XIX
THE LAND OF KRIS AND SARONG
The stir of camp and court, the state and pomp and pageantry of three such grandees as emperor, sultan, and resident in the one city, made such street-scenes in Solo as tempted the kodaker to constant play while the sun was high. Bands and marching troops were always to be seen in the street, and the native officials of so many different kinds made pictures of bewildering variety. The resident, returning from an official call, dashed past in a coach and four, with pajong-bearers hanging perilously on behind, and a mounted escort clattering after. Members of the imperial household staff were distinguished by stiff sugar-loaf caps or fezzes of white leather; and such privileged ones stalked along slowly, magnificently, each with a kris at the back of his belt, and always followed by one or two lesser minions. Those of superior rank went accompanied by a pajong-bearer balancing the great flat umbrella of rank above the distinguished one’s head; and the precision with which the grandee kept his head within the halo of shadow, or the bearer managed to keep such a true angle on the sun, were something admirable, and only to be accomplished by generations of the two classes practising their respective feats. The emperor’s mounted troops were objects of greater interest, these dragoons wearing huge lacquered vizors or crownless caps over their turbaned heads, the regulation jackets, sarongs, and heavy krises, and bestriding fiery little Timor ponies. The native stirrup is a single upright bar of iron, which a rider holds between the great toe and its neighbor; and these troopers seemed to derive as much support from this firm toe-grip as booted riders do from resting the whole ball of the foot on our stirrups.
There is a labyrinthine passer at Solo, where open sheds and rustic booths have grown upon one another around several open court spaces, which are dotted with the huge mushrooms of palm-leaf umbrellas, and whose picturesqueness one cannot nearly exhaust in a single morning’s round. The pepper- and fruit- and flower-markets are, of course, the regions of greatest attraction and richest feasts of color. The horn of plenty overflowed royally there, and the masses of bananas and pineapples, durians, nankos, mangosteens, jamboas, salaks, dukus, and rambutans seemed richer in color than we had ever seen before; and the brass-, the basket-, the bird-, the spice-, and the gum-markets had greater attractions too. The buyers were as interesting as the venders, and a frequent figure in these market groups that tempted the kodaker to many an instantaneous shot, regardless of the light,—better any muddy impression of that than none at all,—was the Dutch housewife on her morning rounds. I braved sunstroke and apoplexy in the hot sunshine, and trailed my saronged subjects down crowded aisles to open spots, to fix on film the image of these sockless matrons in their very informal morning dress. I lurked in booths and sat for endless minutes in opposite shops, with focus set and button at touch, to get a good study of Dutch ankles, when certain typical Solo hausfraus should return to and mount their carriage steps—only to have some loiterer’s back obscure the whole range of the lens at the critical second.
JAVA, BALI, AND MADURA KRISES.
From Sir Stamford Raffles’s “History of Java.”