The Sméroe—13,000 Feet High.
There is a small hotel at the Boro Budur where one is recommended to stay when studying details, and we can well believe that sunrise as seen from the summit is a sight one should never forget. We saw it in the early afternoon when the heat vapours from the noontide sun partially obliterated the landscape, but even so it was impressive. Except on the right, where the mountains close in the horizon, the eye has a range of many miles over fertile alluvial plains, studded with coco and banana and palm trees, and every other patch of ground cultivated "like a tulip bed." Miss Marianne North, whose collection of paintings in Kew Gardens may be familiar to some of our readers, wrote of this view: "The very finest view we ever saw."
The Temples of Parambanan.
There are other Buddhist ruins in the neighbourhood of the Boro Budur; but the other more important collection is scattered over the region between Djocjakarta and Soerakarta. One small temple, the Tjandi Kali Bening, is reputed to be the gem of Hindu art in Java. This we did not see; but, on another day, in a victoria drawn by four small ponies, kept going by the wild gr-r-r-ee gr-r-r-eeing of our native running footman, we drove to the scattered temples on the Plain of Parambanan, where, with the help of another archæological guide by Dr. I. Groneman, we were able to appreciate the beauties of these 1100-year-old centres of ancient religious devotees. These temples are the most interesting in the country, though lacking the extent and grandeur of the Boro Budur. Though they do not contain a single genuine Buddha figure, but many images of Brahmanic gods, Dr. Groneman says there are many reasons to justify the opinion that they were built by Buddhists, probably over the ashes of princes and grandees of a Buddhistic empire.
In his report to Sir Stamford Raffles on these Parambanan ruins, Captain George Baker, of the Bengal establishment wrote:—"In the whole course of my life, I have never met with such stupendous and finished specimens of human labour and of the science and taste of ages long since forgot, crowded together in so small a compass, as in this little spot, which, to use a military phrase, I deem to have been the headquarters of Hinduism in Java."
In Volume XIII of the "Asiatick Researches or Transactions of the Society instituted in Bengal for inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia" (Calcutta, 1820), Mr. John Crawfurd, who, apparently, visited Java in 1816, gives a long and interesting description of the ruins on the Plain of Parambanan. He describes the locale as ten miles from Djocjakarta, a valley lying between Rababu and Marapi to the north and a smaller southern range of high land.