“But I don’t want to distort my brief span by trying to cram every experience into it. I know I can be happy without Borobudor.”
“Eh? Pardon me. But this relic is unique.”
“So am I, sir; so are you. We are even older than that old tope by about seven hundred years. Besides, I have seen its portraits, and they fill me with despair.”
His monocle dropped from his raised eyebrow. “Despair? It’s a wonderful mass. It’s an amazing pile. I do not understand so incurious a man. You astonish me. Everybody sees it who comes to Java. Despair? Why, dammit, think of the industry, think of the devotion of those people who converted the rocks of a hilltop into a huge temple!”
“I have thought of it. That’s what disheartens me. It is horrible. Those stones with their carvings commemorate calm and settled error....”
The archæologist held up his right hand and waved it gently in the way a policeman stops the traffic. I stopped.
“Excuse me. If they erred, what is that to us? It is their art which matters, not its cause. And even its cause—such devotion to their faith, carried to its topmost pinnacle, crowning a hill with the proof of man’s yearning mind, deserves more than your flippant indifference. Borobudor was a temple to God.”
“That’s the trouble with it. That’s the nearest to God we ever get. If I went, I know I should only have it rubbed in that we seem unable to receive a simple lesson in wisdom without at once beginning to elaborate it into a system to justify what we want to do. Why, if Buddha were to come to Java, Borobudor is probably the one place he would be careful to avoid!”
“Sir, you have no reverence for your fellows. Those sincere stones celebrate faith.”
“What of that? Have you ever had to jump for it when faith dropped one of its sincere bombs? Those fervid stones embarrass me like fetiches and patriotic songs.”