All Java is in a way as finished as little Holland itself, the whole island cultivated from edge to edge like a tulip-garden, and connected throughout its length with post-roads smooth and perfect as park drives, all arched with waringen-, kanari-, tamarind-, or teak-trees. The rank and tangled jungle is invisible, save by long journeys; and great snakes, wild tigers, and rhinoceroses are almost unknown now. One must go to Borneo and the farther islands to see them, too. All the valleys, plains, and hillsides are planted in formal rows, hedged, terraced, banked, drained, and carefully weeded as a flower-bed. The drives are of endless beauty, whichever way one turns from Buitenzorg, and we made triumphal progresses through the kanari- and waringen-lined streets in an enormous “milord.” The equipage measured all of twenty feet from the tip of the pole to the footman’s perch behind, and with a cracking whip and at a rattling gait we dashed through shady roads, past Dutch barracks and hospitals, over picturesque bridges, and through villages where the native children jumped and clapped their hands with glee as the great Juggernaut vehicle rolled by. We visited the grave of Raden Saleh, a lonely little pavilion or temple in a tangle of shrubbery that was once a lovely garden shaded by tall cocoa-palms; and we drove to Batoe Toelis, “the place of the written stone,” and in the little thatched basket of a temple saw the sacred stone inscribed in ancient Kawi characters, the original classic language of the Javanese. In another basket shrine were shown the veritable footprints of Buddha, with no explanation as to how and when he rested on the island, nor yet how he happened to have such long, distinctively Malay toes. Near these temples is the villa where the poor African prince of Ashantee was so long detained in exile—an African chief whose European education had turned his mind to geology and natural sciences, and who led the life of a quiet student here until, by the exchange from Dutch to British ownership of Ashantee, a way was opened for him to return and die in his own country. There is a magnificent view from the Ashantee villa out over a great green plain and a valley of palms to the peaks of Gedeh and Pangerango, and to their volcanic neighbor, Salak, silent for two hundred years. Peasants, trooping along the valley roads far below, made use of a picturesque bamboo bridge that is accounted one of the famous sights of the neighborhood, and seemed but processions of ants crossing a spider’s web. All the suburban roads are so many botanical exhibitions approaching that in the great garden, and one’s interest is claimed at every yard and turn.
FRANGIPANI AND SAUSAGE-TREE.
It takes a little time for the temperate mind to accept the palm-tree as a common, natural, and inevitable object in every outlook and landscape; to realize that the joyous, living thing with restless, perpetually threshing foliage is the same correct, symmetrical, motionless feather-duster on end that one knows in the still life of hothouses and drawing-rooms at home; to realize that it grows in the ground, and not in a pot or tub to be brought indoors for the winter season. The arches of gigantic kanari-trees growing over by-lanes and village paths, although intended for triumphal avenues and palace driveways, overpower one with the mad extravagance, the reckless waste, and the splendid luxury of nature. One cannot accept these things at first as utilities, just as it shocks one to have a servant black his shoes with bruised hibiscus flowers or mangosteen rind, or remove rust from kris- or knife-blades with pineapple-juice, thrusting a blade through and through the body of the pine. The poorest may have his hedge of lantana, which, brought from the Mauritius by Lady Raffles, now borders roads, gardens, and the railway-tracks from end to end of the island. The humblest dooryard may be gay with tall poinsettia-trees, and bougainvilleas may pour a torrent of magenta leaves from every tree, wall, or roof. The houses of the great planters around Buitenzorg are ideal homes in the tropics, and the Tjomson and other large tea and coffee estates are like parks. The drives through their grounds show one the most perfect lawns and flower-beds and ornamental trees, vines, and palms, and such ranks on ranks of thriving tea-bushes and coffee-bushes, every leaf perfect and without flaw, every plant in even line, and the warm red earth lying loosely on their roots, that one feels as if in some ornamental jardin d’acclimatation rather than among the most staple and serious crops of commerce. Yet from end to end of the island the cultivation is as intense and careful, entitling Java to its distinction as “the finest tropical island in the world.” It is the gem of the Indies, the one splendid jewel in the Netherlands crown, and a possession to which poor Cuba, although corresponding exactly to it geographically and politically, has been vainly compared.
There were often interesting table d’hôte companies gathered at noon and at night in the long dining-room of the Buitenzorg hotel. While many of the Dutch officials and planters, and their wives, maintained the wooden reserve and supercilious air of those uncertain folk of the half-way strata in society everywhere, there were others whose intelligence and courtesy and friendly interest remain as green spots in the land. There was one most amiable man, who, we thought, in his love of country, was anxious to hear us praise it. We extolled the cool breezes and the charming day, and said: “You have a beautiful country here.”
“This is not my country,” he answered.
“But are you not Dutch?”
“Oh, yes.”