"The idyllic Duke's park, very shadowy, fragrant, and green."
Now and then a native traverses the field, slowly moving along an invisible track. He does not disturb the loneliness. He is indigenous to the place, its natural product, almost as much as the cicadas trilling among the grass blades, the snakes darting in and out among the crevices of the sun-baked soil, and the lean cattle, upon whose backs the crows perch. There is but one abiding power and presence here—the broad brown field under the broad blue sky, shifting shades and splendours over it, and that horizon of sombre trees all around.
This vast sweep of sky gives the Plein a tone and atmosphere of its own. The changes in the hour and the season that are but guessed at from some occasional glimpse in the street, are here fully revealed. The light may have been glaring enough among the whitewashed houses of Ryswyk and Molenvliet—it is on the Plein only that tropical sunshine manifests itself in the plenitude of its power. The great sun stands flaming in the dizzy heights; from the scorched field to the incandescent zenith the air is one immense blaze, a motionless flame in which the tall tamarinds stand sere and grey, the grass shrivels up to a tawny hay, and the bare soil stiffens and cracks.—The intolerable day is past. People, returning home from the town, see a roseate sheen playing over roofs and walls, a long crimson cloud sailing high overhead. Those walking on the Plein behold an apocalyptic heaven and a transfigured earth, a firmamental conflagration, eruptions of scarlet flame through incarnadined cloud, runnels of fire darting across the melting gold and translucent green of the horizon; hill-tops changed into craters and tall trees into fountains of purple light. And many are the nights, when, becoming aware of a dimness in the moonlit air, I have hastened to the Koningsplein, and found it whitely waving with mist, a very lake of vapour, fitfully heaving and sinking in the uncertain moonlight, and rolling airy waves against a shore of darkness.
"The Business-quarter of Batavia."
The seasons, too—how they triumph in this bit of open country! When, after the devouring heat of the East monsoon, the good gift of the rains is poured down from the heavens, and the town knows of nothing but impracticable streets, flooded houses, and crumbling walls, it is a time of resurrection and vernal glory for the Plein. The tamarinds, gaunt gray skeletons a few days ago, burst into full-leaved greenness; the hard, white, cracked soil is suddenly covered with tender grass, fresh as the herbage of an April meadow under western skies. In the early morning, the broad young blades are white with dew. There is a thin silvery haze in the air, which dissolves into a pink and golden radiance, as the first slanting sunbeams pierce it. And the tree tops, far off and indistinct, seem to rise airily over hollows of blue shade.
"A footsore Klontong trudging wearily along."
Not far from the Koningsplein there is another square, its very opposite in aspect and character—the idyllic Duke's Park very shadowy, fragrant, and green. One walks in it as in a poet's dream. All around there is the multitudinous budding and blossoming of many-coloured flowers, a play of transparent bamboo-shadows that flit and shift over smooth grassplot and shell-strewn path, a ceaseless alternation of glooms and glories. Set amidst tall dark trees, whose topmost branches break out into a flame of blossom, there stands a white pillared building, palace-like in the severe grace of its architecture. Is it the Renaissance style of those gleaming columns and marble steps, or that name of "the Duke's Park," or both, that stir up the fancy to thoughts of some sixteenth-century Italian pleasaunce, such as Shakespeare loved as a setting for his love-stories? A Duke as gentle as his prince of Illyria, Olivia's sighing lover, might have walked these glades, listening to disguised Viola as, all unsuspectedly, she wooed him from his forlorn allegiance.
The irony of facts has willed it otherwise.