interior of the island; and as they had not arrived by the afternoon
before we intended leaving Buitenzorg, we drove to the assistant
resident’s to inquire. “You shall have them this evening,” said that
gracious and courtly official, standing beside the huge carriage; “but
as it is only the merest matter of form, go right along in the morning,
ladies, anyhow, and I shall send the papers after you by post. To Tissak
Malaya? No? Well, then, to Djokjakarta.”
Upon that advice we proceeded on our journey, crossed the Preangers,
saw the plain of Leles, and made our brief visit to Tissak Malaya. We
rode for a long, hot day across the swamps and low-lying jungles of
the _terra ingrata_ of Middle Java, and just before sunset we reached
Djokjakarta, a provincial capital, where the native sultan resides in
great state, but poor imitation of independent rulership. We had tea
served us under the great portico of the Hotel Toegoe, our every movement
followed by the uncivilized piazza stare of some Dutch residents—that
gaze of the summer hotel that has no geographic or racial limit, which
even occurs on the American littoral, and in Java has a fixedness born of
stolid Dutch ancestry, and an intensity due to the tropical fervor of
the thermometer, that put it far beyond all other species of unwinking
scrutiny. The bovine, ruminant gaze of those stout women, continued
and continued past all provincial-colonial curiosity as to the cut and
stuff of our gowns, drove us to the garden paths, already twinkling with
fireflies. The landlord joined us there, and strolled with us out to the
street and along a line of torch-lighted booths and shops, where native
products and native life were most picturesquely presented. Our landlord
made himself very agreeable in explaining it all, walked on as far as
the gates of the sultan’s palace, plying us with the most point-blank
personal questions, our whence, whither, why, for how long, etc.; but
we did not mind that in a land of stares and interrogative English. He
showed us the carriage we could have for the next day’s twenty-five-mile
drive to Boro Boedor—“if you go,” with quite unnecessary emphasis on the
phrase of doubt. He finally brought us back to the portico, disappeared
for a time, and returning, said: “Ladies, the assistant resident wishes
to meet you. Will you come this way?” And the courteous one conducted us
through lofty halls and porticos to his own half-office parlor, all of us
pleased at this unexpected attention from the provincial official.
A tall, grim, severe man in the dark cloth clothes of ceremony, with
uniform buttons, waved a semi-military cap, and said curtly: “Ladies, it
is my duty to inform you that you have no permission to visit Djokja.”
It took some repetitions for us to get the whole sensation of the heavens
suddenly falling on us, to learn that a telegram had come from official
headquarters at Buitenzorg to warn him that three American ladies would
arrive that afternoon, without passports, to visit Djokja.
“Certainly not, because those Buitenzorg officials told us not to wait
for the passports—that they would mail them after us.” Then ensued
the most farcical scene, a grand burlesque rendering of the act of
apprehending criminals, or rather political suspects. The assistant
resident tried to maintain the stern, judicial manner of a police-court
magistrate, cross-examining us as closely as if it were testimony in a
murder trial we were giving, and was not at all inclined to admit that
there could be any mistake in the elaborately perfect system of Dutch
colonial government. Magnificently he told us that we could not remain
in Djokja, and we assured him that we had no wish to do so, that we
were leaving for Boro Boedor in the morning. The Pickwickian message
from Buitenzorg had not given any instructions. It merely related that
we should arrive. We had arrived, and the assistant resident evidently
did not know just what to do next. At any rate, he intended that we
should stand in awe of him and the government of Netherlands India.
He “supposed” that it was intended that we should be sent straight
back to Buitenzorg. We demurred, in fact refused—the two inflammable,
impolitic ones of us, who paid no heed to the gentle, gray-haired elder
member of our party, who was all resignation and humility before the
terrible official. We produced our United States passports, and quite
as much as told him that he and the noble army of Dutch officials might
finish the discussion with the American consul; we had other affairs,
and were bound for Boro Boedor. He waved the United States passports
aside, curtly said they were of “no account,” examined the letters of
credit with a shade more of interest, and gave his whole attention
to my “Smithsonian passport,” or general letter “to all friends of
science.” That beautifully written document, with its measured phrases,
many polysyllabic words in capital letters, and the big gold seal of
Saint-Gaudens’s designing, worked a spell; and after slowly reading all
the commendatory sentences of that great American institution “for the
increase and diffusion of knowledge among men,” he read it again:
“Hum-m-m! Hum-m-m! The Smithsonian Institution of
Washington—National Geographic Society—scientific observation and
study—anthropology—photography—G. Brown Goode, acting secretary! Ah,
ladies, since you have such credentials as _this_,”—evidently the
Smithsonian Institution has better standing abroad than the Department of
State, and G. Brown Goode, acting secretary of the one, was a better name
to conjure with away from home than Walter Q. Gresham, actual secretary
of the other,—“since you come so highly commended to us, I will allow you
to proceed to Boro Boedor, and remain there while I report to Buitenzorg
and ask for instructions. You will go to Boro Boedor as early as possible
in the morning,” he commanded, and then asked, “How long had you intended
to remain there?”
“That depends. If it is comfortable, and the rains keep off, we may stay
several days. If not, we return to-morrow evening.”
“No, no, no!” he cried in alarm; “you must stay there at Boro Boedor.
You have no permission to visit Djokja, and I cannot let you stay in my
residency. You must stay at Boro Boedor or go back to Buitenzorg.”
To be ordered off to the Buddhist shrine at sunrise put the pilgrimage in
quite another light; to be sentenced to Nirvana by a local magistrate in
brass buttons was not like arriving there by slow stages—meditation and
reincarnation; but as the assistant resident seemed to be on the point of
repenting his clemency, we acquiesced, and the great man and his minions
drove away, the bearer of the _pajong_, or official umbrella of his rank,
testifying to the formal character of the visit he had been paying. The
landlord mopped his brow, sighed, and looked like one who had survived
great perils; and we then saw that his sightseeing stroll down the
street with us had been a ruse, a little clever scouting, a preliminary
reconnaissance for the benefit of the puzzled magistrate.
We left Djokja at sunrise, with enthusiasm somewhat dampened from former
anticipations of that twenty-five-mile drive to Boro Boedor, “the aged
thing” in the Boro district of Kedu Residency, or Bára Budha, “Great
Buddha.” We had expected to realize a little of the pleasure of travel
during the barely ended posting days on this garden island, networked
over with smooth park drives all shaded with tamarind-, kanari-, teak-,
and waringen-trees, and it proved a half-day of the greatest interest and
enjoyment. Our canopied carriage was drawn by four little rats of ponies,
driven by a serious old coachman in a gay sarong and military jacket,
with a huge lacquered vizor or crownless hat tied on over his battek
turban, like a student’s exaggerated eye-shade. This gave the shadow
of great dignity and owlish wisdom to his wrinkled face, ornamented by
a mustache as sparsely and symmetrically planted as walrus whiskers.
He held the reins and said nothing. When there was anything to do, the
running footman did it—a lithe little creature who clung to a rear step,
and took to his heels every few minutes to crack the whip over the
ponies’ heads, and with a frenzied “Gree! G-r-r-_ee_! _Gr-r-r-e-e-e!_”
urge the mites to a more breakneck gallop in harness. He steered them by
the traces as he galloped beside them, guided them over bridges, around
corners, past other vehicles, and through crowds, while the driver held
the reins and chewed betel tobacco in unconcerned state. We rocked and
rolled through beautiful arched avenues, with this bare-legged boy in gay
petticoat “gr-r-ree-ing” us along like mad, people scattering aside like
frightened chickens, and kneeling as we passed by. The way was fenced
and hedged and finished, to each blade of grass, like some aristocratic
suburb of a great capital, an endless park, or continuous estate, where
fancy farming and landscape-gardening had gone their most extravagant
lengths. There was not a neglected acre on either side for all the
twenty-five miles; every field was cultivated like a tulip-bed; every
plant was as green and perfect as if entered in a horticultural show.
Streams, ravines, and ditches were solidly bridged, each with its white
cement parapet and smooth concrete flooring, and each numbered and marked
with Dutch preciseness; and along every bit of the road were posted the
names of the kampongs and estates charged to maintain the highway in its
perfect condition. Telegraph- and telephone-wires were strung on the
rigid arms of cotton-trees, and giant creepers wove solid fences as they
were trained from tree-trunk to tree-trunk—the tropics tamed, combed, and
curbed, hitched to the cart of commerce and made man’s abject servant.
Every few miles there were open red-tiled pavilions built over the
highways as refuges for man and beast from the scorching sun of
one season and the cloud-burst showers of the rainy half of the
year. Twice we found busy passers going on in groves beside these
rest-houses—picturesque gatherings of men, women, and children, and
displays of fowls, fruits, nuts, vegetables, grain, sugar, spices, gums,
and flowers, that tempted one to linger and enjoy, and to photograph
every foot of the passer’s area. The main road was crowded all the way
like a city street, and around these passers the highway hummed with
voices. One can believe in the density of the population—450 to the
square mile[4]—when he sees the people trooping along these country
roads; and he can well understand why every foot of land is cultivated,
how even in the benevolent land of the banana every one must produce
something, must work or starve. The better sanitary condition of the
native kampongs is given as a great factor in the remarkable increase of
population in the last half-century; but it took many years of precept
and example, strict laws, and a rating of native rulers and village
chiefs according to the cleanliness of their kampongs, before the native
hamlets became tropical counterparts of Broek and the other absurdly
clean towns of Holland. These careless children of the tropics are
obliged to whitewash their houses twice a year, look to their drains and
debris, and use disinfectants; and with the dainty little basket houses,
one of which may be bought outright for five dollars, and the beautiful
palms and shrubberies to serve as screens from rice-field vapors, each
little kampong is a delight in every way.
[Illustration: WAYSIDE PAVILION ON POST-ROAD.]
Men and boys toiled to the passer, bent over with the weight of one or
two monstrous jack-fruits or durians on their backs. A woman with a baby
swinging in the slandang over her shoulder had tied cackling chickens
to the back of her belt, and trudged on comfortably under her umbrella;
and a boy swung a brace of ducks from each end of a shoulder-pole, and
trotted gaily to the passer. The kampongs, or villages, when not hidden
in palm- and plantain-groves behind fancy bamboo fences, were rows of
open houses on each side of the highway, and we reviewed native life at
leisure while the ponies were changed. The friendly, gentle little brown
people welcomed us with amused and embarrassed smiles when our curiosity
as to sarong-painting, lacquering, and mat-weaving carried us into the
family circle. The dark, round-eyed, star-eyed babies and children showed
no fear or shyness, and the tiniest ones—their soft little warm brown
bodies bare of ever a garment save the cotton slandang in which they
cuddle so confidingly under the mother’s protecting arm—let us lift and
carry and play with them at will.
We left the main road, and progressed by a narrower way between open
fields of pepper, manioc, indigo, and tobacco, with picturesque views of
the three symmetrical and beautiful mountains, Soembung, Merbaboe, and
Merapi—the first and largest one as pure in line, as exquisite and ideal
a peak, as Fujiyama, and the others sloping splendidly in soft volcanic
outlines. Soembung is the very center of Java, and native legends cling
to the little hill of Tidar at its base—the “spike of the universe,” the
nail which fastens the lovely island to the face of the earth. Merbaboe,
the “ash-ejecting,” has wrought ruin in its time, and a faint white plume
of steam waves from its summit still. The capitulations which delivered
the Napoleonic possessions of the Dutch East Indies to England in 1811
were signed at the base of Merbaboe, and in our then frame of mind
toward the Dutch government we wished to make a pilgrimage of joyous
celebration to the spot. The third of the graceful peaks, Merapi, the
“fire-throwing,” was a sacred peak in Buddhist times, when cave-temples
were hewn in its solid rock and their interiors fretted over with fine
bas-reliefs. A group of people transplanting rice, a little boy driving
a flock of geese down the road, a little open-timbered temple of the
dead in a frangipani-grove—all these, with the softly blue-and-purple
mountains in the background, are pictures in enduring memory of that
morning’s ride toward Nirvana.
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.
XV
BORO BOEDOR
The deep portico of the passagrahan commands an angle and two sides of
the square temple, and from the mass of blackened and bleached stones the
eye finally arranges and follows out the broken lines of the terraced
pyramid, covered with such a wealth of ornament as no other one structure
in the world presents. The first near view is almost disappointing. In
the blur of details it is difficult to realize the vast proportions of
this twelve-century-old structure—a pyramid the base platform of which
is five hundred feet square, the first terrace walls three hundred feet
square, and the final dome one hundred feet in height. Stripped of every
kindly relief of vine and moss, every gap and ruined angle visible, there
was something garish, raw, and almost disordered at the first glance,
almost as jarring as newness, and the hard black-and-white effect of the
dark lichens on the gray trachyte made it look like a bad photograph
of the pile. The temple stands on a broad platform, and rises first
in five square terraces, inclosing galleries, or processional paths,
between their walls, which are covered on each side with bas-relief
sculptures. If placed in single line these bas-reliefs would extend for
three miles. The terrace walls hold four hundred and thirty-six niches or
alcove chapels, where life-size Buddhas sit serene upon lotus cushions.
Staircases ascend in straight lines from each of the four sides, passing
under stepped or pointed arches the keystones of which are elaborately
carved masks, and rows of sockets in the jambs show where wood or metal
doors once swung. Above the square terraces are three circular terraces,
where seventy-two latticed _dagobas_ (reliquaries in the shape of the
calyx or bud of the lotus) inclose each a seated image, seventy-two more
Buddhas sitting in these inner, upper circles of Nirvana, facing a great
dagoba, or final cupola, the exact function or purpose of which as key
to the whole structure is still the puzzle of archæologists. This final
shrine is fifty feet in diameter, and either covered a relic of Buddha,
or a central well where the ashes of priests and princes were deposited,
or is a form surviving from the tree-temples of the earliest, primitive
East when nature-worship prevailed. The English engineers made an opening
in the solid exterior, and found an unfinished statue of Buddha on a
platform over a deep well-hole; and its head, half buried in debris,
still smiles upon one from the deep cavern. M. Freidrich, in “L’Extrême
Orient” (1878), states that this top dagoba was opened in the time of the
resident Hartman (1835), and that gold ornaments were found; and it was
believed that there were several stories or chambers to this well, which
reached to the lowest level of the structure. M. Désiré de Charnay, who
spent an afternoon at Boro Boedor in 1878 in studying the resemblance of
the pyramid temples of Java to those of Central America, believed this
well-hole to be the place of concealment for the priest whose voice used
to issue as a mysterious oracle from the statue itself.
[Illustration: BORO BOEDOR. FROM THE PASSAGRAHAN]
A staircase has been constructed to the summit of this dagoba, and from
it one looks down upon the whole structure as on a ground-plan drawing,
and out over finely cultivated fields and thick palm-groves to the
matchless peaks and the nearer hills that inclose this fertile valley of
the Boro Boedor—“the very finest view I ever saw,” wrote Marianne North.
Three fourths of the terrace chapels and the upper dagobas have crumbled;
hundreds of statues are headless, armless, overturned, missing; tees, or
finials, are gone from the bell-roofs; terrace walls bulge, lean outward,
and have fallen in long stretches; and the circular platforms and the
processional paths undulate as if earthquake-waves were at the moment
rocking the mass. No cement was used to hold the fitted stones together,
and another Hindu peculiarity of construction is the entire absence of a
column, a pillar, or an arch. Vegetation wrought great ruin during its
buried centuries, but earthquakes and tropical rains are working now a
slow but surer ruin that will leave little of Boro Boedor for the next
century’s wonder-seekers, unless the walls are soon straightened and
strongly braced.
[Illustration: GROUND-PLAN OF BORO BOEDOR.]
All this ruined splendor and wrecked magnificence soon has an
overpowering effect on one. He almost hesitates to attempt studying out
all the details, the intricate symbolism and decoration lavished by those
Hindus, who, like the Moguls, “built like Titans, but finished like
jewelers.” One walks around and around the sculptured terraces, where
the bas-reliefs portray all the life of Buddha and his disciples, and
the history of that great religion—a picture-Bible of Buddhism. All the
events in the life of Prince Siddhartha, Gautama Buddha, are followed in
turn: his birth and education, his leaving home, his meditation under
Gaya’s immortal tree, his teaching in the deer-park, his sitting in
judgment, weighing even the birds in his scales, his death and entrance
into Nirvana. The every-day life of the seventh and eighth century is
pictured, too—temples, palaces, thrones and tombs, ships and houses, all
of man’s constructions, are portrayed. The life in courts and palaces, in
fields and villages, is all seen there. 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. Half the wonders of that
great three-mile-long gallery of sculptures cannot be recalled. Each
round disclosed some more wonderful picture, some more eloquent story,
told in the coarse trachyte rock furnished by the volcanoes across the
valley. Even the humorous fancies of the sculptors are expressed in
stone. In one rilievo a splendidly caparisoned state elephant flings
its feet in imitation of the dancing-girl near by. Other sportive
elephants carry fans and state umbrellas in their trunks; and the marine
monsters swimming about the ship that bears the Buddhist missionaries
to the isles have such expression and human resemblance as to make one
wonder if those primitives did not occasionally pillory an enemy with
their chisels, too. In the last gallery, where, in the progress of the
religion, it took on many features of Jainism, or advancing Brahmanism,
Buddha is several times represented as the ninth avatar, or incarnation,
of Vishnu, still seated on the lotus cushion, and holding a lotus with
one of his four hands. Figure after figure wears the Brahmanic cord, or
sacrificial thread, over the left shoulder; and all the royal ones sit
in what must have been the pose of high fashion at that time—one knee
bent under in tailor fashion, the other bent knee raised and held in a
loop of the girdle confining the sarong skirt. There is not a grotesque
nor a nude figure in the whole three miles of sculptured scenes, and the
costumes are a study in themselves; likewise the elaborate jewels which
Maia and her maids and the princely ones wear. The trees and flowers are
a sufficient study alone; and on my last morning at Boro Boedor I made
the whole round at sunrise, looking specially at the wonderful palms,
bamboos, frangipani-, mango-, mangosteen-, breadfruit-, pomegranate-,
banana-, and bo-trees—every local form being gracefully conventionalized,
and, as Fergusson says, “complicated and refined beyond any examples
known in India.” It is such special rounds that give one a full idea
of what a monumental masterpiece the great Buddhist _vihara_ is, what
an epitome of all the arts and civilization of the eighth century A.
D. those galleries of sculpture hold, and turn one to dreaming of the
builders and their times.
No particularly Javanese types of face or figure are represented. All the
countenances are Hindu, Hindu-Caucasian, and pure Greek; and none of the
objects or accessories depicted with them are those of an uncivilized
people. All the art and culture, the highest standards of Hindu taste
and living, in the tenth century of triumphant Buddhism, are expressed
in this sculptured record of the golden age of Java. The Boro Boedor
sculptures are finer examples of the Greco-Buddhist art of the times
than those of Amravati and Gandahara as one sees them in Indian museums;
and the pure Greek countenances show sufficient evidence of Bactrian
influences on the Indus, whence the builders came.