djoelies, or sedan-chairs, each borne by four coolies, whose
go-as-you-please gait, not one of them keeping step with any other,
was especially trying so soon after coming from the enjoyment of the
swift, regular, methodical slap-slap tread of the chair-bearers of
South China. Despite their churning motion, the way was enjoyable;
and, beginning with a blighted and abandoned coffee-plantation at the
base of the mountain, we passed through changing belts of vegetation,
as by successive altitudes we passed botanically from the tropic to
the temperate zone. The bleached skeletons of the old coffee-trees,
half-smothered in undergrowth and vines, interested one more than the
beautifully ordered and carefully tended young coffee-trees in newer
plantations—sad reminders of those good old days before the war (the
Achinese war), the deficit, and the blight. Beyond kina limits there were
no more clearings, and then the tree-fern appeared—wan skeletons of trees
at first, where much thinning out had left them in range of scorching
sunlight; but in the shade of greater trees in the thick of the jungle
they stood superb—great, splendid, soft, drooping, swaying, gigantic
green fronds, a refined, effeminate, delicate, sensitive sort of palm,
the tropic’s most tropical, exquisite, wonderful tree. The upper regions
of Papandayang are all clothed with real jungle, the forest primeval,
with giant creepers writhing and looping serpent-like about the trees,
and doing all the extravagant things they are expected to do. Ratans,
or climbing palms, enveloped whole trees with their pendant, gracefully
decorative leaves; orchids swung in tasseled sprays, starred mossy trunks
and branches, and showed in all the green wonderland overhead and around;
and in each ravine, where warm streams sprayed the air, a whole hothouse
full of blooming, green, and strange loveliness delighted the eye.
We met strings of coolies descending with baskets of sulphur on their
backs, the path was yellow with the broken fragments of years’ droppings,
and infragrant, murky sulphur-streams crossed and ran beside the path, in
promise of the stifling caldrons we were fast approaching.
We had a magnificent view back over the Garoet plain, with its
checker-board of green and glinting fields, marked with the network of
white post-roads and dotted with the clumps of palms that bespoke the
hidden villages, and then we passed in through a natural gateway or
cutting in the solid mountain-side made by the last eruption. The broad
passage or defile led to the _kawa_, or crater, a bowl or depression deep
sunk in rocky walls, with pools of liquid sulphur bubbling all over the
five-acre floor and sending off clouds of nauseous steam. These pools,
vats of purest molten gold, boiled violently all the time, scattering
golden drops far and wide from their fretted, honey-combed edges. There
was always suggestion of the possibility of their suddenly shooting into
the air like geysers, and deluging one with the column of molten gold; or
of the soft filigree edges of the pools crumbling and precipitating one
untimely into the lakelet of fire and brimstone. Steam jets roared and
hissed from all parts of the quaking solfatara, and from the rumblings
and strange underground noises one could understand the native legends
of chained giants groaning inside of the mountain, and their name for
Papandayang, “The Forge.” The sulphur coolies stepped warily along the
paths between the pools; our shoe-soles were not proof against the steam
and scorch of the heaving ground beneath us; and carbonic-acid gas and
sulphureted hydrogen were all that one could find to breathe down there
on the crater’s floor—the undoubted Guevo Upas, or “Valley of Poison.”
It is said that one can see the shores both of the Indian Ocean and the
Java Sea from the summit of Papandayang, which is seven thousand feet
above their level. Although the skies were cloudy and doubtful around the
horizon edges, we were willing to take the brilliant noonday sun overhead
as augury, and attempt the climb. As there was no path beyond the
crater’s rest-sheds for the coolies to carry us in djoelies, we started
on foot straight up the first steep slope of the crater’s ragged wall,
through tangles of bushes and the rank bamboo-grass. We drove our servant
on ahead, and the poor indolent creature, cheated of his expected lounge
after his arduous pony-ride up the mountain and his midday rice-feast,
turned plaintive countenance backward, as he picked his reluctant way
barefooted through this prickly underbrush.
“What for go here?” he bleated.
“To get to the top of the mountain and see the two oceans.”
“Dis mountain no got top,” wailed the unconscionable one; but we
remembered the waist-deep water he had conjured up to discourage us from
Chandi Sewou; nor had we forgotten the Tjilatjap sandwiches with which he
had comforted himself such a few days before, and we said, “Go on!”
Then, remembering our perpetual hunt for and expectation of great snakes,
he turned mournful countenance and wailed: “_Slanga! slanga!_ [”Snakes!
snakes!“] always live dis kind grass.”
“Very well. That’s just what we want to find. Be sure you tell us as soon
as you step on one or see it moving.”
But, after pushing and tearing our way through bamboo-grass and bushes to
the first ridge, we saw only other and farther ridges to be surmounted,
with great ravines and stony hollows between. We took such view of
the cloudy plains and ranges to northward and southward as we could,
seeing everywhere the murky, blue, misty horizon of the rainy season,
and nowhere the silver sea-levels, nor the lines of perpetual surf that
fringe the Indian Ocean. We saw again the mosaic of rice-fields and dry
fields covering the Garoet plain; and looking down upon the foot of an
opposite mountain spur, we could study, like a relief-map or model tilted
before us, a vast plantation cultivated from tea to highest coffee and
kina level.
Nowhere in the slopes below could we see the vale of the deadly
upas-tree, that was last supposed to occupy a retired spot on
Papandayang’s remote heights. The imaginative Dr. Foersch, surgeon of
the Dutch East India Company at Samarang in 1773, made the blood of all
readers of the last century run cold with his description of himself
standing alone, “in solitary horror,” on a blasted plain covered with
skeletons, with another solitary horror of a deadly upas the only larger
object in sight. The Guevo Upas, or “Valley of Poison,” was first said to
be on the plain southeast of Samarang, but that region was explored in
vain; then it was put upon the Dieng plateau, and found not there; and
last the valley was said to be on the side of a high mountain far away in
the almost unexplored Preanger regencies. Dr. Horsfield, in his search
for volcanic data, routed the upas myth from the Papandayang region and
exploded it for all time, and the Guevo Upas has gone to that limbo where
the maelstrom and other perils of ante-tourist times are laid away. There
is a deadly tree in Java, the antiar (_Antiaris toxicaria_), whose sap
is as poisonous as serpent venom if it enters a wound, and will produce
deep, incurable ulcers if dropped on the skin; and skeletons of animals
may have been found beneath and near it. Erasmus Darwin immortalized
the deadly upas, or antiar, in his poem, “The Botanic Garden,” and this
antiar is the only actual and accepted upas-tree of the tropics. It is
quite possible that some valley or old crater on the mountain-side, where
the carbonic-acid and sulphurous gases from the inner caldron could
escape, would be strewn with skeletons of birds and animals, a valley of
death to man and beast, and as deadly a place, for the same reasons, as
the celebrated grotto at Naples; but no tree could live in those fumes
either; and the solitary tree on the “blasted plain” of skeletons, and
the Dutch doctor in his “solitary horror,” have to be abandoned entire—a
last disillusionment in Java.
When we returned from above, our djoelie coolies were squatted under
the tiled shed of refuge built for visitors and sulphur-miners, and
were as curious a lot of mixed types and races as one could find in an
ethnological museum. While the Malays have, as a rule, but scanty beards
and no hair on breast or limbs, two of these men were as whiskered
and hairy as the wild men of Borneo, or the hirsute ones of Ceylon,
the faces narrowed to the countenance of apes by the thick growth of
hair, and their breasts shaggy as a spaniel’s back. These wild men
came from some farther district, but our medium could not or would not
comprehend our queries and establish the exact spot of their birthplace
by cross-questioning the man-apes themselves; and the missing links sat
comfortably the while, submitting their disheveled heads to one and
another’s friendly search and attentions.
We were reluctant to descend Papandayang at the rapid gait the coolies
struck for going down hill, but they whisked us through the different
belts of vegetation and down to the serried rows of coffee-trees in
seemingly no time at all. The head man of Tjisoeroepan had posted the
village gamelan, or orchestra, in the little rustic band-stand of the
green, and their tinkling, mild, and plaintive melodies reached us
through the trees long before we were in sight of them. The musicians
played a long program while the djoelies were put away, carts and horses
brought round, and the very moderate bill itemized and paid—too modest a
bill altogether to need an accompaniment of slow music.
We reached Garoet as the delayed afternoon shower began falling; but the
lovely moonlight evening under the shade-trees of Garoet streets was to
be remembered, as were the later hours on the porch, with the iron bust
of Mozart looking at us from his tropical garden bower. In the middle of
the night we heard commotion on our porch, as of bamboo-chairs thrown
over and dragged about. “The snake!—at last!” was the first thought and
cry; and as the thrashing continued, it was evident that a whole den of
pythons must be contorting outside. “A tiger!” and we peered through a
crack of the latticed door and saw our Tissak Malaya basket scattered in
sections over the garden path, and monkeys capering off with our store
of Boro Boedor cocoanut-palm sugar. And this petty larceny of the garden
monkeys was our only adventure with wild beasts in the tropics!
XXIV
“SALAMAT!”
The return from the hill-country to Buitenzorg and Batavia was all
too hurried, and the soft Malay “_Salamat_” (“Farewell”) found much
regretfully left undone. We lingered at the Sans Souci by Salak until the
last hour of grace for the necessary steamer preparations at Batavia, as
we dreaded the reeking sea-coast with its scorching noondays and stifling
nights.
The shady avenues, the wonder-garden, the picturesque passer, and the
veranda view of the great blue mountain rising from the valley of palms
below were more enchanting than at first. I had come to appreciate and
accept the tropics then, to be aware of many fine distinctions unnoted
in the first enjoyment of their beauty. I fancied that I could detect
greater coolness in the shade of the tamarind than in that of any other
tree; the milk of a fresh cocoanut had become the most refreshing and
delicious drink; and the palm had established itself in my affections
and all associations with the outer world. There had come to be a sense
of attachment, almost comradeship, in the constant companion tree, the
graceful, restless creature that the natives say will not live beyond the
sound of the human voice—dying if the village or habitation it guards is
deserted. So nearly human and appealing are these waving cocoas that it
is fitting that there should be a census of palms quite as much as of
people, and that in the last enumeration it appeared that the people and
the palms existed in even numbers—one palm apiece for every one of the
millions of inhabitants of the island.
The drives and the scenery about Buitenzorg, the sunset and twilight
band-concerts under the great aisles of kanari-trees, had fresh interest,
and it was indeed a penance to leave without taking train around to
the Preanger side of Mount Gedeh, and driving up to the sanatorium of
Sindanglaya, over three thousand feet above sea-level. The cool mountain
air at that elevation is cure and tonic for all tropic ills, and with
the mercury always 20° lower than at sea-level, Sindanglaya is the one
sure refuge for all Malaysia and Cochin China, French officers from
Saigon reaching it more quickly than Japan or the highlands of Ceylon.
From Sindanglaya one may go to the Gedeh’s crater, and to the summit of
its twin peak, Pangerango, the highest mountain of the island, where,
surrounded by primroses and violets,—the flora of the European temperate
zone, islanded there after the period of great cold had retreated
northward,—one may look down upon all the Batavia Residency, and out upon
the Java Sea, and southward across Preanger hills to the greater Indian
Ocean.
There was always some new or strange thing to pique one’s interest
and implore delay, and the promise of the great talipot-palm of the
gardens bursting into its magnificent flower, or the great creeper, the
_Rafflesia_, producing one of its gigantic six-foot flowers, the biggest
blossom known to the world,—was an inducement not put away without a
pang. There were bird’s-nest caves near by on a mountain-side, and over
in the highlands toward Bantam a strange colony of “Badouins,” more
than a thousand refugees from religious persecution, who continue there
unhindered the practice of a religion part pagan and part Buddhist,
which commands the most severely upright lives. The anthropologist and
economist have passed these people by, and one can find little concerning
them in English print. Every day held its wonder and surprise, and rumor
of more and of greater ones.
Although we were living and walking on the line of one of the great
fissures of the earth’s crust all that time, and eleven of the forty-five
volcanoes of the island are gently active, we did not once feel the
tremor of an earthquake. Table d’hôte talk often turned upon the volcanic
phenomena one and another guest had experienced, and the eruption of
Krakatau—by no means an old story to these colonials—was a topic for
which I had an insatiable appetite. They told one thrilling stories of
that summer of Krakatau’s prolonged activity, of Batavian folk running
frequent excursion-steamers to the Strait of Sunda to witness the
spectacle of a volcano in eruption; and of that August Sunday of horror
when the very end of the world seemed to have come to all that part of
Java. A dense pall of smoke covered all of Buitenzorg’s sky that day;
Salak was lost in the darkness, and it was thought that it or Gedeh was
in eruption when crashes and roars beyond those of the most terrific
thunderstorms, the bang and boom of the heaviest artillery’s bombardment,
and the sound of frightful explosions filled the air, shook and rocked
the ground, and rattled houses until conversation was impossible.
Compass-needles spun around and around, barometers rose and fell, clouds
of sulphurous vapors half strangled the people in the gloom of that awful
Sabbath night, and no one slept with this dread cannonading and the end
of the world seemingly close at hand. The next daylight brought the
climax, a series of prolonged and awful roars, and then the very crack
and crash of doom, when half of Krakatau’s island was torn away with
the final explosion. None who endured those days of terror can tell of
them without excitement; and those whose plantations were near the Sunda
Strait had yet more gruesome times during the days of darkness and of
greenish, horrid twilight, when the heavens seemed to be falling about
them in the rain of ashes and hot stones. Batavian folk had as terrifying
experiences, and each entering ship brought more awful tales of being
caught by the waves or the eddies of that sickening sea, with hot stones
setting decks and rigging afire, and the weight of hot ashes threatening
to sink the vessels in the sea of pumice before they could be shoveled
away. Pumice covered the ocean for miles away from Krakatau; and it
drifted into Batavia harbor in a surface-layer so deep that planks were
laid on it and men walked even a mile to shore, they say.
A Dutch scientific commission investigated and collected reports upon
the phenomenal events, and its report, “Krakatau,” edited by R. D.
M. Verbeek, the eminent geologist and director of mines to the Dutch
government, was published at Batavia in 1885, in a quarto volume of 500
pages, in Dutch and French editions, accompanied by charts and an atlas
of colored plates that make clear the whole course of the spectacular
phenomena.
The Royal Society of Great Britain appointed a “Krakatoa Committee,”
composed of thirteen of its most eminent geologists, meteorologists,
seismists, and specialists in such lines, to collect data concerning this
most remarkable eruption of the century, and its report, a quarto volume
of 475 pages, edited by G. J. Symons, and published in London in 1888,
embodies the result of their inquiries.
M. René Breon’s report to the French Minister of Public Instruction was
published by his government, and he contributed papers to “La Nature,”
in the April and May numbers for the year 1885. Mr. H. O. Forbes, the
naturalist, was in Batavia in the first weeks of Krakatau’s activity, and
the record of his excursion to the island and his observations was read
to the Royal Geographic Society, and afterward published in vol. vi. of
“Proceedings” (1884, pp. 129, 142).
The many official reports and accounts of the Krakatau eruption are best
epitomized in Findlay’s “Sailing Directory for the Indian Archipelago and
China” (p. 78):
In an old Dutch work there is an account of a violent eruption
on Krakatau in 1680, since which time it appears to have been
quiescent until May 21, 1883, when smoke was observed rising
from it, and it quickly became very active. On the 23d a vessel
encountered a large accumulation of pumice off Flat Cape,
Sumatra; and on the 24th volcanic cinders fell on the island of
Timor, twelve hundred miles distant.
For the next eight or nine weeks the eruption continued with
great vigor, increasing in activity on August 21st, preparatory
to its final great effort. On the evening of the 26th some
violent explosions took place, audible at Batavia, eighty miles
distant; and between 5 and 7 A. M. on the 27th there was a
still more gigantic explosion, followed about 10 A. M. by a
detonation so terrific as to be heard even in India, Ceylon,
Manilla, and the west coast of Australia, over two thousand
miles away. Following on these came a succession of enormous
waves, which completely swept the shores of the strait, utterly
destroying Anjer, Telok Betong, and numerous villages, the loss
of life being officially estimated at over thirty-six thousand
souls. The coasts and islands in the vicinity were buried under
a layer of mud and ashes.
The effects of this eruption were felt all over the world.
Ashes fell at Singapore, 519 miles distant, Bengkalis, 568
miles distant, and the Cocos Islands, 764 miles to the
southwestward; and undulations of the sea were recorded at
Ceylon, Aden, Mauritius, South Africa, Australia, and in
the Pacific. A wave of atmospherical disturbance was also
generated, which has been traced three times completely round
the world, traveling at the speed of sound. Many months
afterward pumice was cast ashore on Zanzibar Island and
Madagascar, supposed to have drifted from the Strait of Sunda.
The height of the column of steam and smoke given off by the
volcano is estimated at from nine to twelve miles,[9] the
consequence being that large quantities of fine dust were
discharged into the upper regions of the atmosphere, giving
rise to those beautiful sunset effects observed all over the
world for several months afterward. The amount of solid matter
ejected has been computed at over four and a quarter cubic
miles.
Such a convulsion has naturally greatly altered the features
of the surrounding sea and islands. The northern portion of
Krakatau has completely disappeared, and several banks and
shoals have been formed between it and Bezee Island, rendering
the passage between almost impracticable. It has not otherwise
affected the navigation of Sunda Strait, and its activity has
now ceased (1889)....
Krakatau Island, lying in the middle of Sunda Strait, has been
reduced in size from thirteen to six square miles, the site
of the northern part of the island now being covered by deep
water, no bottom being obtained at 164 fathoms at one spot.
The island is now three and a half miles in length, east and
west, and two miles wide at its east end. Mount Radaka, its
fine conical peak, which still remains, rising boldly up to the
height of 2657 feet, may be seen at a considerable distance,
and serves as a fairway mark for ships entering the strait
from the westward. It is in latitude 6° 9′ S., longitude 105°
27′ E., and its northern side is now a sheer precipice about
2550 feet high.... The island was uninhabited, but visited
occasionally by fishermen....
Verlaten Island has increased in size from about one and a
half to four and a half square miles. Lang Island has altered
somewhat in shape, but not much in size. The round islet named
Polish Hat has disappeared, but another islet now lies three
quarters of a mile west a half-mile from its south point, with
deep water between.
Bezee or Tamarind Island, lying ten and a half miles north by
east from Krakatau peak, has altered a little in shape, but not
in size, and appears to be the northern limit of the volcanic
disturbance.... Bezee Island formerly produced pepper.... The
village was on the east side opposite Little Tamarind Island,
but the volcanic eruption smothered the island with mud and
ashes.
Although we traveled on the island through all the November weeks, we
did not experience any of the sensational downpours promised for the
beginning of the rainy season, nor the terrific thunderstorms warranted
to rend the heavens at the turn of the monsoon, nor any inconvenience
or disarrangement of plans through the first instalments of the annual
precipitation. The black clouds of the Java Sea did not suddenly envelop
our ship in such sheets of rain that the vessel was forced to lay to,
the lookout in the bows unable to see ten feet ahead of him, and the
double sail-cloth awnings over the decks serving no more purpose than so
much gauze. The rain did not descend in a flood or cloud-burst’s fury at
precisely three o’clock every afternoon, penetrating carriage-curtains
and -aprons, filling the carriage-boxes like tanks, and saturating every
garment and article. Nor any more did we play billiards by lightning,
without lamps, like that British planter who eventually scared away a
party of Americans by his account of thunderstorms in Java. This British
resident assured the tourists that at his Preanger plantation the
thunder-claps shook the house, rocked the furniture, and stopped clocks,
and that he had often turned out the reeling lamps for safety’s sake, and
continued his games of billiards by the lightning’s incessant, blinding
green glare. And the Americans believed it, and remained away from
Java—British humor and American credulity matched to equally surprising
extremes.
There were gentle, intermittent drizzles and light showers on several
days; many days when the gray skies sulked and seemed about to weep;
but the only hard showers were at night. The one vaunted sensational,
tropical downpour, with blue-and-green lightning’s illumination, made
my last Batavian midnight memorable, and put me at last in line with
my climatic expectations. Yet that was at the end of November, when the
monsoon was supposed to have sent off its irregular fireworks and settled
down to the fixed program of a three-o’clock shower every afternoon, in
order to precipitate its annual eighty inches of rain.
Even the thermometer disappointed one in this land comprised between the
parallels of 5° and 8° south of the equator. Not once in my stay did it
register as great a heat as I have once seen it register in Sitka in
July—94° Fahrenheit; but as the column of mercury is often small gage or
warrant for one’s own sensations, he must believe, even if with mental
reservations, that Batavia’s mean temperature was but 78.69° for twelve
years, with a monthly mean range of but two degrees. If one has been
out in the sun at that hour, he feels skeptical about Batavia’s annual
average noonday temperature being but 83°, all of four degrees cooler
than Samarang’s and Sourabaya’s average noon temperature. He may believe
that the thermometer very seldom falls below 70° or rises above 90°, but
a quality in the air, a weight and appreciable humidity, make Batavia’s
mean, exhausting, lifeless 83° noondays the climax of one’s discomfort.