Part 9

The good little Javanese who went to Chicago returned from their great outing as simple and unspoiled as before, settled down contentedly under their kanari-trees, and resumed their routine life in field and fabrik. And what tales they had to tell to open-mouthed villagers and neighbors, who sat around the traveled ones, to the neglect of wayang-wayang and provincial professional story-tellers, listening to their accounts of the very remarkable things on that other side of the world! For the first time ever in their lives these Javanese saw white men at work in the fields, drudging in city streets, and doing every kind of menial, coolie labor. They saw a few black men, blacker than Moormen, but they were great personages, wearing fine uniforms and having command of the railway-trains, and riding in the most magnificently gilded cars—individuals treated always with great respect, who came to the Midway Plaisance in rich clothing, with gold watch-chains, jeweled scarf-pins, and much loose money in their pockets—a superior and a moneyed, if not the ruling class, in that topsy-turvy country, America.

A striped cat of the common roof-and-fence variety was given to one of the village managers, and made the journey back to Java with the party. Everything else in Chicago had been paid for so dearly that this tabby could be fairly said to represent the entire profit and result of the Chicago village venture. The cat was named “Chicago,” and soon became the pet of the whole plantation, roaming freely everywhere, and feasting on small rice-mice and tropical birds. “Chicago” came to us on our arrival, rubbed in friendly fashion against one and another American knee, and purred loudly, as if recognizing us for compatriots. The morning we left Sinagar there was hubbub and running to and fro in the great quadrangle of the residence. “Chicago,” while walking the well-curb with gesticulating tail, had lost her balance, and with frightful cries and a splash ended her existence—by unpleasant coincidence, just as we were making our farewells to our kindly host. “In despair at being unable to return to America with you,” said one mourner, “she has thrown herself in the well. It is plainly suicide.” And this domestic tragedy saddened our leave-taking from those charming people, the fine flavor of whose hospitality, courtesy and kindliness took the edge from many of our disagreeable experiences in Java, and gave us pleasant memories with which to offset those of the other kind.

XII

ACROSS THE PREANGER REGENCIES

One may ride all day by train from Buitenzorg before reaching the limits of the Preanger regencies, where native princes still hold pretended sway; and it is a continuous landscape feast from the sunrise start to the sunset halt of the through-train. The railway line, after curving around the shoulder of Salak, runs through the vaunted hill-country, the region of the great tea, coffee, and kina estates; and from Soekaboemi to Bandong, the two great headquarters for planters, one perceives that the planter is paramount, the cultivator is king. The new cultures have not dispossessed the old, however, and the _sawas_, or flooded rice-fields, break the level of plain and valley floor with their myriad waving lines of division, and climb by terraces to the very hilltops—a system of cultivation and irrigation as old as the human race, and followed in these same valleys by these same Sundanese since the beginning of their recorded time. To them rice is a holy grain, the offspring of a god, and the gods’ best gift to man; a grain both cultivated and worshiped. It argues for the industry of a tropical race that they should grow this troublesome grain at all, the grain that demands more back-breaking toil and constant attention from planting to harvest-time than any other grain which grows. It would seem discouraging to rice-cultivation, too, when in old times the natives were taxed according to the area of their rice-lands only, and mulcted of a fifth of their rice when it was harvested—all in this happy land, where they might sit under the breadfruit- and banana-trees and doze at their ease, while those kindly fruits dropped in their laps. These picturesque rice-fields have won for Java the name of “the granary of the East,” and enabled it to export that grain in quantities, besides supporting its own great population, one of the densest in the world, and averaging four hundred and fifty inhabitants to each square mile. No fertilizer of any kind is applied to these irrigated rice-fields, save to burn over and plow under the rich stubble, after the _padi_, or ripe ears of grain, have been cut singly with a knife and borne away in miniature sheaves strung on carrying-poles across the peasants’ shoulders.

Beyond the region of the great plantations, where every hillside is cleared and planted up to the kina limit, and only the summits and steepest slopes are left to primeval jungle, there succeed great stretches of wild country, where remarkable engineering feats were required of the railway-builders. With two heavy engines the train climbs to Tjandjoer station, sixteen hundred feet above the sea; and there, if one has telegraphed the order ahead, he may lunch at ease in his compartment as the train goes on. He may draw from the three-storied lunch-basket handed in either a substantial riz tavel, consisting of a little of everything heaped upon a day’s ration of boiled rice, or a “tiffin,” whose _pièce de résistance_ is a huge _bifstek mit ard appelen_, that would satisfy the cravings of any three dragoons. Either feast is followed by bread or bananas, with a generous section of a cheese, with mangosteens or other fruits, and one feels that he has surely reached the land of plenty and solid, solid comforts, where fate cannot harm him—when all this may be handed in to fleeting tourists at a florin and a half apiece.

After this station of abundant rations, all signs of cultivation and occupancy disappear, and the station buildings and the endless lantana-hedges along the railway-track are the only signs of human habitation or energy in the wilderness of hills covered with alang-alang or bamboo-grass, and the coarse _glagah_ reeds which cattle will not touch. The banteng, the one-horned rhinoceros, and the tigers that used to roam these moors, fled when the shriek of the locomotive was heard in the cañons, and the sportsmen have to seek such big game in the jungles and grass-lands of the south coast. The streams that come cascading down from all these green heights have carved out some beautiful scenery, and the Tjitaroem River, foaming in sight for a while, disappears, runs through a mountain by a natural tunnel, and reappears in a deep gorge, of which one has an all-too-exciting view as the train crosses on a spidery viaduct high in air.

A great, fertile green plain surrounds the native capital of Bandong, and on its confines rises the Tangkoeban-Praoe, the Ararat of the natives, who see in its square summit-lines the reversed _praoe_ in which their ancestors survived the flood, and, turning their boat over carefully to dry, descended, as the waters fell, to people the Malay universe. One may ascend the butte-like peak, passing up first through a belt of old coffee-plantations, whose product ranked first in the good old days before the blight, and by the villa and experimental grounds of Herr Junghuhn, the botanist, who first succeeded with the kina-culture and introduced so many other economic plants and trees to the island. At Lembang, ten miles from Bandong, the mountain-climber gives up his pony or carriage, and is carried in a _djoelie_, or sedan-chair, through a magnificent jungle to the edge of the open crater, where bubbling sulphur-pools in an ashy floor, and a wide view over the fertile valley, are sufficient reward for all exertion on the climber’s part.

Bandong itself, as the capital of the Preanger regencies and the home of the native regent and the Dutch resident, is a place of great importance to both races. The regent, as a mere puppet and pensioner of the colonial government, supports the shadow of his old state and splendor in a large _dalem_, or palace, in the heart of the town. He has also a suburban villa in European style, to which are attached large racing-stables, and this progressive regent is a regular cup-winner at the Buitenzorg and Bandong races at every summer, or dry-season, meet, when the “good monsoon” inspires all the islanders to their greatest social exertions.

As one gets farther into the center of the island, native life becomes more picturesque, and every station platform offers one more diverting study. There is more color in costume, and the wayside and platform groups are kaleidoscopic with their gay sarongs and kerchiefs. More men are seen wearing the military jacket of rank with the native sarong, and the boat-handled kris thrust in the belt at the back. The little children, who ride astride of their mothers’ hips and cling and cuddle so confidingly in the slandang’s folds, seem of finer mold, and their deep, dark Hindu eyes tell of a different strain in the Malay blood than we had seen on the coast—these the Javanese, as distinguished from the Sundanese. The clumsy buffalo, or water-ox, is everywhere, plowing the fields, wallowing in mud, or browsing the stubble patch after the gleaners, always with a patient, statuesque, nude little brown boy on his blue-gray back, the fine, polished skins of these small herders glowing in the sun as if they were inanimate bronze figurines.

The train climbs very slowly from Bandong to Kalaidon Pass, and, after toiling with double engines up the steep grades, it rests at a level, and there bursts upon one the view of the plain of Leles—the fairest of all tropical landscapes, a vision of an ideal promised land, and such a dream of beauty that even the leaden blue clouds of a rainy afternoon could not dim its surpassing loveliness. The railway follows a long shelf hewn high on the mountain wall, that encircles an oval plain set with two conical mountains that rise more than two thousand feet above the level of this plain of Leles, itself two thousand feet above the level of the sea. The finely wrought surface of the plain—networked with the living green dikes and terraces of rice-fields, which, flooded, gleam and glitter in the fitful sun-rays, or, sown and harvested, glow with a mosaic of green and gold—is one exquisite symphony in color, an arrangement in greens that holds one breathless with delight. All the golden greens of rice seed-beds, the intense, vivid greens of young rice transplanted, the opaque and darker greens of advanced crops, and the rich tones of stubble are relieved by the clumps and masses of palms and fine-leaved trees, which, like islands or mere ornamental bits of shrubbery, are disposed with the most admirable effect to be attained by landscape art. Each of these tufted clumps of trees, foregrounded with broad, translucent banana-leaves, declares the presence of toy villages, where the tillers of the plain, the landscape-farmers, and the artist-artisans have woven and set up their pretty basketry homes. A masterpiece, a central ornament or jewel, to which the valley is but the fretted and appropriate setting, a very altar of agriculture, a colossal symbol and emblem of abundance, is the conical Goenong-Kalaidon, a mountain which rises three thousand feet from the level of the plain, and is terraced all the way from base to summit with narrow ribbons of rice-fields—the whole mountain mass etched with myriad fine green lines of verdure, wrinkled around and around with the curving parapets and tiny terraces that retain the flooded hanging gardens. Beyond this amazing piece of agricultural sculpture stands Goenong-Haroeman, a more perfect pyramid, a still rarer trophy of the landscape-farmer’s art, even more finely carved in the living green lines of ancient terrace-culture. The rush of the thousand rills, dropping from one tiny terrace to another, fills the air with a peculiar singing undertone, an eerie accompaniment that adds the last magic touch to the fascination of the plain of Leles. Hardly the miles of sculptured bas-reliefs on Boro Boedor and Brambanam temple walls make them any more impressive as monuments and records of human toil than these great green pyramids of Kalaidon and Haroeman, on which human labor has been lavished for all the seasons of uncounted generations—the ascending lines, the successive steps of the great green staircases of rice-terraces, recording ages of toil as plainly as the rings within a tree-trunk declare its successive years of growth.

The railway, dipping nearly to the level of the plain as it describes a great curve around the gloriously green Kalaidon, again ascends along the side of the mountain wall, loops itself around the Haroeman pyramid, and halts at the station of Leles. From that point one has a backward view over the enchanting picture (a line of white bridges and culverts marking the path of the railway along the mountain-side) and he looks directly across at the soft green slopes of Haroeman, which faces him—that vast green dome or pyramid, which is a little world in itself, with uncounted villages nestling under clumps of palm-trees that break the lines of singing terraces, and those peasants of the hanging gardens looking down upon the most pleasing prospect, the most beautiful landscape in all Java, which should be world-famous, and whose charm it is as impossible to exaggerate as to describe.

The sesquipedalian names of the railway-stations throughout the Preanger regencies, are something to fill a traveler’s mind between halts, and almost explain why the locomotives not only toot and whistle nearly all the time they are in motion, but stand on the track before station sign-boards and shriek for minutes at a time, like machines demented. Radjamendala is an easy arrangement in station names for the early hours of the trip, and all that family of names—Tjitjoeroek, Tjibeber, Tjirandjang, Tjipenjeum, Tjitjalenka, and also Tagoogapoe—will slip from the tongue after a few trials; but when one strains his eyes toward the limits of the plain of Leles, he may almost see the houses of Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan. People actually live there and pay taxes, and it is my one regret that I did not leave the train, drive over, and have some letters postmarked with that astonishing aggregation of sound-symbols. Only actual sight, too, could altogether convince one, that one small village of metal-workers could really support so much nomenclature together with any amount of profitable trade. In the intervals of practising the pronunciation of that particular geographic name, the artisans of Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan do hammer out serviceable gongs, bowls, and household utensils of brass and copper. In earlier times Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan was the Toledo of the isles, and the kris-blades forged there had finer edge than those from any other place in the archipelago. In these railroad and tramp-steamer days of universal, wholesale trade rivalry, the blade of the noble kris more often comes from abroad, and the chilled edges from Birmingham or those made in Germany have displaced the blades made at the edge of the plain of Leles, and the glory of Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan has departed.

XIII

“TO TISSAK MALAYA!”

The sun fell at six o’clock, and in the fast-gathering twilight of the tropics the train shrieked past Tjihondje and Radjapolah, stopped but a minute at Indihiang, and panted into Tissak Malaya like an affrighted creature, to put up for the night. We were whirled through avenues of pitch-darkness, with illuminated porticos gleaming through splendid shrubberies, to the _passagrahan_, or government rest-house. At first we thought the Parthenon had been restored and whitened, and leased to some colonial landlord, or at least that we had come to the deserted summer palace of some great sovereign, so lofty were the columns, so enormous the shining white portico before which the sadoes halted. Quite feudal and noble we felt ourselves, too, when the sadoe-drivers crouched on their heels in that abject position of the dodok, or squatting obeisance, and when they raised the coins to their foreheads in a reverent _simbah_, or worshipful thanksgiving. Truly we were reaching the heart of a strange country, and experiences were thickening!

The passagrahan was an object for sight-seers by itself. The great open space under the portico was the usual living-room, with huge tables, reading-lamps, and lounging- and arm-chairs fitted for a giant’s ease. A grand hallway running straight through the center of the building held the scattered and massive furniture of a banquet-hall. Bedrooms with latticed doors opened from either side of this noble hall, the least of these chambers twenty feet square, with ceilings twenty feet high; while the beds, measuring seven by nine feet, suggested Brobdingnagian nightmares to match.

At nine o’clock we followed a silent, beckoning Malay with a lantern off into pitch-darkness, down a deserted street, around a hedge, to a smaller white portico with lamps and rocking-chairs and center-tables. We were dazed as we came suddenly into the glare of lights; and the other guests at the _table d’hôte_ of the little hotel viewed us as they would have viewed sudden arrivals by balloon.

“From America! To Tissak Malaya!” they all exclaimed, and we almost apologized for having come so far. There was an amiable and charming young Dutch woman in the company, who, speaking English, benefited all her compatriots with the details of our present itinerary, our past lives and mutual relationships, after each little conversational turn she took with us.

Having commanded a sunrise breakfast for the next morning, we followed the lantern and the silent Malay back through blackness to our illuminated Parthenon of a passagrahan, and had entomological excitement and entertainment for an hour, while all the strange flying things filled the air and strewed the table beneath the lamps. The usual lizards chuck-chucked and called for “Becky” in the shadows, and thin wraiths of lizards ran over the great columns and walls; but a house-front that was not decorated with lizards would be the strangest night sight in Java. When we had laid ourselves out on the state catafalques in the great bedrooms, stealthy whisperings and rustlings of palm-trees beyond the latticed windows, other strange sounds, and startled bird-calls throughout the night suggested the great snakes we had expected to encounter daily and nightly in Java. The tiny light floating in a tumbler of cocoanut-oil threw weird shadows over the walls, and within the bed-curtains one had space to dance a quadrille or arrange a whole set of ordinary bedroom furniture, while the open construction of the upper partition-walls let one converse at will with the occupant of the farthest apartment.

In the first clear light of the dewy morning we saw that a beautiful garden surrounded the passagrahan, and our vast Parthenon of the darkness did not seem so colossal when seen in the shadow of the magnificent kanari-trees that shaded the street before it. While lost in admiration of this splendid aisle of shade-trees, I saw a solitary pedestrian coming down the green avenue, just the pygmy touch of human life needed to complete the picture and give one measure for the soaring tree-trunks and vast canopy of leaves. The slender figure, advancing with the splendid, slow stride of these people, was visible now in a glorifying shaft of earliest, level yellow sunlight, and then almost invisible against the tall hibiscus-hedges or the green shadows of tree-trunks. A nearer flash of sunlight gilded a tray he was carrying—a tray furnished with three small cups of coffee and a plate with six thin wafers of toast, which, well cooled by the long promenade in the fresh air of the morning, constituted the breakfast of three able-bodied travelers, who were to pass the rest of the day on the train, with only opportunity for a sandwich lunch before the evening’s nine-o’clock dinner. We sent back those thimble cups, and they were refilled with the same lukewarm, indefinite, muddy gray fluid; but finally, by personal exertions and a hasty trip down the magnificent avenue, some solid additions were secured to the usual scant, skeleton, impressionist breakfast of the country—some marmalade, some eggs, and a bit of the cold blue meat of the useful buffalo. Everywhere in Java one’s first, best instincts and finer feelings of the day are hurt and the appetite affronted by just such early morning incidents; protest and prevision are alike useless, and travel on the island is beset with unnecessary hardships.

The semi-weekly passer of Tissak Malaya was then beginning in a park, or open market-place, in front of the passagrahan, and picturesque processions of venders and buyers came straggling down the arched avenues, and filled the shady quadrangle with a holiday hum. There were double panoramas and stages of living pictures along each path in the passer encampment, that grew like magic; and the glowing colors of the fruit-, the flower-, and the pepper-markets, the bright sarongs and turbans, and, above all, the cheerful chatter, were quite inspiring. We bought everywhere—fruits, and a queer three-story basket to hold them; yards of jasmine garlands, bunches of roses, and great double handfuls of the green, lindenish ylang-ylang flowers, pinned with a thorn in a plantain-leaf cornucopia—this last lot of perpetual fragrance for three gulden cents only. Odd bottles of home-made attars of rose and jasmine were sold as cheaply, and gums in straw cases, ready for burning. There was a dry-goods district, where booths were piled high and hung round with Cheribon and other gay sarongs of Middle Java, slandangs and kerchiefs of strongest colors and intricate borderings. We were distracted with the wide choice offered, but could not rouse the phlegmatic dealers to any eagerness or excitement in bargaining; the whole overcharge, reductions, and slow-descending fall in prices proceeding, on the part of the dealers, with a well-assumed indifference, an uninterrupted betel-chewing, a bored and lethargic manner that wore one sadly. A long row of country tailors, thirty or forty of them in a line, sat like so many sparrows around the edges of the passer in the comforting shade of the kanari-trees. All were spectacled like owls, and sat cross-legged before their little American sewing-machines. The customers brought their cloth, the tailors measured them with the eye, and in no time at all the machines were humming up and down the seams of the jackets, that needed no fitting nor trying on, and were made while the candidates sat and smoked and chatted with the sartorial artists. From the chatter-chatter along this tailors’ row one might conclude that what the barbers are to Seville, as purveyors of news, the tailors are to Tissak Malaya.

All too soon we had to tear ourselves away from the fascinating passer, and, loaded down with our mixed marketing, fly by sadoe to the station at the far end of town. We saw then the magnificent aisle of kanari-trees we had passed through in darkness the night before—an avenue more fitted for an emperor’s triumphal procession than for our queer little two-wheeled carts, drawn each by a mite of a pony, that was all but lifted from the ground by the shafts when I stepped on the after foot-board untimely, the driver dodoking like a hop-toad on the ground in respectful humility. The natives were streaming down the great _allée_ and in from all the side streets and by-paths toward the passer, and we half wished we might miss the train when we realized what a spectacle that Tissak Malaya passer was about to be.