After all Tjilatjap’s evil name, we never had any ill effects from venturing into it, and we had a sense of complacent rejoicing when we took train, that next morning, for Maos on the main line of the railway, and knew that a few hours would put us beyond the terra ingrata.
Nearly always, in our railway rides in Java, we had the first-class compartments to ourselves; and we often looked longingly, despite the heat, at the crowded second-class compartments, where many Europeans, nice, intelligent-looking people and interesting families, traveled in sociable numbers. The only companions ever of our first-class solitude were, once, the chief constructor of the railways, who for a sudden short trip had dispensed with his official car; and, again, a young Holland geologist and mining expert returning from a season’s survey in Borneo—both traveling at government expense. Only the more extravagant planters, native princes, tourists, and officials with passes or under orders seem to use the first-class cars, although the additional comforts and the extra space are actual necessaries of travel in the tropics. That the second-class carriages were always well filled with Europeans showed that at least one thrifty notion of the Hollanders’ home survived transplantation in this matter of railway fares. From the two chance fellow-passengers whom we had the fortune to meet on the train I derived enough, by a day’s steady questioning and comment, to atone for the dearth of travelers’ talk I had suffered before. Both men were cyclopedias of things Javanese, geologic and botanical, and those were very red-letter days in the guide-bookless land.
There was always interest enough in watching the people by the way; and as the through railway-trains were then novelties of a few days’ and weeks’ experience in that section of Middle Java, the station platforms were crowded with native sight-seers. Native officials and their trains of attendants, Mohammedan women with gorgeous head-gear and the thinnest pretenses of veils, stolid planters with obsequious, groveling servants, and planters’ wives, barefooted, wrapped in scant sarongs, and as often wearing red velvet jackets and other traveling toilets of eccentric combination, the costume of the tropics and a Northern winter at the same time—processions of these entertained us not a little as they went their way to the other compartments of the long train.
After the scorching hours spent running through swamp and jungle, we drew near the mountains; life became more bearable, and we beckoned our Moslem at the next stopping-place.
“Bring the sandwiches; they are not in this basket.” He looked blankness, as if a little vaguer and more becalmed in mind than usual. “The sandwiches that you made at the Tjilatjap hotel this morning,” I explained slowly. “Where are they?”
“Oh, I eat them—jus’ now,” said the soft-voiced one, naïvely, his hand unconsciously traveling to the digestive region and comfortably stroking it.
Language was useless at such a crisis, and sadly, silently, I resigned myself to the rest of the ten hours’ empty ride. An hour later we reached Tjiawi, near which the finest pineapples of the island are grown; and we bought them on the platform, great fragrant, luscious globes of delight, regardless of the almost prayerful requests made to us on arrival, that we would not touch a pineapple in Java. We did a tourist’s whole duty to specialties of strange places for that one day, buying the monster nanas in most generous provision; and we made up for all previous denials and lost pineapple opportunities as we tore off the ripe diamonds of pulp in streaming sections that melted on the tongue; nor did we feel any sinking at heart nor dread of the future for such indulgence. Then, at Tissak Malaya, we bought strings of mangosteens through the car-windows. But after the light, evanescent, six-o’clock breakfast of the country, these noonday feasts of juicy fruits did not satisfy one for long, and soon we hungered again.
At Tjipeundeui, in the shadow of the great volcanic range that walls the west, a local chief, or village head man, was foremost on the station platform, that was crowded with cheerful, chattering groups of natives, hung over with bundles as if come from a fair. With great excitement the chief announced that the Goenoeng Galoengoeng, or “Great Gong Mountain,” was in eruption again. Two weeks before it had rumbled, as its name indicates it has a habit of doing, and sent out a shower of stones that ruined a large coffee-plantation, scorching and half burying the budding trees in the hot rocks, pebbles, and sand. It had begun rumbling and shaking again, the village wells had emptied, and the people had fled, remembering too well the eruption of 1822, when one hundred and fifteen villages were destroyed, twenty thousand people were killed, and plantations ruined for twenty miles around by the rain of hot stones and ashes, and the hot water and mud overflowing from the blown-out crater. But such a gentle, happy, cheerful, chattering lot of refugees as they were, saving their best sarongs and finery by wearing them, and tying the rest of their treasures in shapeless bundles, as they went picnicking forth to visit relatives until the volcanic disturbance might subside! They were not a whit more care-worn or anxious than the crowd on the next station platform, where two or three hundred pleasure-seekers were returning from a famous country passer, whose rare meetings attract people from afar. Even the chief of the volcanic village radiated joy and pride all over his wrinkled old brown face as he related the moving events occurring in his bailiwick. Eruptions were evidently his pastime, a diversion quite in his line, since he had only come down to the railway to see his family off to a place of safety, while he would return, play Casabianca on his burning heath, and have it out with the resounding Galoengoeng at his leisure.
We had an hour to wait at Tjibatoe station before the Garoet train left, and the refreshment-room keeper offered tea and biscuits—the inevitable, omnipresent Huntley & Palmer biscuits, that are the mainstay and salvation, the very prop and stay and staff, of tourist life in Netherlands as well as British India, and for whose making the great Reading bakers buy the entire tapioca-crop of Java each year. After a short wait in the room, redolent of gin and schnapps and colonial tobacco, a boy sauntered in the back door with an iron tea-kettle, and the proprietor was about to make the tea with that warm water, when we chorused a protest. He good-naturedly allowed me to gather up tea-pot, tea-kettle, small boy, and all, and go a hundred yards down the road, climb a bamboo ladder laid against a bank, and restore the cooling kettle to its place on the home fire in the airiest, dearest little fancy basket of a home, in which one could imagine grown people playing “keep house.” A bright-eyed little woman stirred the fire, gave me a box to sit upon, and herself crouched before the sullen tea-kettle, chattering and crooning like a child at play. “Bodedit? Bodedit?” (“Does it boil? Does it boil?”) she asked seriously, putting her ear to the spout, or sliding the lid and peering into the still interior; but it finally did boil energetically. We made the tea; and, at risk of every bone, I descended that slanting half-ladder in a gentle rain, and returned to enjoy quite a feast that the kind refreshment-room keeper had conjured up in the meantime.