Out came the syce's matches, as he clung to the pony's bridle. Not nearly so bright as the lambent phosphorescence from the fireflies which flickered across our path, the puny light of the match was sufficient for the guide to pick up the ribbon-like path, and once more we were on our way to the top.
Three deep ravines were traversed before we made the final upward movement, and then Nature's lamp lights were being shut out in hundreds at a time as the soft dawn began to diffuse itself. With Dawn's left hand in the sky, we thought of Omar Khayyam's stanza, and felt impelled to cry out to the sleepers in the hollow—
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light,
The dawn had been preluded by the awakening chirrups of songsters in the wood. A shriller note was struck by some feathered Daphnis piping to his Chloe. Deep down in the valleys and in the villages perched perilously on projecting ledges of the mountain, faint twinkling lights began to appear, and the lowing of the cattle and the answering and re-echoed crowing of rival poultry-yards sent the thoughts back to Homeland scenes some 10,000 miles away.
As we stood on the wall of the enormous crater, overlooking the Sand Sea, and watched the long shafts of golden light shoot up to the zenith from behind the mountain peaks to the East, we felt that our ride had not been in vain.
To be abroad at early dawn in the tropics is to enjoy the most delightful period of the day. An English essayist has well expressed the exhilaration one feels: "There is something beautiful in the unused day, something beautiful in the fact that it is still untouched, unsoiled." Only those who have stood on the hill tops, far removed from the haunts of men, have any true idea of the grandeur of Nature and the insignificance of man.
The sun rose speedily in the full power of his golden radiance to paint the landscape. There was no transition. Out of the darkness there rose a view, enormous, diversified, impressive.
Miles away on the west, the five summits of the Ardjeono had been the first to reflect the rays hidden from us. Penanggoenan's sugar-loaf top soon caught them up and passed them on to Kawi's three lofty peaks. To the south, was the Seméroe, Java's loftiest volcano; to the east, the Yang Plateau; to the north, the sea and the island of Madoera. We could trace the coast-line 9,000 feet below, away westward beyond Sourabaya, where white-crested surf beat silently upon the streak of yellow sand. The vast plains of East Java showed a pattern of variegated colour, which stretched out to the cultivated slopes of the hills. Mountain hamlets and villages on the plains sent out blue vapours from morning fires. The rivers were distinguishable by their leafy fringe as much as by the reflection of the blue sky overhead. Between us and the Yang Plateau, there were rolling billows of white cloud, tipped by the colours from the sun's spectrum.
But it was the panorama spread out like a model beneath our feet which arrested attention and impressed one most. We stood on the edge of an enormous crater—the Teng'ger—with a circumference of fifteen miles. Where, in prehistoric times, flames and ashes and lava had boiled and belched, there was now a sea of yellow sand, out of which stood other three volcano peaks—the Battok, the Bromo, and the Widodarèn—showing purple in the morning light. The Battok is a perfect cone, the lava-covered sides standing out in clearly defined ridges like the buttresses of a Gothic structure. The Bromo is the only one of the three now active. As we gaze down, we are startled by a deep groaning noise, and out of the wide crater mouth there issues a mass of grey smoke and ashes laden and streaked with fire. Simultaneously, a huge mass of cloud, cruciform in shape, is shot up hundreds of feet into the air from the Semeroe. It rests a few seconds above the bare, ash-strewn cone, and then drifts heavily to westward, to make way for the next eruption.