To Baliwag. Following the Quingua in its upward and eastward course as it meandered through a well-cultivated and luxuriantly fertile country, past stone-built churches and chapels which grouped themselves with the surrounding palm-trees and bamboo-bushes into sylvan vignettes, Father Llano’s four-horsed carriage brought me to the important town of Baliwag, the industry of which is celebrated beyond the limits of the province.
Board houses and their furniture. I visited several families and received a friendly reception from all of them. The houses were built of boards and were placed upon piles elevated five feet above the ground. Each consisted of a spacious dwelling apartment which opened on one side into the kitchen, and on the other on to an open space, the azotea; a lofty roof of palm-trees spread itself above the dwelling, the entrance to which was through the azotea. The latter was half covered by the roof I have just mentioned. The floor was composed of slats an inch in width, laid half that distance apart. Chairs, tables, benches, a cupboard, a few small ornaments, a mirror, and some lithographs in frames, composed the furniture of the interior. The cleanliness of the house and the arrangement of its contents testified to the existence of order and prosperity.
Tapis weaving. I found the women in almost all the houses occupied in weaving tapis, which have a great reputation in the Manila market. They are narrow, thickly-woven silk scarves, six varas in length, with oblique white stripes on a dark-brown ground. They are worn above the sarong.
Petaca cigar cases. Baliwag is also especially famous for its petaca[1]cigar-cases, which surpass all others in delicacy of workmanship. They are not made of straw, but of fine strips of Spanish cane, and particularly from the lower ends of the leaf-stalks of the calamusart, which is said to grow only in the province of Nueva Ecija.
Preparation of material. A bundle of a hundred selected stalks, a couple of feet long, costs about six reals. When these stalks have been split lengthways into four or five pieces, the inner wood is removed, till nothing but the outer part remains. The thin strips thus obtained are drawn by the hand between a convex block and a knife fixed in a sloping position, and between a couple of steel blades which nearly meet.
Costly weaving. It is a task requiring much patience and practice. In the first operation, as a rule, quite one-half of the stems are broken, and in the second more than half, so that scarcely twenty per cent of the stalks survive the final process. In very fine matting the proportionate loss is still greater. The plaiting is done on wooden cylinders. A case of average workmanship, which costs two dollars on the spot, can be manufactured in six days’ uninterrupted labor. Cigar-cases of exceptionally intricate workmanship, made to order for a connoisseur, frequently cost upwards of fifty dollars.
Volcanic stone quarries. Following the Quingua from Baliwag up its stream, we passed several quarries, where we saw the thickly-packed strata of volcanic stone which is used as a building material. The banks of the river are thickly studded with prickly bamboos from ten to twelve feet high. The water overflows in the rainy season, and floods the plain for a great distance. Hence the many shells of large freshwater mussels which are to be seen lying on the earth which covers the volcanic deposit. The country begins to get hilly in the neighborhood of Tobog, a small place with no church of its own, and dependent for its services upon the priest of the next parish. The gentle slopes of the hills are, as in Java, cut into terraces and used for the cultivation of rice. Except at Lucban I have never observed similar sawas anywhere else in the Philippines. Several small sugar-fields, which, however, the people do not as yet understand how to manage properly, show that the rudiments of agricultural prosperity are already in existence. The roads are partly covered with awnings, beneath which benches are placed affording repose to the weary traveller. I never saw these out of this province. One might fancy oneself in one of the most fertile and thickly-populated districts of Java.
A convento and the parish priest.I passed the night in a convento, as the dwelling of the parish priest is called in the Philippines. It was extremely dirty, and the priest, an Augustinian, was full of proselytish ardor. I had to undergo a long geographical examination about the difference between Prussia and Russia; was asked whether the great city of Nuremberg was the capital of the grand-duchy or of the empire of Russia; learnt that the English were on the point of returning to the bosom of the Catholic Church, and that the “others” would soon follow, and was, in short, in spite of the particular recommendation of Father Llanos, very badly received. Some little time afterwards I fell into the hands of two young Capuchins, who tried to convert me, but who, with the exception of this little impertinence, treated me capitally. They gave me pâtés de foie gras boiled in water, which I quickly recognized by the truffles swimming about in the grease. To punish them for their importunity I refrained from telling my hosts the right way to cook the pâtés, which I had the pleasure of afterwards eating in the forest, as I easily persuaded them to sell me the tins they had left. These are the only two occasions on which I was subjected to this kind of annoyance during my eighteen months’ residence in the Philippines.
Arrangements for travellers.The traveller who is provided with a passport is, however, by no means obliged to rely upon priestly hospitality, as he needs must do in many isolated parts of Europe. Every village, every hamlet, has its commonhouse, called casa real or tribunal, in which he can take up his quarters and be supplied with provisions at the market price, a circumstance that I was not acquainted with on the occasion of my first trip. The traveller is therefore in this respect perfectly independent, at least in theory, though in practice he will often scarcely be able to avoid putting up at the conventos in the more isolated parts of the country. In these the priest, perhaps the only white man for miles around, is with difficulty persuaded to miss the opportunity of housing such a rare guest, to whom he is only too anxious to give up the best bedroom in his dwelling, and to offer everything that his kitchen and cellar can afford. Everything is placed before the guest in such a spirit of sincere and undisguised friendliness, that he feels no obligation, but on the contrary easily persuades himself that he is doing his host a favor by prolonging his stay. Upon one occasion, when I had determined, in spite of an invitation from the padre, to occupy the casa real, just as I was beginning to instal myself, the priest appeared upon the scene with the municipal officials and a band of music which was in the neighborhood pending the preparations for a religious festival. He made them lift me up, chair and all, and with music and general rejoicing carried me off to his own house.
Kupang iron-foundry.On the following day I paid a visit to Kupang, an iron-foundry lying to the N.N.E of Angat, escorted by two armed men, whose services I was pressed to accept, as the district had a bad reputation for robberies. After travelling three or four miles in a northerly direction, we crossed the Banauon, at that time a mere brook meandering through shingle, but in the rainy season an impetuous stream more than a hundred feet broad; and in a couple of hours we reached the iron-works, an immense shed lying in the middle of the forest, with a couple of wings at each end, in which the manager, an Englishman, who had been wrecked some years before in Samar, lived with his wife, a pretty mestiza. If I laid down my handkerchief, my pencil, or any other object, the wife immediately locked them up to protect them from the kleptomania of her servants. These poor people, whose enterprise was not a very successful one, had to lead a wretched life. Two years before my visit a band of twenty-seven robbers burst into the place, sacked the house, and threw its mistress, who was alone with her maid at the time, out of the window. She fortunately alighted without receiving any serious hurt, but the maid, whom terror caused to jump out of the window also, died of the injuries she received. The robbers, who turned out to be miners and residents in Angat, were easily caught, and, when I was there, had already spent a couple of years in prison awaiting their trial.