WOMAN COOKING RICE.
The staple diet is rice and dried fish, with vegetables and fruits: cakes and pastry are rare luxuries, and purchased at the market or from itinerant vendors. The cooking arrangements are very simple. Nearly everything is cooked in a priok, or frying-pan, which is heated over a kompor, or stove of earthenware, or on bricks on a flat stove raised from the ground. In both cases charcoal is burnt, being made to burn brightly by a fan. The rice (which is to them what bread is to us) is not boiled, but steamed. A copper vessel (dang-dang) is filled with hot water, and the rice is then placed in a cone-shaped bamboo basket (koekoesan), which is placed point downwards into the vessel and covered with a bamboo or earthenware top (kekep). The dang-dang is then placed over the fire either in the kompor or on the bricks.
Rice culture is the natural pursuit of the Javanese or Sundanese native. Coffee, sugar, and tea he cultivates on compulsion for wages with which to pay his taxes. Now the land of Java is divided into two classes, land capable of being inundated by streams or rivers called sawah, and land not so inundated called tegal, or gaga. On the latter only the less important crops, such as mountain rice or Indian corn, are grown. On sawah land the rice is grown in terraces, which are so arranged that, without any machinery for raising or cisterns for storing the water, a perfectly natural and perpetual supply is gained from the high mountains, which serve here the same useful purpose that the great river Nile does in Egypt. The small fields are worked with the patjoel, a sort of hoe, and the large with the plough (wloekoe), and then inundated. After ten or fifteen days they are hoed again, so that any places not reached by the plough or hoe may be laboured, and the intervening banks kept free from weeds and consequently made porous. The large sawahs are also harrowed with the garoe; and, finally, small trenches are cut for the water to flow from one terrace to another. When the earth has thus been worked into a mass of liquid mud, the young plants are transplanted from the beds in which they have been sown about a month previously, and carefully placed in this soft mud. Inundation is necessary until the rice is nearly ripe, which is naturally about August or September. It is reaped with a short knife called ani-ani, with which the reaper cuts off each separate ear with a few inches of the stem; and the ears are then threshed by being placed in a hollow tree trunk and there stamped with a toemboekan, a heavy piece of wood with a broad end. The lands are ploughed, harrowed, and weeded by the men, but the transplanting, reaping, and threshing is done by women.
A curious circumstance in rice-cultivation is the fact that side by side the crops may be seen in each of the separate stages, planting and reaping often going on simultaneously. Beside the rice, a crop of beans or sweet potatoes is grown in the year, and the flooded terraces are also utilized as fish-tanks, in which gold-fish are grown to the length of a foot and a half and then eaten. They are brought to the market in water, and so kept fresh, and, if not sold, are of course returned to their "pastures" again.
The sawah plough is an interesting study. It is made in three pieces—the pole (tjatjadan); the handle (patjek), which fits into the iron-shod share (singkal). To this is attached a crosspiece or yoke (depar), fitted with a pair of long pegs coming over the necks of the oxen or buffaloes, and a crosspiece hanging under their necks and fastened to the yoke by native cord. The ploughman holds the tail of the plough with the left and the rod-whip (petjoet) with the right hand. He drives and directs the big lumbering beasts by words or by a touch of the rod. To make them go "straight on," he calls out, Gio gio kalen; "Turn to the right" is Ghir ngivo; "To the left," Ghir nengen; "Stop" is His his; and whenever they (or horses) incur the displeasure of their drivers, they are invariably brought to a better mind by hearing an unpronounceable exclamation something like Uk uk.
A BULLOCK CART.
Another natural industry in which the Javanese are particularly skilful is the making of mats. There are many varieties. A light sort of floor-covering is made from the leaves of the wild pine-apple (pandan); a stronger kind is the tika Bogor, or Buitenzorg matting, which is made from the bark of a species of palm, and which is used to cover walls and ceilings. Beside these, matting is made from rushes and from the cane imported from Palembang, in Sumatra; while for the walls of the houses a heavy matting of bamboo strips is used. The weaving of sarongs is practised by the women all over Java, and the cooking and household utensils, made both in copper and earthenware, indicate by their forms a considerable taste. The Javanese carpenters are also very clever, and both they and the Malays are skilful in imitating any European designs which are handed to them. In spite, however, of this natural aptitude for higher industries, the great mass of the native population are compelled by the present commercial system to remain mere peasants. Even so the cheapness and simplicity of the means of life prevent them from being a joyless race. A plantation cooly generally has two days in the week on which he does no work.