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That being so, I shall only inflict on you a little of Calcutta. I like it immensely. They laugh at me for saying it is pretty, but I do think it is quite beautiful. It is so much greener than I expected, and I like the broad streets of pillared houses standing in their palm-shaded compounds.
One may consider that the present age is an age of spiritual eclipse, though that is not the writer's opinion, and question with Matthew Arnold: What girl Now reads in her bosom as clear As Rebekah read, when she sate At eve by the palm-shaded well? Who guards in her breast As deep, as pellucid a spring Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?
In those days the hotel was called, in appeal to our patriotism, more flattered then than now in Europe, Hotel Washington; but it is to-day a mere pension, though it looks over the same length of palm-shaded, statue-peopled garden.
One day we crawled up the narrow, rickety ladder that led into the two by four opening of old Wahpering's palm-shaded home. The little punghulo or chief, touched his forehead with the back of his open palm as we advanced cautiously over the open bamboo floor toward his old wife, who was seated in one corner by a low, horizontal window, weaving a sarong on a hand-loom.
Then mustering the hands together, Atkins, with Harvey, Roka, and Huka, carried the body to its last resting-place, and Huka, as Latour the steward dropped a handful of the sandy soil into the grave, prayed as he had prayed over the bodies of those who had been buried at sea simply, yet touchingly and then the party returned along the narrow palm-shaded path to the village.
Rebekah, when she came to fill her earthen pitcher at the palm-shaded well, looked out with dusky, dreamy eyes across the golden grain toward the mysterious east. Moses, when he stood in the night, watching his flock on the starlit Arabian waste, felt borne to him on the desert wind a scent of wheat. The Bible said, "He maketh peace in thy borders and filleth thee with the finest of the wheat."
And how, meditating on the methods of such drastic deliverance sitting in the palm-shaded verandah of a fly-blown little eating-house, kept by a monkey-faced, squint-eyed Japanese he happened to pick up a Calcutta newspaper. He read its columns mechanically, without interest or understanding, his mind still working on methods of death, when a name leapt at him weighted with personal meaning.
The customary payment is never omitted, and at evening the owner of the basket collects the money, and brings a fresh supply of food for future wayfarers. Country districts demonstrate the fact of Java being a creedless land. This is Sunday, and the Feast of the Epiphany, but the only honour paid to the day consists in a gayer garb, and a band playing for an hour in the palm-shaded garden.
The wonderful Gap of Harau may be reached by cart from Paja-Kombo; the palm-shaded road narrows at the mighty gorge, where vermilion cliffs, grooved and ribbed as though by some convulsion of Nature, tower up in colossal majesty on either side.
A palm-shaded plateau beneath the hotel offers an ideal resting-place, but the impenetrable jungle covering the Penang Hills makes expeditions on foot or by chair, impracticable, and the wild deluges of rain, with terrific thunder peals bursting in uncontrolled fury on this exposed peak, minimise the delights of a mountain sojourn.
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