It is only for want of a better word that one uses this term of "town" to designate that picturesque ensemble of villa-studded parks and avenues, Batavia. There is, it is true, an older Batavia, grey, grim and stony as any war-scarred city of Europe—the stronghold which the steel-clad colonists of 1620 built on the ruins of burnt-down Jacatra. But, long since abandoned by soldiers and peaceful citizens alike, and its once stately mansions degraded to offices and warehouses, it has sunk into a mere suburb—the business quarter of Batavia—alive during a few hours of the day only, and sinking back into a death-like stillness, as soon as the rumble of the last down-train has died away among its echoing streets. And the real Batavia—in contradistinction to which this ancient quarter is called "the town"—is as unlike it as if it had been built by a different order of beings.
It is best described as a system of parks and avenues, linked by many a pleasant byway and shadowy path, with here and there a glimpse of the Kali Batawi gliding along between the bamboo groves on its banks, and everywhere the whiteness of low, pillared houses, standing well back from the road, each in its own leafy garden. Instead of walls, a row of low stone pillars, not much higher than milestones, separates private from public grounds, so that from a distance one cannot see where the park ends and the street begins. The shadow of the tall trees in the avenue keeps the garden cool, and the white dust of the road is sprinkled with the flowers that lie scattered over the smooth grass-plots and shell-strewn paths of the villa.
Among the squares of Batavia, the largest and most remarkable by far is the famous Koningsplein. It is not so much a square as simply a field, vast enough to build a city on, dotted from place to place by pasturing cattle, and bordered on the four sides of its irregular quadrangle by a triple row of branching tamarinds. From the southern distance two aerial mountain-tops overlook it. The brown bare expanse of meadowy ground, lying thus broadly open to the sky, with nothing but clouds and cloudlike hill-tops rising above its distant rampart of trees, seems like a tract of untamed wilderness, strangely set in the midst of a city, and all the more savage and lonely for these smooth surroundings. Between the stems of the delicate-leaved tamarinds, glimpses are caught of gateways and pillared houses; the eastern side of the quadrangle is disfigured by a glaring railway-station; and, notwithstanding, it remains a rugged solitary spot, a waste, irreclaimably barren, which, by the sheer strength of its unconquered wildness, subdues its environment to its own mood. The houses, glinting between the trees, seem mere accidents of the landscape, simply heaps of stones; the glaring railway-station itself sinks into an indistinct whiteness, dissociated from any idea of human thought and enterprise.
"A triple row of branching tamarinds."
