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Sat March 21. S.S. Maetsuycker. Dearest Father. I have been flying about Java [Jawa] so fast that hadn't a moment to write a letter; I'm afraid I have therefore missed a mail. I'm very sorry we hadn't a week longer in Java, however I have managed to see the things I wanted to see and we both feel it has been quite worth going even for that short time. H and I travelled together on Tuesday till 2 in the afternoon; then I went on alone till 7.15 when I arrived at a place called Maos where I had to sleep. Not that I wanted to stay there but they don't run the trains at night and that was as far as I could get. It was a most beautiful journey, between volcanoes and over low passes, across deep gorges through which ran streams fringed with bamboo, and everywhere the incomparable green of the rice fields and little villages buried in dense tropical vegetation. You may say roughly that the whole country is under water at this time of year for the rice fields are kept continually flooded and countless irrigation streams run down from terrace to terrace. The flowers are all on the trees, there are scarcely any flowering plants; still a row of scarlet dak trees is not a bad feature in a landscape. The gardens were full of canna and hibiscus. After I left Hugo the line ran down into a great swampy virgin forest, a tangle of tree ferns and creepers. It's the most unhealthy part of the country I believe, but they are being driven to drain and clear it now by their unmanageably large native population. It has doubled in the last 16 years and the Dutch don't know what to do. I don't fancy they are very flourishing. Tea coffee and sugar have all fallen in value and with all their rice growing they don't grow enough for their own consumption and have to import some of the commoner kinds. They seem to settle down and intermarry with the natives a good deal - a man by whom I sat at dinner told me that there was no feeling here as there is with us against the half caste and I saw numbers of people who were evidently half Javan and who were treated as equals by the Dutch. But of course the race deteriorates just as it is and a delightful doctor with whom I travelled said that all the European children who were not sent home between the ages of 10 and 20 remained half baked creatures and never developed properly. Maos is in the middle of the marsh. It isn't a place at all, only a govt hotel for the accomodation of travellers - and mosquitoes. I never saw so many mosquitoes in one place; so many and so many and so gay. That was all I ever saw at Maos for it was dark when I arrived and still dark when I left next morning at 5.20. Another 4 hours brought me to my destination Djoka [Yogyakarta] and when I got out I found that I had left Holland and was really in Java. This is what they call the Prinzenland, for they have one or two native rajas whom they manage much as we manage ours, falling into much the same mistakes also. I think they give them even less of a free hand than we do ours and as far as I can understand they simply take all their authority, civil and political, from them, in return for which they give them a subsidy. They don't seem to attempt to leave them with any responsibility at all which is quite different from our plan - in theory - though I daresay it works out much the same. Anyway Djoka is a very amusing place. The people are real Javanese, not Sundanese as they are in the west. And a Javanese swell is a most attractive person. He is very tall and slight; he wears a beautiful painted cotton petticoat drawn tightly round him and held by a wide band, in the back of which he sticks his great knife - kriss, it's called - and a cotton coat, short behind to leave room for the cross handle of the kriss, and falling in long pointed ends in front. His head is wrapped in a printed cotton scarf, folded so as to make his forehead look as high and pointed as possible, and knotted in the nape of his neck when the 2 ends stick out like rabbits' ears, and on top of this he wears a black jockey cap, exactly like a jockey cap except that the back half of the crown is cut out, I can't imagine why. And if he's related to a raja he ties a gold thread round his jockey cap with gold tassels hanging from it. So he swaggers down the street, his servant carrying a huge umbrella, green and gold or blue and gold, to show how hochwohlgeboren he is. I hadn't time to see much of Djoka when I arrived for I went straight off by a light railway to a little place called Moentilan and then I hired a sadoe of a Chinaman and drove off through the rice fields to Borobudor. It was enchanting driving through the heart of Java; a delicious afternoon, not too sunny, with clouds drifting across the lines of volcanoes. Java has been in turn Buddhist, Hindu and Muhammadan, which latter it is now in a half hearted manner. Borobudor is the great Buddhist temple - about 800 AD I think it is. You have to be very careful in the matter of temple building in Java because of the earthquakes. Borobudor is a part of the hill on which it is built; it is a series of carved galleries encasing the top of the hill, and even so it is rent and torn with earthquake. The first gallery has carved panels representing people sacrificing at a altar; the next and most beautiful of all tells the tale of the master's life from his mother's vision before his birth until his own attainment of Nirvana - all the wonderful story of the miraculous birth, the prince's life in his father's palace, the initiation into the evils of the mortal coil, the flight by night, the long ordeal, the preaching and the dying Buddha surrounded by his disciples. And you see too the whole life of the East 1100 years ago, their ships, their houses, their armies, their chariots, all their merry makings; you stand by the death beds of kings and beggars and walk in their funeral processions. The next gallery is carved with the birth stories, that is the stories of the former existences of the Buddha; then come three galleries without any carving but thick with little shrines in each of which sits a Buddha in meditation and on the top of all, the tip top of the great pyramid, is a final shrine in which is a big unfinished statue of the Buddha. They say that the whole temple is an elaborate bit of symbolism. First you have praying humanity, then the history of the man who found the clue to the mystery, then the exposition of how the chain of cause and effect is forged through countless ages and last of all, indicated and not completed, the figure of the Enlightened One who is still to come bringing a new dispensation. Anyhow it's a very wonderful place, not the less so for being set of a spur of volcanic hills looking over a tropical plain, indescribably green and luxuriant. One of the interesting things about it is that though the scenery and the life on the carvings are apparently Malay, there are clear indications that the builders' traditions came from the north; on the procession paths the stories follow the course of the sun, but of the sun to the north of the equator, that is east, south and west, not east north and west as it is here. So I drove back through rice fields. There was a wonderful thing growing in the ditches, a flower like a white orchid, growing on an iris plant, I don't know what it is. Just as I reached the train station a thunderstorm broke in sheets of rain. It was kind of it to hold off till that moment. I got back to Djoka about 6, in time to have a bath before dinner. The only drawback of the day was that I had so little to eat. It's true I did have what you may call tea at Moentilan. It consisted of a bottle of Pilsener beer and some Marie biscuits, which was all that Moentilan offered. On Thursday I got up as usual long before the lark and went off to Prambanan, half an hour by train. There are Hindu temples at Prambanan, some 3 centuries later that Boro Budor [Borobudor] and built something on the same plan. Only instead of having one enormous pyramid you have a group of nine smaller ones. They lie at the foot of a volcano which has buried them from time to time in ashes. The Dutch have recently dug them out and are now repairing them. I found an agreeable Dutchman superintending the works; he spoke very good German and took me round explaining everything. The Shiwa temple has a gallery, like that at Borobudor, on which the whole of the great Hindu epic, the Ramayana, is carved. It's a marvellous bit of storytelling. This temple has 4 shrines, 2 to Shiwa, one to his son Ganesh, the elephant God, and one to his wife Durga. The statues in them are wonderfully preserved. Since the temple has been unburied, the Javanese, very imperfectly Muhammadan, have come back to worship to the older gods. They lay offerings before the statues and say their prayers to Shiwa's great stone bull in the opposite temple. I saw bunches of flowers and leaves lying before the unfinished Buddha at Borobudor, and the ashes of burnt offerings. I had a couple of hours at Djoka when I got back, drove about the town and saw 'ow they do there. I also had a dance in the hotel garden, a charming little lady danced for me, waving her bare arms, while some musicians played delicious music on wooden keyed instruments and drums softly beaten with the fingers. That night I returned to Maos and slept there and next day travelled 13 hours to Batavia [Jakarta] where I rejoined Hugo. Fortunately for me - though not for him - it rained nearly all day so that it was quite cool and pleasant travelling.
Sunday 22. [22 March 1903] We caught our boat by the skin of our teeth on Sat. morning. It's very full; I have a woman in my cabin, but what with living and sleeping on deck we have never met yet! We have quite a number of dear friends on board, the nice old Kromschroeders whom we love, a tedious Russian called Ditmar and 3 Austrians who have all been our travelling companions at different times. Last night we had a furious storm of rain. I was sleeping on deck and was drenched even under the awning; but it doesn't do you any harm to get wet in this climate, so I went on sleeping peacefully and when I woke I was dry. Today it's gray [sic] and cool, our usual equatorial day. Tomorrow we get to Singapore.
I can't understand how I come to be overdrawn. I must examine my cheque book when I get to a climate when it's possible to do anything. I thought I had ú20 in the bank still. Meantime thank you very much for putting ú100 to my credit. I feel dreadfully confused about my accounts with Mother. I sent her a cheque for some bills from Calcutta and she now sends me a list of things she has paid, which I rather think were mostly included in the cheque and I don't know how to tirer this au claire. {Would} I think I had better send her a further cheque, blank, so that she may refund herself. Ever your very affectionate daughter Gertrude.
We have very few mails these days. We hope to find one from you in Singapore.
[Enclosed with above letter?] Hugo won't stay any longer in Japan, as your telegram advised. I think it's a pity as we shall probably only have 3 weeks there and it seems silly to hurry so through a country to which he is not likely to come back. However, it's his journey so I can't insist. I don't feel as if 3 weeks in America will be very enjoyable or profitable at the end of a long journey. It's too late in the year to find people in the towns. We've given up the idea of going to Washington which at the end of June would be absolutely empty. If you have any suggestions to make I should be very grateful. I really don't feel as if I could tackle America on the spur of the moment, and I don't know anybody either. I have represented to him that it would be far better to come back there some day properly provided with introductions, and to stay in Japan another fortnight now, which it seems to me would be a wiser plan, but he won't. If we find we aren't enjoying it at all, which I think is very likely, we can always come straight home and have a little time in London. Still I do rather regret having to rush so in Japan. It spoils the pleasure of travel.