prince was regretful that we had given up a trip to the sweltering end
of the island, where the Bromo smokes. “The Bromo is the only ‘lake of
fire’ in the world, you know,” said the prince, proudly. And soon after,
in answer to a question, he said, “No, I have never been in Europe, but
I have been all over Java”—this last with an emphasis that became one to
the island born, and appreciative of all its wonderful beauties.
When we praised and extolled the scenery of Java, he asked naïvely,
“Is America not beautiful, then? Have you no mountains, no beautiful
scenery there?” And when we answered patriotically to the facts,—Niagara,
the Yellowstone, the Yosemite, Mount Rainier, and Alaska,—he asked in
amazement, “Then why do you travel to other countries?”
The old prince announced the approaching marriage of his granddaughter
to the son of the Prince of Malang, and asked that we would attend the
fêtes which he would give in celebration of the affair a fortnight
later; but with all of the other India beckoning, we could not prolong
our stay in Java; and we took leave of our princely hosts then, to hasten
to the train, promising, as one always does in every pleasant place, to
come again when time would allow for a fuller enjoyment of this Javanese
Djokja, that we had only begun to know as we were leaving.
XXII
“TJILATJAP,” “CHALACHAP,” “CHELACHAP”
“Tjilatjap! Tjilatjap!” Often as one may sound those syllables aloud,
they seem absurd; and the very idea of spending the night in a town of
such name, of buying a railway ticket with that name printed on it, and
asking to have one’s luggage labeled to that destination, was enough to
tickle the fancy. Could there be solemn men and serious women living
there? and had the station a sign-board? and could the pale, grave little
Dutch children keep their faces straight and glibly pronounce the name of
that town without sneezing?
Whether it is printed “Tjilatjap,” “Chalachap,” or “Chelachap,” it at
once suggests enough puns to spare one printing them, and surely no town
on the north side of the equator could support such a name with any
dignity.
But Tjilatjap is one of the oldest foreign settlements in Java, the one
good harbor on the whole south coast; and the “Tjilatjap fever” is a
distinguished specialty of the region that surpasses all the deadly forms
of fever in Java. The place proved to be such a cemetery for European
troops that the government was finally forced to abandon the extensive
barracks, magazines, and fortifications it had once constructed there.
A considerable white population remains, however, and the passer is one
of great local importance to the natives. The completion of the railway
brought new life to the old settlement; and with such easy access,
Tjilatjap is well worth visiting, if it were only to see its shade-trees.
All the post-roads running into the town, every street and lane, are
such continuous isles, arcades, and tunnels of living green that one is
repaid for coming, even after all the other teak and tamarind, kanari
and waringen avenues he may have seen elsewhere in Java. Not the allées
of Versailles, nor the _cryptomeria_ avenues of Japan, can surpass these
tree-lined streets of Tjilatjap, the endless vistas of straight trunks
and arching branches, the lofty canopies of solid, impenetrable shade,
rejoicing one in every part of the town. Tamarind may be the coolest and
waringen the densest shade, but kanari-trees give the most splendid and
inspiring effect, and Tjilatjap is the place of their greatest perfection.
We drove during the late afternoon and until dusk through kanari avenues,
whose great green cathedral aisles, with fretted arches a hundred feet
overhead, dwarfed everything that moved or stood beneath them; and then
under cool, feathery tamarind bowers, and past arrays of noble teak,
everywhere exclaiming with delight. The use of the big-leaved teak for
street and post-road shade-trees seemed to me the acme of botanical
extravagance,—as ill ordered as putting Pegasus to a cart,—since we of
the temperate zone are used to even speaking of that expensive timber
with respect. While we drove through the magnificent avenues in the late
afternoon light, past parade-grounds and parks, over canals and along
their embankments, the rising mists and the solid blue vapors massing
in the distances were so much actual, visible evil—malaria almost in
tangible form. One felt that he should dine on so many courses of quinine
only, taking the saving sulphate first with a soup-spoon, if he expected
to survive the mad venture into Tjilatjap’s fever-laden air. A crowded,
neglected cemetery gave one further creeps and gruesome thoughts; and
the evil-smelling sugar and copra warehouses on the harbor front seemed
to seal our doom—that old ignorant instinct or idea asserting itself
that the bad smell must necessarily be the bad air. There is a beautiful
view from the old military encampment out over the land-locked harbor,
with a glimpse of the open ocean through a narrow entrance. The dark
mass of Noesa Kambangan (“Floating Island”) rises beyond the silvery
waters—a tropical paradise deliberately depopulated by the Dutch as a
strategic measure, that there might be no temptation of sustenance to
induce an attack or siege from that quarter. The island is mountainous,
and contains much fine scenery, many floral marvels, curious stalactite
caverns of holy repute where Siva is secretly worshiped, hot springs, and
even gold-mines, and is famous in the old Javanese poems and legends. The
great surf of the Indian Ocean beats upon its precipitous south shore,
where the clefts and caves in the bold cliffs are inhabited by myriads
of sparrows, who build there their edible nests. Nest-hunting furnishes
employment to the few islanders, and, like everything else, is strictly
regulated and taxed by the colonial government. The nest-hunters only
pursue their perilous quest after the young sparrows are well grown each
season, as only new, fresh, one-season-old nests serve to make the “bad
vermicelli” soup Celestial gourmets adore; and the hunters are often
suspended over the cliffs by ropes in order to reach their carefully
hidden homes. The glutinous white lumps are as much esteemed in Java as
in China, and this rare dainty commands a high price from the moment it
is secured.
There is a typical little country colonial hotel at Tjilatjap—a large
building containing the offices, drawing-room, and dining-room in the
center of a garden, with long, low buildings at either side of it, where
rows of bedrooms open upon the long arcade or bricked porch, which is a
general corridor, screened off into as many little open sitting-rooms,
each with its table, lamp, and lounging-chairs. After our malarial drive
we were served an excellent dinner, which concluded with a dessert course
of kanari _ambon_, the “Java almond,” or nut of the kanari-tree, soaked
in brandy. The kanari ambon has the shape and shell of a butternut; but
the long, solid white kernel is finer and firmer than even an almond,
and of a richer, more distinct and delicate flavor. These nuts of the
Tjilatjap region are superior to those grown elsewhere in Java, but we
learned this too late, when we tried to buy them elsewhere.
After the sun fell the air grew heavier and hotter—a stifling, sodden,
steaming, reeking atmosphere of evil that one could hardly force in and
out of the lungs. We gasped at intervals all through the long evening,
and wondered if some vast vacuum bell had not been dropped down over
Tjilatjap, while we batted flying things from our faces and swept them
from the writing-table. Lizards ran over the walls, of course; and one
pale-gray, clammy thing was picked from the bed-curtains, and thrown out
with a sickening “ugh!” The invisible one, in agony, called for “_Becky!
Becky! Becky!_” and a hoarser voice cried for “_Tokee! Tokee! Tokee!_” of
whom we had never heard before.
Wearily, without rustle of leaves, stir, or any provocation, a sullen
rain began to fall, and saturating the atmosphere, made it that much
heavier. The rain ceased as wearily as it had begun, and the awful,
sodden stillness was only broken by the slow, heavy drip of the listless
foliage, and the occasional thud of a falling mango. Far, far away,
faintly in the air was heard a smothered booming, moaning sound—the
ceaseless surf of the Indian Ocean. Overhead there was darkness, profound
and intense, beyond even heat-lightning’s illumining, with a more
impenetrable blackness where the double rows of ancient kanari-trees
shaded the street beyond the hotel garden. The possibilities of its
effects, the awful, desperate depression that loneliness in such
surroundings would surely cause, made me wonder how great was the
proportion of suicides’ graves in that damp, weedy cemetery we had driven
past in the gloaming.
Then three guests came over from the other part of the hotel, and,
spreading themselves out on chairs in the section of porch beyond our
partition screen, began conversation, all in Dutch consonants and palatal
garglings, with a volume and lung-power, a fervor and emphasis, that made
the languid air vibrate and the mangos fall in showers. Their voices
could have easily been heard at the harbor’s edge or the railway-station,
in a stamp-mill or in a boiler factory; and the humor of it—the three
Dutchmen in the stilly night bellowing away as if conversing through a
half-mile of fog—greatly relieved the sodden melancholy of the malarial
evening. Clouds of dense, rank, Sumatra tobacco-smoke rose from the
talkers’ mouths in volumes to match their voices, and until long past
midnight those three men on a silent porch conversed _more Hollandico_,
the roar of voices and the pungent smoke sending us dreams of Chicago
fires and riots, passing freight-trains, and burning forests.
We had been warned betimes that there would be no opportunity to lunch at
wayside stations or from compartment baskets during the long ride from
Tjilatjap to Garoet, and we planned accordingly. Our gentle Moslem, who
made such inconsequent, irresponsible child’s play at waiting on us, was
shown the bread and the cold buffalo beef, and bidden make sandwiches in
plenty. I even went into details as to salt and pepper, the “mustard” and
“no mustard” varieties, and insisted on white paper only for wrapping,
before leaving him to the task.
After all Tjilatjap’s evil name, we never had any ill effects from
venturing into it, and we had a sense of complacent rejoicing when we
took train, that next morning, for Maos on the main line of the railway,
and knew that a few hours would put us beyond the _terra ingrata_.
Nearly always, in our railway rides in Java, we had the first-class
compartments to ourselves; and we often looked longingly, despite the
heat, at the crowded second-class compartments, where many Europeans,
nice, intelligent-looking people and interesting families, traveled in
sociable numbers. The only companions ever of our first-class solitude
were, once, the chief constructor of the railways, who for a sudden
short trip had dispensed with his official car; and, again, a young
Holland geologist and mining expert returning from a season’s survey in
Borneo—both traveling at government expense. Only the more extravagant
planters, native princes, tourists, and officials with passes or under
orders seem to use the first-class cars, although the additional
comforts and the extra space are actual necessaries of travel in the
tropics. That the second-class carriages were always well filled with
Europeans showed that at least one thrifty notion of the Hollanders’ home
survived transplantation in this matter of railway fares. From the two
chance fellow-passengers whom we had the fortune to meet on the train
I derived enough, by a day’s steady questioning and comment, to atone
for the dearth of travelers’ talk I had suffered before. Both men were
cyclopedias of things Javanese, geologic and botanical, and those were
very red-letter days in the guide-bookless land.
There was always interest enough in watching the people by the way; and
as the through railway-trains were then novelties of a few days’ and
weeks’ experience in that section of Middle Java, the station platforms
were crowded with native sight-seers. Native officials and their trains
of attendants, Mohammedan women with gorgeous head-gear and the thinnest
pretenses of veils, stolid planters with obsequious, groveling servants,
and planters’ wives, barefooted, wrapped in scant sarongs, and as often
wearing red velvet jackets and other traveling toilets of eccentric
combination, the costume of the tropics and a Northern winter at the same
time—processions of these entertained us not a little as they went their
way to the other compartments of the long train.
After the scorching hours spent running through swamp and jungle, we drew
near the mountains; life became more bearable, and we beckoned our Moslem
at the next stopping-place.
“Bring the sandwiches; they are not in this basket.” He looked
blankness, as if a little vaguer and more becalmed in mind than usual.
“The sandwiches that you made at the Tjilatjap hotel this morning,” I
explained slowly. “Where are they?”
“Oh, I eat them—jus’ now,” said the soft-voiced one, naïvely, his hand
unconsciously traveling to the digestive region and comfortably stroking
it.
Language was useless at such a crisis, and sadly, silently, I resigned
myself to the rest of the ten hours’ empty ride. An hour later we reached
Tjiawi, near which the finest pineapples of the island are grown; and we
bought them on the platform, great fragrant, luscious globes of delight,
regardless of the almost prayerful requests made to us on arrival, that
we would not touch a pineapple in Java. We did a tourist’s whole duty to
specialties of strange places for that one day, buying the monster nanas
in most generous provision; and we made up for all previous denials and
lost pineapple opportunities as we tore off the ripe diamonds of pulp in
streaming sections that melted on the tongue; nor did we feel any sinking
at heart nor dread of the future for such indulgence. Then, at Tissak
Malaya, we bought strings of mangosteens through the car-windows. But
after the light, evanescent, six-o’clock breakfast of the country, these
noonday feasts of juicy fruits did not satisfy one for long, and soon we
hungered again.
At Tjipeundeui, in the shadow of the great volcanic range that walls the
west, a local chief, or village head man, was foremost on the station
platform, that was crowded with cheerful, chattering groups of natives,
hung over with bundles as if come from a fair. With great excitement the
chief announced that the Goenoeng Galoengoeng, or “Great Gong Mountain,”
was in eruption again. Two weeks before it had rumbled, as its name
indicates it has a habit of doing, and sent out a shower of stones
that ruined a large coffee-plantation, scorching and half burying the
budding trees in the hot rocks, pebbles, and sand. It had begun rumbling
and shaking again, the village wells had emptied, and the people had
fled, remembering too well the eruption of 1822, when one hundred and
fifteen villages were destroyed, twenty thousand people were killed, and
plantations ruined for twenty miles around by the rain of hot stones and
ashes, and the hot water and mud overflowing from the blown-out crater.
But such a gentle, happy, cheerful, chattering lot of refugees as they
were, saving their best sarongs and finery by wearing them, and tying the
rest of their treasures in shapeless bundles, as they went picnicking
forth to visit relatives until the volcanic disturbance might subside!
They were not a whit more care-worn or anxious than the crowd on the
next station platform, where two or three hundred pleasure-seekers were
returning from a famous country passer, whose rare meetings attract
people from afar. Even the chief of the volcanic village radiated joy
and pride all over his wrinkled old brown face as he related the moving
events occurring in his bailiwick. Eruptions were evidently his pastime,
a diversion quite in his line, since he had only come down to the railway
to see his family off to a place of safety, while he would return, play
Casabianca on his burning heath, and have it out with the resounding
Galoengoeng at his leisure.
We had an hour to wait at Tjibatoe station before the Garoet train
left, and the refreshment-room keeper offered tea and biscuits—the
inevitable, omnipresent Huntley & Palmer biscuits, that are the mainstay
and salvation, the very prop and stay and staff, of tourist life in
Netherlands as well as British India, and for whose making the great
Reading bakers buy the entire tapioca-crop of Java each year. After
a short wait in the room, redolent of gin and schnapps and colonial
tobacco, a boy sauntered in the back door with an iron tea-kettle, and
the proprietor was about to make the tea with that warm water, when we
chorused a protest. He good-naturedly allowed me to gather up tea-pot,
tea-kettle, small boy, and all, and go a hundred yards down the road,
climb a bamboo ladder laid against a bank, and restore the cooling kettle
to its place on the home fire in the airiest, dearest little fancy
basket of a home, in which one could imagine grown people playing “keep
house.” A bright-eyed little woman stirred the fire, gave me a box to sit
upon, and herself crouched before the sullen tea-kettle, chattering and
crooning like a child at play. “_Bodedit? Bodedit?_” (“Does it boil? Does
it boil?”) she asked seriously, putting her ear to the spout, or sliding
the lid and peering into the still interior; but it finally did boil
energetically. We made the tea; and, at risk of every bone, I descended
that slanting half-ladder in a gentle rain, and returned to enjoy quite
a feast that the kind refreshment-room keeper had conjured up in the
meantime.
XXIII
GAROET AND PAPANDAYANG
Rain blurred the landscape for all of the half-hour run from Tjibatoe
down to Garoet, and we lost the panorama of splendid mountains that
surround the great green Garoet plain, embowered in the midst of which is
the town of Garoet, a favorite hill and pleasure-resort of the island. We
did catch glimpses now and then, however, of dark mountain masses looming
above and through the clouds, and of flooded rice-fields and ripening
crops, with scarecrows and quaint little baskets of outlooks perched
high on stilts, where young Davids with slings lay in wait for birds.
Boys leading flocks of geese, and boys astride of buffaloes made other
pictures afield, and in the drizzling rain of the late afternoon we were
whirled through the dripping avenues to the Hotel Hork, home of Siamese
royalties and lesser tourists, health- and pleasure-seekers, who visit
this volcanic and scenic center of the Preanger regencies.
Our sitting-room porch at this summer hotel, with an endless season,
looked on a garden, whose formal flower-beds, bordered with stones and
shells, classic vases, and other conventions of their kind, reminded one
at once of by-places in Europe; and so also did the bust of Mozart and
the copy of Thorwaldsen’s “Venus,”—until one noted their protecting palm-
and mango-trees. This Garoet hotel is one of the institutions of Java,
and the Vrouw van Hork and her excellent Dutch housekeeping are famed
from Anjer Head to Banjoewangi. All the colonial types were represented
at the long table d’hôte, and every language of Europe was heard. There
were always nice neighbors at table, able and anxious to talk English,
and the cheery Dutch ladies were kindness and friendliness personified.
At no other resort on the island did we receive such a pleasant
impression of the simplicity, refinement, and charm of social life in the
colony. But, although two thousand feet above sea-level, in a climate of
mildly tempered eternal spring, the ladies all wore the sarong and loose
dressing-sacque in the morning, as in scorching Batavia or lowland Solo.
Even on damp and chilly mornings, when a light wrap was a comfortable
addition to our conventional muslin gowns, the Garoet ladies were
bare-ankled and as scantily clad as the Batavians; and there were shock
and real embarrassment to me in seeing in sarong and sacque the dignified
elderly matron who had been my charming dinner neighbor the night before.
There is an interesting passer at Garoet, and besides the lavish display
of nature’s products, there are curious baskets brought from a farther
valley, which visitors compete for eagerly. The town square, or overgrown
village green, is faced by the homes of the native regent and the Dutch
resident, and by the quaint little messigit, or Mohammedan mosque. The
last mufti, or head priest of the prophet, at Garoet was a man of such
intelligence and liberality that he had but one wife, and allowed her to
go with face uncovered, to learn Dutch, and to meet and freely converse
with all his foreign visitors, men as well as women. Travelers brought
letters to this mufti and quoted him in their books, but since his death
the more regular, illiberal order has ruled at Mohammedan headquarters.
The great excursion from Garoet is to the crater of Papandayang, a
mountain whose extended lines (fifteen miles in length by six in
breadth) match its syllables; which has been in vigorous eruption within
a century; and which still steams and rumbles, and, like the Goenoeng
Goentor, or “Thunder Mountain,” across the plain, may burst forth again
at any moment. At the last eruption of Papandayang, in 1772, there was
a great convulsion, a solid mass of the mountain was blown out into the
air, streams of lava poured forth, and ashes and cinders covered the
earth for seven miles around with a layer five feet thick, destroying
forty villages and engulfing three thousand people in one day. The scar
of the great crater, or “blow-out hole,” near the summit of the mountain,
is still visible from the plain, and the plumes and clouds of steam
ascending from it remind one of its unpleasant possibilities. We made a
start early one rainy morning, and drove twelve miles across the plain,
along hard, sandy white roads, continuously bordered with shade-trees.
The frequent villages were damp and cheerless, and the little basket
houses, that the people weave as they would a hat, were anything but
enviable dwellings then. The sling-shooters’ sentry-boxes throughout the
fields—perches where men or boys sat to pull sets of strings that reached
to scarecrows far away—suggested too much of clammy, rheumatic discomfort
to seem as picturesque as usual—strange little Malay companion pieces
to the same boxes on stilts that one sees perched in the rice-fields of
Hizen and the other southern provinces of Japan.
[Illustration: TRANSPLANTING RICE.]