Hoofdstuk 5

At ten in the morning there was an unusual stir on the high road that links the district of Pandeglang with Lebak. "High road" is perhaps saying rather too much for the broad footpath that people, out of courtesy and for want of anything better, called the "road." But if one set out from Serang, the chief town of the Bantam residency, in a carriage and four, meaning to make one's way to Rangkas-Betoeng, the new chief town of the Lebak country, one could be nearly certain of arriving there in due course. So it was a road after all.

True, one was forever sticking fast in the mud, which in the Bantam lowlands is heavy, clayey, and clinging; true, one was repeatedly obliged to call on the help of the inhabitants of the nearest villages — even when they were not very near, for villages are not plentiful in those parts — but once one had finally managed to gather a score of farmers from round about, it usually did not take very long before horse and carriage were back on firm ground.

The coachman cracked his whip, the runners — in Europe, I believe, one would say "grooms," or rather, there is nothing in Europe that corresponds to these runners — these incomparable runners, then, with their short thick little whips, would skip along again at the side of the team, shrieking out indescribable noises and lashing the horses under the belly to spur them on. In this way one jolted along for a while, until the dispiriting moment came round again when one sank up to the axles in the mud.

Then the cry for help began afresh. One waited patiently until that help arrived, and ... struggled on.

Often, as I passed along that road, it seemed to me that here or there I might come upon a carriage carrying travellers from the previous century, who had sunk in the mud and been forgotten.

But this never once happened to me.

So I assume that all who ever came along this road did in the end arrive where they wished to be.

One would be much mistaken to form an idea of the whole of the great road across Java by the measure of that road in the Lebak country.

The high road proper, with its many branches, which Marshal Daendels had laid out at great cost of human life, is indeed a magnificent piece of work, and one stands amazed at the force of will of the man who, despite all the obstacles his enviers and opponents in the mother country put in his way, dared to defy the unwillingness of the population and the discontent of the chiefs in order to bring about something that to this day still rouses and deserves the admiration of every visitor.

No system of post-horses in Europe — not even in England, Russia, or Hungary — can be set on a par with the one on Java.

Over high mountain ridges, along chasms that make you shudder, the heavily laden travelling-carriage flies onward at a single gallop.

The coachman sits as though nailed to the box, for hours, indeed whole days on end, and swings the heavy whip with an iron arm.

He knows exactly how to reckon where and by how much he must rein in the racing horses, so that after a headlong descent of a mountain slope, there at that bend ...

— My God, the road is ... gone! We are driving into an abyss, cries the inexperienced traveller; there is no road ... there is the chasm!

Yes, so it seems.

The road bends, and just as one gallop-bound more would lose firm ground beneath the leaders, the horses wheel about and sling the vehicle round the corner.

They fly up the mountain height that you did not see a moment before, and ... the abyss lies behind you.

On such an occasion there are moments when the carriage rests only on the wheels at the outer side of the curve you are describing: the centrifugal force has lifted the inner wheels off the ground.

It takes cool blood not to shut one's eyes, and whoever travels on Java for the first time writes to his family in Europe that he has been in mortal danger. But whoever belongs there laughs at such fear.

It is not my aim — least of all at the beginning of my tale — to keep the reader long occupied with the describing of places, landscapes, or buildings. I am too afraid of scaring him off with anything that might smack of long-windedness; and only later, when I feel that he has been won over to me, when I can tell from his look and bearing that the fate of the heroine who springs from a fourth-floor balcony somewhere holds his interest, then I will, with bold contempt for all the laws of gravity, let her hover between heaven and earth until I have unburdened my heart in a meticulous sketch of the beauties of the landscape, or of the building that seems set down there for the sole purpose of furnishing a pretext for a many-paged disquisition on medieval architecture.

All those castles resemble one another.

Invariably they are of heterogeneous construction. The corps de logis always dates from a good few reigns earlier than the additions that some later king or other has tacked on to it.

The towers are in a state of decay ... Worthy reader, there are no towers.

A tower is a notion, a dream, an ideal, a fabrication, an intolerable piece of bragging!

There are half-towers, and ... little turrets.

The zeal that thought it had to set towers upon the buildings raised in honour of some saint or other did not last long enough to bring them to completion, and the spire that is to point the faithful toward heaven usually rests, a few stages too low, on the massive base — which puts one in mind of the man without thighs at the fair.

Only little turrets, small needles on village churches, are ever finished.

It is truly no compliment to Western civilization that the notion of bringing some great work to completion has so seldom been able to hold its ground long enough to see that work carried through.

I am not speaking now of undertakings whose completion was necessary to cover the costs. Whoever wishes to know exactly what I mean should go and look at the Cathedral of Cologne.

Let him give himself an account of the grand conception of that building, in the soul of its architect Gerhard von Riehl ... of the faith in the hearts of the people that put him in a position to begin that work and carry it on ... of the influence of the ideas that needed so colossal a thing to serve as a visible representation of the unseen religious feeling ... and let him compare this exaltation with the temper that, some centuries later, gave birth to the moment at which the work was abandoned. There lies a deep gulf between Erwin von Steinbach and our architects!

I know that for years now men have been at work bridging this gulf. At Cologne too they are building at the Cathedral once more.

But will the broken thread be joined again? Will we find once more, in our own days, what then made up the strength of churchman and master-builder?

I do not believe it. Money will surely be forthcoming, and for that, stone and lime are to be bought.

One can pay the artist who draws up a plan, and the mason who lays the stones. But not to be had for money is that strayed, yet still venerable, feeling which saw in a building-design a poem — a poem of granite that spoke aloud to the people, a poem in marble that stood there like an unmoving, ever-enduring, eternal prayer.

On the border between Lebak and Pandeglang, then, there was an unusual stir one certain morning.

Hundreds of saddled horses covered the road, and at least a thousand people — which was a great many for that spot — moved to and fro in busy waiting.

Here one saw the chiefs of the villages, and the district chiefs from the Lebak country, each with his retinue; and to judge by the handsome half-Arab horse that, in its rich harness, was champing at the silver watering-bit, a chief of higher rank too was present in this place.