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The flower of the Malay race belongs to Sumatra, and the wild Battek tribes of alien origin are fast merging themselves into the dominant stock, though the Redjanger clan, retaining curious customs of a remote past, and possessing a written character, cut with a kris on strips of bamboo, is slow to assimilate itself to the Malayan element.
Every variety of battek, basket-work, mats, and quaint silver or brass ware, is brought by native peddlers to the broad verandahs of the hotel, the patient and gentle people content to spend long hours on the marble steps, dozing between their scanty bargains, or crimsoning their months with the stimulating morsel of betel-nut, said to allay the hunger, thirst, and exhaustion of the steaming tropics.
Villagers returning from work brighten the road with patches of scarlet and yellow; children, clad only in necklaces of red seeds and silver bangles, running about amid groups of women in painted battek, with brown babies carried in the orange or crimson folds of the slandang, pause before the doorways of woven basket-work huts, or carry crates of yellow bananas and strings of purple mangosteens, to supplement the "evening rice" of their frugal meal.
Hygienic regulations are compulsory, and even here the traditions of Holland enjoin an amount of whitewashing and cleaning up unique in tropical colonies. The green and vermilion panelled sarongs of Solo are renowned for their elaborate designs, and the painting of battek, or cotton cloth, remains a flourishing industry of the ancient capital.
No two sarongs are alike, and the painted battek, notwithstanding the simplicity of the cotton background, represents an amount of labour and finish which makes the archaic garment a costly, though almost indestructible production.
Silken scarves, and elaborately-painted battek, woven with gold and silver thread, swing from the black rafters of dim corridors, and countless treasures of the deep, in shells and coral of rich and delicate colouring, manifest the infinite variety of Nature's handiwork.
Centuries of hereditary training, from the days when royal Solo was a self-supporting city, contribute to the amazing skill of the battek girls, but the elaboration of native Art is doomed to decay, for Time, hitherto a negligeable quantity in this "summer isle of Eden," begins to reveal a value unknown to the Javanese past, and as the poetry of illumination vanished before the prose of the printing press, so the painting of battek must inevitably give way to the wholesale methods of Manchester in the near future of Java, just awakening from her spellbound sleep to the changed conditions of life and labour.
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