CHAPTER XIV
The moist heat of Java’s plains and seaports, even when the interest of a place is just a little more remarkable than the temperature, soon turns one to thoughts of escape, in the bare hope that Java somewhere in its garden has a bower which has not the peculiar virtue of a vapor bath. “Why, if you go to Garut,” I was told in a voice which suggested a wonder that I was not required to believe without Thomas’s proof, “you will want a blanket at night!”
I had never heard of Garut, but one place is as good as another to a traveler who is rewarded by whatever he can get. I found Garut in the mountains of central Java, somewhere behind Tjilatjap. There was no trouble in finding it. Everybody seemed to know it. But I shall remember Garut as I remember Sfax, Taormina, Chartres, Tlemçen, and other odd corners of the earth, some without even a name on the map, where we arrived by chance and disconsolate, and from which we departed with something in our memory, forgotten till then, that had been lighted briefly by what may have been a ray of moonshine. Can such an experience be communicated? But how shall a man define his faith?
Yet there Garut is—or there it was, for I am not going to assert the existence of any spot on earth that was, for all I know, revealed to me briefly by lunar means—there Garut is for me at least, high on a ridge above a confusion of tracks through rice and tobacco plantations. The bearings of the place as I saw it can be only vague, and are probably wrong. The women of its campongs cast down their eyes as you approach, the children run into their huts, and the men raise their big hats of grass politely. It is secluded within ranges of dark peaks, but its own fields are bright and have the warm smell of new earth. From a grove of bamboos which fringes the highest ledge of a vast amphitheater terraced with steps of rice you look out into space and down to an inclosed plain. The plain is remote enough to be the ceremonious setting for the drama of a greater race of beings; men would be insignificant there. But the stage is empty; only the cicadas and frogs fill that immense arena with their songs just before the day goes. The ridge of the opposite side of the theater dissolves in rainstorms and is reformed momentarily by lightning.
The night was cold. I had to get up to find that blanket. It was still colder before dawn, when a knocking at my door warned me that I had arranged to go to a village called Jiporai, where it was said I could find a horse and so could ride to some mysterious height where there were hot springs in a forest. That folly was of my doing—it came of my easy compliance to a foolish suggestion made when my mood, induced by Garut and wine, was inclusive and grateful. Nor would it be any use, I found, to ignore that knocking. The native outside was going to keep it up. In the bleak small hours my need for a horse had vanished. I did not feel it. I did not want a horse.
Yet there it was; and out of the village of Jiporai the track mounted quickly, while from the saddle of a stout pony—he was as petulant as myself over this preposterously early excursion—I looked at the darkness which filled the amphitheater of mountains; it was a starless lake of night. We were only just above the level of that expanse of chilling shadow, and its depth, straight down from where the pony’s feet clattered the stones on the edge of it, was unseen and unknown. But I stopped him when the sun came. He turned his head, too, with his ears cocked eastward. We both watched. The great space below us quickly filled with light. We could see to the bottom of it. Without a movement, rider and horse were at once placed by the dawn at a dizzy height, on an aërial path.
The pony snorted and shook his head. It was morning, it was warm, and suddenly the earth began to exhale odors. We went through a flimsy campong, with relics of totems over its huts, and shy women with babies straddled on their hips pretended they could not see us. The men were in the padi fields beyond. We came upon some of these workers making coffee and cooking rice under a thatch propped on four poles. They accepted us as though they had always known us, and I may have had a better breakfast than that at some time or other, but I don’t remember it.
We had to pass through a deep ravine remarkable with the fronds of immense ferns arched from its rocks. There was an outlook at times over steep places, where distant lower Java was framed in immediate tree-ferns, grotesque leaves, and orchids. We passed up to a grassy plateau, which might have been an English ducal park. The flowers there were of another climate—raspberry, brambles, the yellow heads of composite plants, and labiate herbs. In a hollow of a forest beyond there were forbidding and incrusted recesses where the foliage was veiled in bursts of steam. But we did not pause by those caldrons of boiling mud. The smell of sulphur is not good. Those pools were not designed for the rustic wonder of travelers, nor even to admonish them of what follows after sin. I do not know for what they were designed, but a few years ago, so I was told, they boiled over and obliterated forty of the villages where the people are so good-natured.
So we learn that the rich and beautiful island of Java is not, after all, a creation especially intended to support the flamboyant posters of Batavia. Sometimes it does things on its own account. It was even with a degree of pleasure, later, that I learned I should not be allowed to leave Sourabaya without a visit to the port’s medical officer. It broke the spell of the Garden of Eden to find that that corner of it is infected by the plague, and that anyone emerging from the garden is suspect of subtle evil. But what attraction would there be in a snakeless Paradise?