Nowhere in the slopes below could we see the vale of the deadly upas-tree, that was last supposed to occupy a retired spot on Papandayang’s remote heights. The imaginative Dr. Foersch, surgeon of the Dutch East India Company at Samarang in 1773, made the blood of all readers of the last century run cold with his description of himself standing alone, “in solitary horror,” on a blasted plain covered with skeletons, with another solitary horror of a deadly upas the only larger object in sight. The Guevo Upas, or “Valley of Poison,” was first said to be on the plain southeast of Samarang, but that region was explored in vain; then it was put upon the Dieng plateau, and found not there; and last the valley was said to be on the side of a high mountain far away in the almost unexplored Preanger regencies. Dr. Horsfield, in his search for volcanic data, routed the upas myth from the Papandayang region and exploded it for all time, and the Guevo Upas has gone to that limbo where the maelstrom and other perils of ante-tourist times are laid away. There is a deadly tree in Java, the antiar (Antiaris toxicaria), whose sap is as poisonous as serpent venom if it enters a wound, and will produce deep, incurable ulcers if dropped on the skin; and skeletons of animals may have been found beneath and near it. Erasmus Darwin immortalized the deadly upas, or antiar, in his poem, “The Botanic Garden,” and this antiar is the only actual and accepted upas-tree of the tropics. It is quite possible that some valley or old crater on the mountain-side, where the carbonic-acid and sulphurous gases from the inner caldron could escape, would be strewn with skeletons of birds and animals, a valley of death to man and beast, and as deadly a place, for the same reasons, as the celebrated grotto at Naples; but no tree could live in those fumes either; and the solitary tree on the “blasted plain” of skeletons, and the Dutch doctor in his “solitary horror,” have to be abandoned entire—a last disillusionment in Java.
When we returned from above, our djoelie coolies were squatted under the tiled shed of refuge built for visitors and sulphur-miners, and were as curious a lot of mixed types and races as one could find in an ethnological museum. While the Malays have, as a rule, but scanty beards and no hair on breast or limbs, two of these men were as whiskered and hairy as the wild men of Borneo, or the hirsute ones of Ceylon, the faces narrowed to the countenance of apes by the thick growth of hair, and their breasts shaggy as a spaniel’s back. These wild men came from some farther district, but our medium could not or would not comprehend our queries and establish the exact spot of their birthplace by cross-questioning the man-apes themselves; and the missing links sat comfortably the while, submitting their disheveled heads to one and another’s friendly search and attentions.
We were reluctant to descend Papandayang at the rapid gait the coolies struck for going down hill, but they whisked us through the different belts of vegetation and down to the serried rows of coffee-trees in seemingly no time at all. The head man of Tjisoeroepan had posted the village gamelan, or orchestra, in the little rustic band-stand of the green, and their tinkling, mild, and plaintive melodies reached us through the trees long before we were in sight of them. The musicians played a long program while the djoelies were put away, carts and horses brought round, and the very moderate bill itemized and paid—too modest a bill altogether to need an accompaniment of slow music.
We reached Garoet as the delayed afternoon shower began falling; but the lovely moonlight evening under the shade-trees of Garoet streets was to be remembered, as were the later hours on the porch, with the iron bust of Mozart looking at us from his tropical garden bower. In the middle of the night we heard commotion on our porch, as of bamboo-chairs thrown over and dragged about. “The snake!—at last!” was the first thought and cry; and as the thrashing continued, it was evident that a whole den of pythons must be contorting outside. “A tiger!” and we peered through a crack of the latticed door and saw our Tissak Malaya basket scattered in sections over the garden path, and monkeys capering off with our store of Boro Boedor cocoanut-palm sugar. And this petty larceny of the garden monkeys was our only adventure with wild beasts in the tropics!
XXIV
“SALAMAT!”
The return from the hill-country to Buitenzorg and Batavia was all too hurried, and the soft Malay “Salamat” (“Farewell”) found much regretfully left undone. We lingered at the Sans Souci by Salak until the last hour of grace for the necessary steamer preparations at Batavia, as we dreaded the reeking sea-coast with its scorching noondays and stifling nights.
The shady avenues, the wonder-garden, the picturesque passer, and the veranda view of the great blue mountain rising from the valley of palms below were more enchanting than at first. I had come to appreciate and accept the tropics then, to be aware of many fine distinctions unnoted in the first enjoyment of their beauty. I fancied that I could detect greater coolness in the shade of the tamarind than in that of any other tree; the milk of a fresh cocoanut had become the most refreshing and delicious drink; and the palm had established itself in my affections and all associations with the outer world. There had come to be a sense of attachment, almost comradeship, in the constant companion tree, the graceful, restless creature that the natives say will not live beyond the sound of the human voice—dying if the village or habitation it guards is deserted. So nearly human and appealing are these waving cocoas that it is fitting that there should be a census of palms quite as much as of people, and that in the last enumeration it appeared that the people and the palms existed in even numbers—one palm apiece for every one of the millions of inhabitants of the island.