raffles, in his five years of control, did a century’s work. He
explored, excavated, and surveyed the ruined temples, and searching the
voluminous archives of the native princes, drew from the mass of romantic
legends and poetic records the first “History of Java.” His officers
copied and deciphered inscriptions, and gradually worked out all the
history of the great ruins, and determined the date of their erection at
the beginning of the seventh century.
At this time Sir Stamford wrote: “The interior of Java contains temples
that, as works of labor and art, dwarf to nothing all our wonder and
admiration at the pyramids of Egypt.” Then Alfred Russel Wallace said:
“The number and beauty of the architectural remains in Java ... far
surpass those of Central America, and perhaps even those of India.” And
of Boro Boedor he wrote: “The amount of human labor and skill expended
on the Great Pyramid of Egypt sinks into insignificance when compared
with that required to complete this sculptured hill-temple in the
interior of Java.” Herr Brumund called Boro Boedor “the most remarkable
and magnificent monument Buddhism has ever erected”; and Fergusson, in
his “History of Indian and Eastern Architecture,” finds in that edifice
the highest development of Buddhist art, an epitome of all its arts and
ritual, and the culmination of the architectural style which, originating
at Barhut a thousand years before, had begun to decay in India at the
time the colonists were erecting this masterpiece of the ages in the
heart of Java.
There is yet no Baedeker, or Murray, or local red book to lead one to and
about the temples and present every dry detail of fact. The references
to the ruins in books of travel and general literature are vague or
cautious generalities, absurd misstatements, or guesses. In the great
libraries of the world’s capitals the archæologists’ reports are rare,
and on the island only Dutch editions are available. Fergusson is one’s
only portable guide and aid to understanding; but as he never visited
the stupendous ruin, his is but a formal record of the main facts. Dutch
scientists criticize Sir Stamford Raffles’s work and all that Von
Humboldt and Lassen deduced from it concerning Javanese religion and
mythology. They entirely put aside all native histories and traditions,
searching and accepting only Chinese and Arabic works, and making a close
study of ancient inscriptions, upon the rendering of which few of the
Dutch savants agree.