While this went on below, and we watched the dark indigo mass of Salak turning from purple and azure to sunlit greens in the light of early day, the breakfast of the country was brought to our porch: cold toast, cold meats, eggs, fruit, tea or the very worst coffee in all the world—something that even the American railway restaurant and frontier hotel would spurn with scorn. Java coffee, in Java, comes to one in a stoppered glass bottle or cruet, a dark-brown fluid that might as well be walnut catsup, old port, or New Orleans molasses. This double extract of coffee, made by cold filtration, is diluted with hot water and hot milk to a muddy, gray-brown, lukewarm drink, that is uniformly bad in every hotel and public place of refreshment that a tourist encounters on the island. In private houses, where the fine Arabian berry is toasted and powdered, and the extract made fresh each day, the morning draught is quite another fluid, and worthy the cachet the name of Java gives to coffee in far countries.
Buitenzorg, the Bogor of the natives, who will not call it by its newer name, is one of the enchanted spots where days can slip by in dateless delight; one forgets the calendar and the flight of time, and hardly remembers the heavy, sickening heat of Batavia stewing away on the plains below. It is the Versailles of the island, the seat of the governor-general’s court, and the social life of the colony, a resort for officials and the leisure class, and for invalids and the delicate, who find strength in the clear, fresh air of the hills, the cool nights, and the serenely tempered days, each with its reviving shower the year round. Buitenzorg is the Simla of Netherlands India, but it awaits its Kipling to record its social life in clear-cut, instantaneous pictures. There are strange pictures for the Kipling to sketch, too, since the sarong and the native jacket are as much the regular morning dress for ladies at the cool, breezy hill-station as in sweltering Batavia, a fact rather disproving the lowland argument that the heat demands such extraordinary concessions in costume. But as that “Bengal Civilian” who wrote “De Zieke Reiziger; or, Rambles in Java in 1852,” and commented so freely upon Dutch costume, cuisine, and Sabbath-keeping, succeeded, Mr. Money said, in shutting every door to the English traveler for years afterward, and added extra annoyances to the toelatings-kaart system, budding and alien Kiplings may take warning.
The famous Botanical Garden at Buitenzorg is the great show-place, the paradise and pride of the island. The Dutch are acknowledgedly the best horticulturists of Europe, and with the heat of a tropical sun, a daily shower, and nearly a century’s well-directed efforts, they have made Buitenzorg’s garden first of its kind in the world, despite the rival efforts of the French at Saigon, and of the British at Singapore, Ceylon, Calcutta, and Jamaica. The governor-general’s palace, greatly enlarged from the first villa of 1744, is in the midst of the ninety-acre inclosure reached from the main gate, near the hotel and the passer, by what is undoubtedly the finest avenue of trees in the world. These graceful kanari-trees, arching one hundred feet overhead in a great green cathedral aisle, have tall, straight trunks covered with stag-horn ferns, bird’s-nest ferns, ratans, creeping palms, blooming orchids, and every kind of parasite and air-plant the climate allows; and there is a fairy lake of lotus and Victoria regia beside it, with pandanus and red-stemmed Banka palms crowded in a great sheaf or bouquet on a tiny islet. When one rides through this green avenue in the dewy freshness of the early morning, it seems as though nature and the tropics could do no more, until he has penetrated the tunnels of waringen-trees, the open avenues of royal palms, the great plantation of a thousand palms, the grove of tree-fern, and the frangipani thicket, and has reached the knoll commanding a view of the double summit of Gedeh and Pangerango, vaporous blue volcanic heights, from one peak of which a faint streamer of smoke perpetually floats. There is a broad lawn at the front of the palace, shaded with great waringen-, sausage-, and candle-trees, and trees whose branches are hidden in a mantle of vivid-leafed bougainvillea vines, with deer wandering and grouping themselves in as correct park pictures as if under branches of elm or oak, or beside the conventional ivied trunks of the North.
It is a tropical experience to reverse an umbrella and in a few minutes fill it with golden-hearted white frangipani blossoms, or to find nutmegs lying as thick as acorns on the ground, and break their green outer shell and see the fine coral branches of mace enveloping the dark kernel. It is a delight, too, to see mangosteens and rambutans growing, to find bread, sausages, and candles hanging in plenty from benevolent trees, and other fruits and strange flowers springing from a tree’s trunk instead of from its branches. There are thick groves and regular avenues of the waringen, a species of Ficus, and related to the banian- and the rubber-tree, a whole family whose roots crawl above the ground, drop from the branches and generally comport themselves in unconventional ways. Bamboos grow in clumps and thickets, ranging from the fine, feathery-leafed canes, that are really only large grasses, up to the noble giants from Burma, whose stems are more nearly trunks easily soaring to a hundred feet in air, and spreading there a solid canopy of graceful foliage.
The creepers run from tree to tree, and writhe over the ground like gray serpents; ratans and climbing palms one hundred feet in length are common, while uncommon ones stretch to five hundred feet. There is one creeper with a blossom like a magnified white violet, and with all a wood-violet’s fragrance; but with only Dutch and botanical names on the labels, one wanders ignorantly and protestingly in this paradise of strange things. The rarer orchids are grown in matted sheds in the shade of tall trees; and although we saw them at the end of the dry season, and few plants were in bloom, there was still an attractive orchid-show.
But the strangest, most conspicuous bloom in that choice corner was a great butterfly flower of a pitcher-plant (a nepenthes), whose pale-green petals were veined with velvety maroon, and half concealed the pelican pouch of a pitcher filled with water. It was an evil-looking, ill-smelling, sticky thing, and its unusual size and striking colors made it haunt one longest of all vegetable marvels. There were other more attractive butterflies fluttering on pliant stems, strange little woolly white orchids, like edelweiss transplanted, and scores of delicate Java and Borneo orchids, not so well known as the Venezuelan and Central American orchids commonly grown in American hothouses, and so impossible to acclimate in Java.
Lady Raffles died while Sir Stamford was governor of Java, and was buried in the section of the palace park that was afterward (in 1817) set apart as a botanical garden, and the care of the little Greek temple over her grave near the kanari avenue was provided for in a special clause in the treaty of cession. The bust of Theismann, who founded the garden and added so much to botanical knowledge by his studies in Java and Borneo, stands in an oval pleasance called the rose-garden; and there one may take heart and boast of the temperate zone, since that rare exotic, the rose, is but a spindling bush, and its blossoming less than scanty at Buitenzorg, when one remembers California’s, and more especially Tacoma’s, perennial prodigalities in showers of roses. In 1895 Professor Lotsy of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, was called to assist the learned curator, Dr. Treub, in the management of this famous Hortus Bogoriensis, which provides laboratory and working-space for, and invites foreign botanists freely to avail themselves of, this unique opportunity of study. Over one hundred native gardeners tend and care for this great botanic museum of more than nine thousand living specimens, all working under the direction of a white head-gardener. The Tjiliwong River separates the botanic garden from a culture-garden of forty acres, where seventy more gardeners look to the economic plants—the various cinchonas, sugar-canes, rubber, tea, coffee, gums, spices, hemp, and other growths, whose introduction to the colony has so benefited the planters. Experiments in acclimatization are carried on in the culture-garden, and at the experimental garden at Tjibodas, high up on the slopes of Salak, where the governor-general has a third palace, and there is a government hospital and sanatorium.
Theismann’s famous museum of living twig- and leaf-insects was abandoned some years ago, the curator deciding to keep his garden strictly to botanical lines. One no longer has the pleasure of seeing there those curious and most extraordinary freaks of nature—the fresh green or dry and dead-looking twigs that suddenly turn their heads or bend their long angular legs and move away; or leaves, as delusive in their way, that detach themselves from a tree-branch and fly away. These insects bearing so astonishing a resemblance to their environment may be purchased now and then from Chinese gardeners; but otherwise, if one asks where they can be found or seen, there comes the usual answer, “In Borneo or Celebes,”—always on the farther, remoter islands,—tropic wonders taking wing like the leaf-insects when one reaches their reputed haunts.