Forty Thousand Miles Over Land and Water / The Journal of a Tour Through the British Empire and America

by Ethel Gwendoline Vincent

A Malay boy hovered around us, and offered by signs to climb a tree, as we thought, taking us for that purpose down a secluded path. At length, after much fruitless gesticulating, he took the petal of a leaf I had picked up, from my hand and laid it against a tree. Then we understood. It was the famous orchids of Buitenzorg Gardens that he was offering to show us. He led us to a retired spot where there were some leafless stumps of shrubs, and on to these, after careful examination, we discovered, engrafted and growing in bamboo baskets, about 4000 of the finest specimens of orchids. True that few were in flower, but those few we should have treasured under glass cases at home. We came back to the carriage by a bye-way where there was a fountain playing over a pool of water-lilies in the midst of a green thicket. And so it is at these Buitenzorg Gardens, one beautiful spot after another, unsuspected before, can be discovered in lengthened wanderings.

A broad park, bordered by a curious row of palm-trees that grow in a descending and ascending scale, forming a perfect zig-zag, surrounds the front of the palace, and here there were a treasured herd of deer feeding. By the park-gates are a group of marvellous banyan-trees. Branches were growing down from them like the stem of another tree, or clustering like a ring of small trees around the trunk, and swelling it to enormous dimensions. In other trees we saw the roots hanging down from the branches like a network of fibres or strings that reached to the ground. Again we saw the roots of the same trees grown outwards from the ground, and forming a rocky network round the base of the trunk.

Another magnificent avenue tapers away from the entrance of the park, ending in a black and white marble obelisk, with the Netherlands arms upon it, and the mystifying initials of T. T.

We drove past the barracks and officers' quarters, and stopped at the Roman Catholic Cemetery, where the handsome monuments are all protected by zinc covers.

We noticed that many of the houses, with their neatly-clipped hybiscus hedge, had the stable as part of the house, the two or three stalls being open along the front. Crossing over the bridge, we looked down into a scene of great beauty, the jungle closing in the banks of the howling river, and then we came back to the gardens once more.

How utterly impossible it is to describe "tropical vegetation." A string of names (even if I knew them) conveys no idea of the extraordinary beauty and curiosity of the many new-shaped leaves, and plants, and shrubs, and trees, and parasites of a jungle. I know we wished the drive could have lasted very much longer than it did, for we were amid the scenes read of in all books of travels—groves of cocoa-nut palms and pomegranates, of sago and betel-nut palms, with the meliosnea, and every other species of tropical beauty. With the exception of some roses, with the outside petals a dark crimson, shaded to pale pink inside, there are no beds of flowers in these gardens. There are plenty of brilliant shrub flowers like the crimson hibiscus (which when crushed yields a kind of blacking I am told), but no garden or cultivated flowers. It is the same throughout Java, no flowers, only tropical creepers and shrubs.

I tried to do some writing after dinner, but the insects forbad it; an ant, a large animal with gauzy wings, being particularly troublesome. This is really the white ant grown to a harmless size. In its earlier stages (when it is eaten by the black ant) the destruction it works in a single night is terrible. Literally it "eats you out of house and home" by perforating the timbers of the house with holes till they become rotten. It eats through a box, and leaves no trace of any clothes ever having been in it, or penetrates through the corks and drinks up a cellarful of wine. There is no finality to the mischief the white ant can and does work in a house. Safety against it is only obtained by a daily inspection and airing of anything and everything.

A very curious custom prevails throughout Java, which we only found out this evening. We frequently passed gardos, or watch-houses, a white building by the roadside, open on all sides. From the centre of the house hangs a billet of wood partially hollowed out, which, when struck, gives forth a piercing, mournful sound. Day and night a watchman is stationed here, sounding the watches every hour. It is a wonderful thought that throughout an island as large as England and Wales, these watches are re-echoed throughout the country every mile, and every hour becoming later and later as it reaches the interior of the country. It is cheering in the stillness of the night, hearing the sound of the watch struck from the gardo nearest the station, taken up by the next one, and so on all through the town, spreading and dying away into the country. The Malays and Javanese are not allowed to be in the streets between the hours of 8 p.m. and 5 a.m. without a passport to show to the watchman, who calls and demands it as they pass. The watchman is provided with a two-pronged, upward-toothed fork, with which he can "run in" any refractory member of society by the neck; and he has the power to detain any one not giving satisfactory reasons for being about at that hour. If a robbery or crime occurs, the first thing is to give notice at the nearest guard-house, which, by a code of signals, is able to pass on the news to the next guard-house, and so it spreads through the country. Each watchman knows what passports and on what business every one has passed during the night, and suspicion thus often falls on the right person. The services of these watchmen are unpaid, it being the duty of each village-chief to allot the hours to each member of the community, who may provide a substitute if he please. Java is divided into campos or villages, governed by chiefs who are responsible for the good conduct of each individual of their division: any complaint of man, woman, or child is referred to the chief of the campo. Thus the government of the people is done by themselves, and there are but a very few native police, irregularly parading the streets in their blue and orange uniforms.