Page:Java, the wonderland, by Vereeniging Toeristenverkeer, Batavia, 1900.djvu/39

Rh with musquito-curtains. The bathrooms are only arranged for pouring water, cooled in basins, over the head by means of a small bucket, which is a healthy way of bathing and adopted all over the country.

Good carriages with two ponies are always to be had at a moderate price and at the Hotel des Indes, the Hotel der Nederlanden and the Hotel Wisse the guests may hire motor cars.

A motor car ride in the tropics is the most pleasant drive to be had.

It is unnecessary to say that several European languages are spoken.

One of the most remarkable things in the Hotel life in Java is the "rice-table" served at tiffin-time in a peculiar way such as is only seen in Dutch colonies and in Singapore. The dishes are handed round by native servants, whose bare feet render the service very silent, dressed in clothes of a semi-European cut incongruously combined with the Javanese sarong and headkerchief. And the meal itself is such as never was tasted on sea or land before. The principal dish is rice and chicken, which sounds simple enough. But, on this as a basis, an entire system of things edible has been constructed: besides fish, flesh, and fricassees, all manner of curries, sauces, pickles, preserved fruit, salt eggs, fried bananas, "sambals" of fowl's liver, fish-roe, young palm-shoots, and the gods of Javanese cookery alone know what more, all strongly spiced, and sprinkled with cayenne. There is nothing under the sun but may be made into a sambal ; and a conscientious cook would count that a lost day on which he had not sent in at the very least twenty of such nondescript dishes to his master's table, for whose digestion let all gentle souls pray! And, when to all this we add that these many and strange things must be eaten with a spoon in the right and a fork in the left hand, the reader will be able to judge how very complicated an affair the rice-table is and how easily the uninitiated may come to grief over it.

Miss Augusta de Wit in her most charming book Facts and fancies about Java describes her first experience in eating rice-table as follows: "For myself, I shall never forget my first experience of the thing. I had just come in from a ride through the town, and I suppose the glaring sunlight, the strangely-accoutred crowd, the novel sights and sounds of the city must have slightly gone to my head (there are plenty of intoxicants besides "gin," vide the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table). Anyhow, I entered the "back gallery" with a sort of "see-the-conquering-hero-comes" feeling; looked at the long table groaning under its dozens of rice-bowls, scores of dishes of fowls