Every few miles there were open red-tiled pavilions built over the highways as refuges for man and beast from the scorching sun of one season and the cloud-burst showers of the rainy half of the year. Twice we found busy passers going on in groves beside these rest-houses—picturesque gatherings of men, women, and children, and displays of fowls, fruits, nuts, vegetables, grain, sugar, spices, gums, and flowers, that tempted one to linger and enjoy, and to photograph every foot of the passer’s area. The main road was crowded all the way like a city street, and around these passers the highway hummed with voices. One can believe in the density of the population—450 to the square mile[4]—when he sees the people trooping along these country roads; and he can well understand why every foot of land is cultivated, how even in the benevolent land of the banana every one must produce something, must work or starve. The better sanitary condition of the native kampongs is given as a great factor in the remarkable increase of population in the last half-century; but it took many years of precept and example, strict laws, and a rating of native rulers and village chiefs according to the cleanliness of their kampongs, before the native hamlets became tropical counterparts of Broek and the other absurdly clean towns of Holland. These careless children of the tropics are obliged to whitewash their houses twice a year, look to their drains and debris, and use disinfectants; and with the dainty little basket houses, one of which may be bought outright for five dollars, and the beautiful palms and shrubberies to serve as screens from rice-field vapors, each little kampong is a delight in every way.
WAYSIDE PAVILION ON POST-ROAD.
Men and boys toiled to the passer, bent over with the weight of one or two monstrous jack-fruits or durians on their backs. A woman with a baby swinging in the slandang over her shoulder had tied cackling chickens to the back of her belt, and trudged on comfortably under her umbrella; and a boy swung a brace of ducks from each end of a shoulder-pole, and trotted gaily to the passer. The kampongs, or villages, when not hidden in palm- and plantain-groves behind fancy bamboo fences, were rows of open houses on each side of the highway, and we reviewed native life at leisure while the ponies were changed. The friendly, gentle little brown people welcomed us with amused and embarrassed smiles when our curiosity as to sarong-painting, lacquering, and mat-weaving carried us into the family circle. The dark, round-eyed, star-eyed babies and children showed no fear or shyness, and the tiniest ones—their soft little warm brown bodies bare of ever a garment save the cotton slandang in which they cuddle so confidingly under the mother’s protecting arm—let us lift and carry and play with them at will.
We left the main road, and progressed by a narrower way between open fields of pepper, manioc, indigo, and tobacco, with picturesque views of the three symmetrical and beautiful mountains, Soembung, Merbaboe, and Merapi—the first and largest one as pure in line, as exquisite and ideal a peak, as Fujiyama, and the others sloping splendidly in soft volcanic outlines. Soembung is the very center of Java, and native legends cling to the little hill of Tidar at its base—the “spike of the universe,” the nail which fastens the lovely island to the face of the earth. Merbaboe, the “ash-ejecting,” has wrought ruin in its time, and a faint white plume of steam waves from its summit still. The capitulations which delivered the Napoleonic possessions of the Dutch East Indies to England in 1811 were signed at the base of Merbaboe, and in our then frame of mind toward the Dutch government we wished to make a pilgrimage of joyous celebration to the spot. The third of the graceful peaks, Merapi, the “fire-throwing,” was a sacred peak in Buddhist times, when cave-temples were hewn in its solid rock and their interiors fretted over with fine bas-reliefs. A group of people transplanting rice, a little boy driving a flock of geese down the road, a little open-timbered temple of the dead in a frangipani-grove—all these, with the softly blue-and-purple mountains in the background, are pictures in enduring memory of that morning’s ride toward Nirvana.
A gray ruin showed indistinctly on a hilltop, and after a run through a long, arched avenue we came out suddenly at the base of the hill-temple. Instead of a mad, triumphant sweep around the great pyramid, the ponies balked, rooted themselves past any lashing or “gr-r-ree-ing,” and we got out and walked under the noonday sun, around the hoary high altar of Buddha, down an avenue of tall kanari-trees, lined with statues, gargoyles, and other such recha, or remains of ancient art, to the passagrahan, or government rest-house.