The night was cold. I had to get up to find that blanket. It was still colder before dawn, when a knocking at my door warned me that I had arranged to go to a village called Jiporai, where it was said I could find a horse and so could ride to some mysterious height where there were hot springs in a forest. That folly was of my doing—it came of my easy compliance to a foolish suggestion made when my mood, induced by Garut and wine, was inclusive and grateful. Nor would it be any use, I found, to ignore that knocking. The native outside was going to keep it up. In the bleak small hours my need for a horse had vanished. I did not feel it. I did not want a horse.
Yet there it was; and out of the village of Jiporai the track mounted quickly, while from the saddle of a stout pony—he was as petulant as myself over this preposterously early excursion—I looked at the darkness which filled the amphitheater of mountains; it was a starless lake of night. We were only just above the level of that expanse of chilling shadow, and its depth, straight down from where the pony’s feet clattered the stones on the edge of it, was unseen and unknown. But I stopped him when the sun came. He turned his head, too, with his ears cocked eastward. We both watched. The great space below us quickly filled with light. We could see to the bottom of it. Without a movement, rider and horse were at once placed by the dawn at a dizzy height, on an aërial path.
The pony snorted and shook his head. It was morning, it was warm, and suddenly the earth began to exhale odors. We went through a flimsy campong, with relics of totems over its huts, and shy women with babies straddled on their hips pretended they could not see us. The men were in the padi fields beyond. We came upon some of these workers making coffee and cooking rice under a thatch propped on four poles. They accepted us as though they had always known us, and I may have had a better breakfast than that at some time or other, but I don’t remember it.
We had to pass through a deep ravine remarkable with the fronds of immense ferns arched from its rocks. There was an outlook at times over steep places, where distant lower Java was framed in immediate tree-ferns, grotesque leaves, and orchids. We passed up to a grassy plateau, which might have been an English ducal park. The flowers there were of another climate—raspberry, brambles, the yellow heads of composite plants, and labiate herbs. In a hollow of a forest beyond there were forbidding and incrusted recesses where the foliage was veiled in bursts of steam. But we did not pause by those caldrons of boiling mud. The smell of sulphur is not good. Those pools were not designed for the rustic wonder of travelers, nor even to admonish them of what follows after sin. I do not know for what they were designed, but a few years ago, so I was told, they boiled over and obliterated forty of the villages where the people are so good-natured.
So we learn that the rich and beautiful island of Java is not, after all, a creation especially intended to support the flamboyant posters of Batavia. Sometimes it does things on its own account. It was even with a degree of pleasure, later, that I learned I should not be allowed to leave Sourabaya without a visit to the port’s medical officer. It broke the spell of the Garden of Eden to find that that corner of it is infected by the plague, and that anyone emerging from the garden is suspect of subtle evil. But what attraction would there be in a snakeless Paradise?
CHAPTER XV
When a scholarly English traveler I met at Batavia found in me no warm regard for the ancient Buddhist tope at Borobudor, and only a loose wish to see it before I died, he adjusted his monocle to get me into a sharper focus. I tried to meet his sudden critical interest with an aspect hastily mustered of original intelligence, but I could see my reputation had perished. He was disappointed. An unfortunate sign now showed in me that he had hitherto overlooked. I should have to make a fight for this, or it would end in my seeing the famous curiosity.
The archæologist was severe, and spoke slowly, like one who knows the truth. “Remember, you have come many thousands of miles. It is probably the only chance in your life to see one of the most remarkable temples in the world.”