the unearthly light and stillness 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.
Pitch-darkness so quickly follows the tropic sunset that when we left the
upper platform of the temple in the last rose-light, we found the lamps
lighted, and huge moths and beetles flying in and about the passagrahan’s
portico. Then lizards “chuck-chucked,” and ran over the walls; and the
invisible gecko, gasping, called, it seemed to me, “_Becky! Becky! Becky!
Becky! Becky! Becky!_” and Rebecca answered never to those breathless,
exhausted, appealing cries, always six times repeated, slowly over and
over again, by the fatigued soul doomed to a lizard’s form in its last
incarnation. There was infinite mystery and witchery in the darkness and
sounds of the tropic night—sudden calls of birds, and always the stiff
rustling, rustling of the cocoa-palms, and the softer sounds of other
trees, the shadows of which made inky blackness about the passagrahan;
while out over the temple the open sky, full of huge, yellow, steadily
glowing stars, shed radiance sufficient for one to distinguish the mass
and lines of the great pyramid. Villagers came silently from out the
darkness, stood motionless beside the grim stone images, and advanced
slowly into the circle of light before the portico. They knelt with many
homages, and laid out the cakes of palm-sugar, the baskets and sarongs,
we had bought at their toy village. Others brought frangipani blossoms
that they heaped in mounds at our feet. They sat on their heels, and
with muttered whispers watched us as we dined and went about our affairs
on the raised platform of the portico, presenting to them a living drama
of foreign life on that regularly built stage without footlights. One of
the audience pierced a fresh cocoanut, drank the milk, and then rolling
kanari and benzoin gum in corn-fiber, lighted the fragrant cigarette,
and puffed the smoke into the cocoa-shell. “It is good for the stomach,
and will keep off fever,” they answered, when we asked about this
incantation-like proceeding; and all took a turn at puffing into the
shell and reinhaling the incense-clouds. The gentle little Javanese who
provided better dinners for passagrahan guests than any island hotel had
offered us, came into the circle of light, with her mite of a brown baby
sleeping in the slandang knotted across her shoulder. The old landlord
could be heard as he came back far enough from his Nirvana to call for
the boy to light a fresh pipe; and one felt a little of the gaze and
presence of all the Dhyani Buddhas on the sculptured terraces in the
strange atmosphere of such far-away tropic nights by the Boedor of Boro.
When we came “gree-ing” back by those beautiful roads to Djokja, and
drew up with a whirl at the portico of the Hotel Toegoe, the landlord of
beaming countenance ran to meet us, greet us with effusion, and give us a
handful of mail—long, official envelops with seals, and square envelops
of social usage.
“Your passports are here. They came the next day. They are so chagrined
that it was all a stupid mistake. The assistant resident at Buitenzorg
telegraphed to the resident here to tell the three American ladies
who were to arrive in Djokja that he had posted their passports, and
to have every attention paid you. He wished to commend you and put you
_en rapport_ with the Djokja officials, that you might enjoy their
courtesies. Then the telegraph operator changed the message so as not to
have to send so many words on the wire, and he made them all think you
were some very dangerous people whom they must arrest and send back. The
assistant resident knew there was some mistake as soon as he saw you.”
(Did he?) “He is so chagrined. And it was all the telegraph operator’s
fault, and you must not blame our Djokja Residency.”
Instead of mollifying, this rather irritated us the more, and the
assistant resident’s long, formal note was fuel to the flame.
“LADIES: This morning I telegraphed to the secretary-general
what in heaven’s name could be the reason you were not to go
to Djokja. I got no answer from him, but received a letter
from the chief of the telegraph, who had received a telegram
from the telegraph office of Buitenzorg, to tell me there had
been a mistake in the telegram. Instead of ‘The permission is
not given,’ there should have been written, ‘The papers of
permission I have myself this moment posted. Do all you can
in the matter,’ etc. Perhaps you will have received them the
moment you get this my letter.
“So I am so happy I did not insist upon your returning to
Buitenzorg, and so sorry you had so long stay at Boro Boedor;
and I hope you will forget the fatal mistake, and feel yourself
at ease now,” etc.
Evidently the little episode was confined to the bureau of telegraphs
entirely, the messages to the American consul, secretary-general, and
Buitenzorg resident all suppressed before reaching them. Certainly this
was no argument for the government ownership and control of telegraphs in
the United States. There were regrets and social consolations offered,
but no distinct apology; and we were quite in the mood for having the
American consul demand apology, reparation, and indemnity, on pain of
bombardment, as is the foreign custom in all Asia. Pacification by small
courtesies did not pacify. Proffered presentation to native princes,
visits to their bizarre palaces, and attendance at a great performance
by the sultan’s actors, dancers, musicians, and swordsmen, would
hardly offset being arrested, brought up in an informal police-court,
cross-questioned, bullied, and regularly ordered to Boro Boedor under
parole. We would not remain tacitly to accept the olive-branch—not then.
The profuse landlord was nonplussed that we did not humbly and gratefully
accept these amenities.
“You will not go back to Buitenzorg now, with only such unhappy
experience of Djokja! Every one is so chagrined, so anxious that you
should forget the little contretemps. Surely you will stay now for the
great _topeng_ [lyric drama], and the wedding of Pakoe Alam’s daughter!”
“No; we have our toelatings-kaarten, and we leave on the noon train.”
And then the landlord knew that we should have been locked up for other
reasons, since sane folk are never in a hurry under the equator. They
consider the thermometer, treat the zenith sun with respect, and do not
trifle with the tropics.
XVII
BRAMBANAM
“In the whole course of my life I have never met with such
stupendous and finished specimens of human labor and of the
science and taste of ages long since forgot, crowded together
in so small a compass, as in this little spot [Brambanam],
which, to use a military phrase, I deem to have been the
headquarters of Hinduism in Java.” (Report to Sir Stamford
Raffles by Captain George Baker of the Bengal establishment.)
There are ruins of more than one hundred and fifty temples in the
historic region lying between Djokjakarta and Soerakarta, or Djokja
and Solo, as common usage abbreviates those syllables of unnecessary
exertion in this steaming, endless mid-summer land of Middle Java. As
the train races on the twenty miles from Djokja to Brambanam, there is
a tantalizing glimpse of the ruined temples at Kalasan; and one small
temple there, the Chandi Kali Bening, ranks as the gem of Hindu art in
Java. It is entirely covered, inside as well as outside, with bas-reliefs
and ornamental carvings which surpass in elaboration and artistic merit
everything else in this region, where refined ornament and lavish
decoration reached their limit at the hands of the early Hindu sculptors.
The Sepoy soldiers who came with the British engineers were lost in
wonder at Kalasan, where the remains of Hindu art so far surpassed
anything they knew in India itself; while the extent and magnificence of
Brambanam’s Brahmanic and Buddhist temple ruins amaze every visitor—even
after Boro Boedor.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF LORO JONGGRAN AT BRAMBANAM.]
We had intended to drive from Boro Boedor across country to Brambanam,
but, affairs of state obliging us to return from our Nirvana directly
to Djokja, we fell back upon the railroad’s promised convenience.
In this guide-bookless land, where every white resident knows every
crook and turn in Amsterdam’s streets, and next to nothing about the
island of Java, a kind dispenser of misinformation had told us that the
railway-station of Brambanam was close beside the temple ruins; and we
had believed him. The railway had been completed and formally opened but
a few days before our visit, and our Malay servant was also quite sure
that the road ran past the temples, and that the station was at their
very gates.
When the train had shrieked away from the lone little station building,
we learned that the ruins were a mile distant, with no sort of a vehicle
nor an animal nor a palanquin to be had; and archæological zeal suffered
a chill even in that tropic noonday. The station-master was all courtesy
and sympathy; but the choice for us lay between walking or waiting at the
station four hours for the next train on to Solo.
We strolled very slowly along the broad, open country road under the
deadly, direct rays of the midday sun,—at the time when, as the Hindus
say, “only Englishmen and dogs are abroad,”—reaching at last a pretty
village and the grateful shade of tall kanari-trees, where the people
were lounging at ease at the close of the morning’s busy passer. Every
house, shed, and stall had made use of carved temple stones for its
foundations, and the road was lined with more such recha—artistic remains
from the inexhaustible storehouse and quarry of the neighboring ruins.
Piles of tempting fruit remained for sale, and brown babies sprawled
content on the warm lap of earth, the tiniest ones eating the green edge
of watermelon-rind with avidity, and tender mothers cramming cold sweet
potato into the mouths of infants two and four months old. There was such
an easy, enviable tropical calm of abundant living and leisure in that
Lilliput village under Brobdingnag trees that I longed to fling away my
“Fergusson,” let slip life’s one golden, glowing, scorching opportunity
to be informed on ninth-century Brahmanic temples, and, putting off
all starched and unnecessary garments of white civilization, join that
lifelong, happy-go-lucky, care-free picnic party under the kanari-trees
of Brambanam; but—
A turn in the road, a break in the jungle at one side of the highway,
disclosed three pyramidal temples in a vast square court, with the ruins
of three corresponding temples, all fallen to rubbish-heaps, ranged in
line facing them. These ruined piles alone remain of the group of twenty
temples dedicated to Loro Jonggran, “the pure, exalted virgin” of the
Javanese, worshiped in India as Deva, Durga, Kali, or Parvati. Even the
three temples that are best preserved have crumbled at their summits
and lost their angles; but enough remains for the eye to reconstruct the
symmetrical piles and carry out the once perfect lines. The structures
rise in terraces and broad courses, tapering like the Dravidian gopuras
of southern India, and covered, like them, with images, bas-reliefs,
and ornamental carvings. Grand staircases ascend from each of the four
sides to square chapels or alcoves half-way up in the solid body of the
pyramid, and each chapel once contained an image. The main or central
temple now remaining still enshrines in its west or farther chamber an
image of Ganesha, the hideous elephant-headed son of Siva and Parvati.
Broken images of Siva and Parvati were found in the south and north
chambers, and Brahma is supposed to have been enshrined in the great east
chapel. An adjoining temple holds an exquisite statue of Loro Jonggran,
“the maiden with the beautiful hips,” who stands, graceful and serene,
in a roofless chamber, smiling down like a true goddess upon those who
toil up the long carved staircase of approach. Her particular temple is
adorned with bas-reliefs, where the _gopis_, or houris, who accompany
Krishna, the dancing youth, are grouped in graceful poses. One of these
bas-reliefs, commonly known as the “Three Graces” has great fame, and one
and two thousand gulden have been vainly offered by British travelers
anxious to transport it to London. Another temple contains an image of
Nandi, the sacred bull; but the other shrines have fallen in shapeless
ruins, and nothing of their altar-images is to be gathered from the
rubbish-heaps that cover the vast temple court.
[Illustration: CLEARING AWAY RUBBISH AND VEGETATION AT BRAMBANAM
TEMPLES.]
The pity of all this ruined splendor moves one strongly, and one deplores
the impossibility of reconstructing, even on paper, the whole magnificent
place of worship. The wealth of ornament makes all other temple
buildings seem plain and featureless, and one set of bas-reliefs just
rescued and set up in line, depicting scenes from the Ramayan, would be
treasure enough for an art museum. On this long series of carved stones
disconsolate Rama is shown searching everywhere for Sita, his stolen
wife, until the king of the monkeys, espousing his cause, leads him to
success. The story is wonderfully told in stone, the chisel as eloquent
as the pen, and everywhere one reads as plainly the sacred tales and
ancient records. The graceful figures and their draperies tell of Greek
influences acting upon those northern Hindus who brought the religion to
the island; and the beautifully conventionalized trees and fruits and
flowers, the mythical animals and gaping monsters along the staircases,
the masks, arabesques, bands, scrolls, ornamental keystones, and all the
elaborate symbols and attributes of deities lavished on this group of
temples, constitute a whole gallery of Hindu art, and a complete grammar
of its ornament.
[Illustration: KRISHNA AND THE THREE GRACES.]
These temples, it is believed, were erected at the beginning of the ninth
century, and fixed dates in the eleventh century are also claimed; but
at least they were built soon after the completion of Boro Boedor, when
the people were turning back to Brahmanism, and Hindu arts had reached
their richest development at this great capital of Mendang Kumulan, since
called Brambanam. The fame of the Javanese empire had then gone abroad,
and greed for its riches led Khublai Khan to despatch an armada to its
shores; but his Chinese commander, Mengki, returned without ships or
men, his face branded like a thief’s. Another expedition was defeated,
with a loss of three thousand men, and the Great Khan’s death put an end
to further schemes of conquest. Marco Polo, windbound for five months
on Sumatra, then Odoric, and the Arab Ibn Batuta, who visited Java in
the fourteenth century, continued to celebrate the riches and splendor
of this empire, and invite its conquest, until Arab priests and traders
began its overthrow. Its princes were conquered, its splendid capitals
destroyed, and with the conversion of the people to Mohammedanism the
shrines were deserted, soon overgrown, and became hillocks of vegetation.
The waringen-tree’s fibrous roots, penetrating the crevices of stones
that were only fitted together, and not cemented, have done most damage,
and the shrines of Loro Jonggran went fast to utter ruin.
A Dutch engineer, seeking to build a fort in the disturbed country
between the two native capitals, first reported these Brambanam temples
in 1797; but it was left for Sir Stamford Raffles to have them excavated,
surveyed, sketched, and reported upon. Then for eighty years—until the
year of our visit—they had again been forgotten, and the jungle claimed
and covered the beautiful monuments. The Archæological Society of Djokja
had just begun the work of clearing off and rescuing the wonderful
carvings, and groups of coolies were resting in the shade, while others
pottered around, setting bas-reliefs in regular lines around the
rubbish-heaps they had been taken from. This salvage corps chattered and
watched us with well-contained interest, as we, literally at the very
boiling-point of enthusiasm, at three o’clock of an equatorial afternoon,
toiled up the magnificent staircases, peered into each shrine, made the
rounds of the sculptured terraces, or processional paths, and explored
the whole splendid trio of temples, without pause.
Herr Perk, the director of the works, and curator of this monumental
museum, roused by the rumors of foreign invasion, welcomed us to
the grateful shade of his temporary quarters beside the temple, and
hospitably shared his afternoon tea and bananas with us, there surrounded
by a small museum of the finest and most delicately carved fragments,
that could not safely be left unprotected. While we cooled, and rested
from the long walk and the eager scramble over the ruins, we enjoyed too
the series of Cephas’s photographs made for the Djokja Society, and in
them had evidence how the insidious roots of the graceful waringen-trees
had split and scattered the fitted stones as thoroughly as an earthquake;
yet each waringen-gripped ruin, the clustered roots streaming, as if
once liquid, over angles and carvings, was so picturesque that we half
regretted the entire uprooting of these lovely trees.
[Illustration: LORO JONGGRAN AND HER ATTENDANTS.]
When the director was called away to his workmen, we bade our guiding
Mohammedan lead the way to Chandi Sewou, the “Thousand Temples,” or great
Buddhist shrine of the ancient capital. “Oh,” he cried, “it is far, far
from here—an hour to walk. You must go to Chandi Sewou in a boat. The
water is up to here,” touching his waist, “and there are many, many
snakes.” Distrusting, we made him lead on in the direction of Chandi
Sewou; perhaps we might get at least a distant view. When we had walked
the length of a city block down a shady road, with carved fragments and
overgrown stones scattered along the way and through the young jungle at
one side, we turned a corner, walked another block, and stood between the
giant images that guard the entrance of Chandi Sewou’s great quadrangle.
The “Thousand Temples” were really but two hundred and thirty-six
temples, built in five quadrilateral lines around a central cruciform
temple, the whole walled inclosure measuring five hundred feet either
way. Many of these lesser shrines—mere confessional boxes in size—are
now ruined or sunk entirely in the level turf that covers the whole
quadrangle, and others are picturesque, vine-wreathed masses, looking
most like the standing chimneys of a burnt house. This Buddhist sanctuary
of the eleventh century has almost the same general plan as Boro Boedor,
but a Boro Boedor spread out and built all on the one level. The five
lines of temples, with broad processional paths between them, correspond
to the five square terraces of Boro Boedor; and the six superior chapels
correspond to the circles of latticed dagobas near Boro Boeder’s summit.
The empty central shrine at Chandi Sewou has crumbled to a heap of
stones, with only its four stepped-arch entrance-doors distinct; and
the smaller temples, each of them eleven feet square and eighteen feet
high, with inner walls covered with bas-reliefs, are empty as well.
When the British officers surveyed Chandi Sewou, five of the chapels
contained cross-legged images seated on lotus pedestals—either Buddha,
or the _tirthankars_, or Jain saints; but even those headless and
mutilated statues are missing now. Every evidence could be had of wilful
destruction of the group of shrines, and the same mysterious well-hole
was found beneath the pedestal of the image in each chapel—whether as
receptacle for the ashes of priests and princes; a place for the safe
keeping of temple treasures; as an empty survival of the form of the
earliest tree-temples, when the mystery of animate nature commanded man’s
worship; or, as M. de Charnay suggests, the orifice from which proceeded
the voice of the concealed priest who served as oracle.
With these Brambanam temples, when Sivaism or Jainism had succeeded
Buddhism, and even before Mohammedanism came, the decadence of arts
and letters began. The Arab conquest made it complete, and the art of
architecture died entirely, no structures since that time redeeming the
people and religion which in India and Spain have left such monuments of
beauty.
[Illustration: PLAN OF CHANDI SEWOU (“THOUSAND TEMPLES”).
From Sir Stamford Raffles’s “History of Java.”]
The ruins of the “Thousand Temples” are more lonely and deserted in their
grassy, weed-grown quadrangle, more forlorn in their abandonment, than
any other of the splendid relics of Java’s past religions. The glorious
company of saintly images are vanished past tracing, and the rows of
little sentry-box chapels give a different impression from the soaring
pyramids of solid stone, with their hundreds of statues and figures
and the wealth of sculptured ornament, found elsewhere. The vast level
of the plain around it is a lake or swamp in the rainy season, and the
damp little chapels, with their rubbish-heaps in dark corners and the
weed-grown well-hole, furnish ideal homes for snakes. As our Mohammedan
had suggested snakes, we imagined them everywhere, stepping carefully,
throwing stones ahead of us, and thrusting our umbrellas noisily into
each chapel before we ventured within; but the long-anticipated, always
expected great snake did not materialize to give appropriate incident to
a visit to such complete ruins. Only one small wisp of a lizard gave the
least starting-point for a really thrilling traveler’s tale. The only
other moving object in sight at Chandi Sewou was a little girl, with a
smaller sister astride of her hip, who followed us timidly and sat for
a time resting on the knee of one of the hideous gate guardians—one of
the Gog and Magog stone monsters, who, although kneeling, is seven feet
in height, and who, with a club in his right hand, a snake wound around
his left arm, and a ferocious countenance, should frighten any child into
spasms rather than invite familiarity.
Herr Perk pointed out to us, on the common between the two great temples,
a formless green mound which he would excavate the following week, and
showed us also the Chandi Lompang, a temple cleared off eighty years ago,
but covered with a tangle of underbrush and a few tall trees—a sufficient
illustration of what all the Loro Jonggran temples had been when the
Djokja Society began its work of rescue and preservation. The British
engineers could see in 1812 that Chandi Lompang had been a central
shrine surrounded by fourteen smaller temples, whose carved stones
have long been scattered to fence fields and furnish foundation-stones
for the neighborhood. It was hoped that the kind mantle of vegetation
had preserved a series of bas-reliefs of Krishna and the lovely gopis,
wrought with an art equal to that employed by the sculptors of the “Three
Graces” at Loro Jonggran which the British surveyors uncovered. Every
one must rejoice that a period of enlightenment has at last come to the
colony, and that steps are being taken to care for the antiquities of the
island.
[Illustration: FRAGMENT FROM LORO JONGGRAN TEMPLE.]
There are other regions of extensive temple ruins in Java, but none
where the remains of the earlier civilization are so well preserved, the
buildings of such extent and magnificence, their cults and their records
so well known, as at Boro Boedor and Brambanam. The extensive ruins of
the Singa Sari temples, four miles from Malang, near the southeastern end
of the island, are scattered all through a teak and waringen forest, half
sunk and overgrown with centuries of vegetation. Images of Ganesha, and
a colossal Nandi, or sacred bull of Siva, with other Brahmanic deities,
remain in sight; and inscriptions found there prove that the Singa Sari
temples were built at about the same time as the Loro Jonggran temples
at Brambanam. The mutilation and signs of wanton destruction of the
recha suggest that it was not a peaceful conversion from Brahmanism to
Mohammedanism in that kingdom either.
On the Dieng plateau, southwest of Samarang, and not far from Boro
Boedor, there are ruins of more than four hundred temples, and the traces
of a city greater than any now existing on the island. This region has
received comparatively little attention from archæologists, although it
has yielded rich treasures in gold, silver, and bronze objects, a tithe
of which are preserved in the museum of the Batavian Society. For years
the Dieng villagers paid their taxes in rough ingots of gold melted
from statuettes and ornaments found on the old temple sites, and more
than three thousand florins a year were sometimes paid in such bullion.
The Goenoeng Praoe, a mountain whose summit-lines resemble an inverted
praoe, or boat, is the fabled home of the gods; and the whole sacred
height was once built over with temples, staircases of a thousand steps,
great terraces, and embankment walls, now nearly lost in vegetation, and
wrecked by the earthquakes of that very active volcanic region. These
Dieng temples appear to have been solid structures, whose general form
and ornamentation so resemble the ruins in Yucatan and the other states
of Central America that archæologists still revolve the puzzle of them,
and hazard no conjectures as to the worshipers and their form of worship,
save that the rites or sacrifices were very evidently conducted on the
open summits or temple-tops. I could not obtain views of these ruined
pyramid temples from any of the Batavia photographers, to satisfy me as
to their exact lines even in decay. There are other old Siva temples in
that region furtively worshiped still, and the “Valley of Death,” where
the fabled upas grew, was long believed to exist in that region, where
the cult of the destroyer was observed.
[Illustration: GANESHA, THE ELEPHANT-HEADED GOD.]