At Tjisoeroepan, at the foot of the mountain, we changed to clumsy djoelies, or sedan-chairs, each borne by four coolies, whose go-as-you-please gait, not one of them keeping step with any other, was especially trying so soon after coming from the enjoyment of the swift, regular, methodical slap-slap tread of the chair-bearers of South China. Despite their churning motion, the way was enjoyable; and, beginning with a blighted and abandoned coffee-plantation at the base of the mountain, we passed through changing belts of vegetation, as by successive altitudes we passed botanically from the tropic to the temperate zone. The bleached skeletons of the old coffee-trees, half-smothered in undergrowth and vines, interested one more than the beautifully ordered and carefully tended young coffee-trees in newer plantations—sad reminders of those good old days before the war (the Achinese war), the deficit, and the blight. Beyond kina limits there were no more clearings, and then the tree-fern appeared—wan skeletons of trees at first, where much thinning out had left them in range of scorching sunlight; but in the shade of greater trees in the thick of the jungle they stood superb—great, splendid, soft, drooping, swaying, gigantic green fronds, a refined, effeminate, delicate, sensitive sort of palm, the tropic’s most tropical, exquisite, wonderful tree. The upper regions of Papandayang are all clothed with real jungle, the forest primeval, with giant creepers writhing and looping serpent-like about the trees, and doing all the extravagant things they are expected to do. Ratans, or climbing palms, enveloped whole trees with their pendant, gracefully decorative leaves; orchids swung in tasseled sprays, starred mossy trunks and branches, and showed in all the green wonderland overhead and around; and in each ravine, where warm streams sprayed the air, a whole hothouse full of blooming, green, and strange loveliness delighted the eye.
We met strings of coolies descending with baskets of sulphur on their backs, the path was yellow with the broken fragments of years’ droppings, and infragrant, murky sulphur-streams crossed and ran beside the path, in promise of the stifling caldrons we were fast approaching.
We had a magnificent view back over the Garoet plain, with its checker-board of green and glinting fields, marked with the network of white post-roads and dotted with the clumps of palms that bespoke the hidden villages, and then we passed in through a natural gateway or cutting in the solid mountain-side made by the last eruption. The broad passage or defile led to the kawa, or crater, a bowl or depression deep sunk in rocky walls, with pools of liquid sulphur bubbling all over the five-acre floor and sending off clouds of nauseous steam. These pools, vats of purest molten gold, boiled violently all the time, scattering golden drops far and wide from their fretted, honey-combed edges. There was always suggestion of the possibility of their suddenly shooting into the air like geysers, and deluging one with the column of molten gold; or of the soft filigree edges of the pools crumbling and precipitating one untimely into the lakelet of fire and brimstone. Steam jets roared and hissed from all parts of the quaking solfatara, and from the rumblings and strange underground noises one could understand the native legends of chained giants groaning inside of the mountain, and their name for Papandayang, “The Forge.” The sulphur coolies stepped warily along the paths between the pools; our shoe-soles were not proof against the steam and scorch of the heaving ground beneath us; and carbonic-acid gas and sulphureted hydrogen were all that one could find to breathe down there on the crater’s floor—the undoubted Guevo Upas, or “Valley of Poison.”
It is said that one can see the shores both of the Indian Ocean and the Java Sea from the summit of Papandayang, which is seven thousand feet above their level. Although the skies were cloudy and doubtful around the horizon edges, we were willing to take the brilliant noonday sun overhead as augury, and attempt the climb. As there was no path beyond the crater’s rest-sheds for the coolies to carry us in djoelies, we started on foot straight up the first steep slope of the crater’s ragged wall, through tangles of bushes and the rank bamboo-grass. We drove our servant on ahead, and the poor indolent creature, cheated of his expected lounge after his arduous pony-ride up the mountain and his midday rice-feast, turned plaintive countenance backward, as he picked his reluctant way barefooted through this prickly underbrush.
“What for go here?” he bleated.
“To get to the top of the mountain and see the two oceans.”
“Dis mountain no got top,” wailed the unconscionable one; but we remembered the waist-deep water he had conjured up to discourage us from Chandi Sewou; nor had we forgotten the Tjilatjap sandwiches with which he had comforted himself such a few days before, and we said, “Go on!”
Then, remembering our perpetual hunt for and expectation of great snakes, he turned mournful countenance and wailed: “Slanga! slanga! [”Snakes! snakes!“] always live dis kind grass.”
“Very well. That’s just what we want to find. Be sure you tell us as soon as you step on one or see it moving.”
But, after pushing and tearing our way through bamboo-grass and bushes to the first ridge, we saw only other and farther ridges to be surmounted, with great ravines and stony hollows between. We took such view of the cloudy plains and ranges to northward and southward as we could, seeing everywhere the murky, blue, misty horizon of the rainy season, and nowhere the silver sea-levels, nor the lines of perpetual surf that fringe the Indian Ocean. We saw again the mosaic of rice-fields and dry fields covering the Garoet plain; and looking down upon the foot of an opposite mountain spur, we could study, like a relief-map or model tilted before us, a vast plantation cultivated from tea to highest coffee and kina level.