"A glimpse of the river as it glides along between the bamboo groves of its margins."
The skippers and raftsmen are more conservative in their ways—owing, perhaps, to their constant communion with the deliberate stream, which saunters along on its way from the hills to the sea, at its own pace. They take life easily; paddling along over the shifting shallows and mud-banks of the Kali (river) in the same leisurely way their forbears did; conveying red tiles, bricks, and earthenware in flat-bottomed boats; or pushing along rafts of bamboo-stems, which they have felled in the wood up-stream. As they come floating down the canal, these rafts of green bamboo, with the thin tips curving upwards like tails and stings of venomous insects, have a fantastical appearance of living, writhing creatures, which the native raftsman seems to be for ever fighting with his long pole. After dark, when the torch at the prow blazes out like the single baleful eye of the monstrous thing, the day-dream deepens into a nightmare. And, shuddering, one remembers ghastly legends of river-dragons and serpents that haunt the sea, swimming up-stream to ravish some wretched mortal.
The native boats appeal to merrier thoughts. With the staring white-and-black goggle eyes painted upon the prow, and the rows of red, yellow, and green lozenges arranged like scales along the sides, they remind one irresistibly of grotesque fishes for those big children, the Javanese, to play with—at housekeeping. For keep house they do in their boats. They eat, drink, sleep, and live in the prao. A roof of plaited bamboo leaves helps to make the stern into the semblance of a hut; and here, whilst the owner pushes along the floating home by means of a long pole and a deal of apparent exertion, his wife sits cooking the rice for the family meal over a brazier full of live coals; and the children tumble about in happy nakedness. Javanese babies, by the way, always seem happy. What do they amuse themselves with, one wonders? They do not seem to know any games, and playthings they have none, except the tanjong-flowers they make necklaces of, and perchance some luckless cockroach, round whose hindmost leg they tie a thread to make him walk the way he should. Their parents, Mohammedan orthodoxy debars them from the society of their natural companions—dogs; and, as for cats, that last resource of unamused childhood in Europe, they hold them sacred, and would not dare to lay a playful hand upon one of them. Yet, there they are—plaything-less, naked, and supremely happy.
Their parents, for the matter of that, are exactly the same; they seem perfectly happy without any visible and adequate cause for such content. As long as they are not dying—and one sometimes doubts if Javanese die at all—all is well with them. The race has a special genius for happiness, the free gift of those same inscrutable powers who have inflicted industry, moral sense, and the overpowering desire for clothes upon the unfortunate nations of the North.
Following the left-ward bend of the canal, past the sluice, and the Post Office,—the most hideous structure by the bye that ever disfigured a decent street—one comes to the bridge of Kampong Bahru; and, crossing it, suddenly finds oneself in what seems another quarter of the globe. Tall narrow houses, quaintly decorated and crowned with red-tiled roofs, that flame out against the contrasting azure of the sky, stand in close built rows; the wide street is full of jostling carts and vans, fairly humming with traffic; and the people move with an energy and briskness never seen among Javanese. This is the Chinese quarter. There are three or four such in the town, inhabited by Chinese exclusively. This habit of herding together—though now a matter of choice with the Celestials—is the survival of a time when Batavia had its "camp" as mediæval Italian cities had their Ghetto: a period no further back than the beginning of the last century.
Procession at the funeral of a rich Chinaman.
Funeral Procession on its way to the Chinese Cemetery.
