Page:Java, the wonderland, by Vereeniging Toeristenverkeer, Batavia, 1900.djvu/40

Rh and fish, and hundreds of sambal-saucers, arrayed between pyramids of bananas, mangosteens, and pine-apples, as if I could have eaten it all by way of "aperitif;" sat me down, heaped my plate up with everything that came my way ; and fell to. What followed, I have no words to express. Suffice it to say, that in less time than I now take to relate it, I was reduced to the most abject misery — my lips smarting with the fiery touch of the sambal; my throat the more sorely scorched for the hasty draught of water with which, in my ignorance, I had tried to allay the intolerable heat; and my eyes full of tears, which it was all I could do to prevent from openly gushing down my cheeks, in streams of utter misery. A charitable person advised me to put a little salt on my tongue, (as children at home are told to do on the tail of the bird they want to catch). I did so; and, after a minute of the most excruciating torture, the agony subsided, I gasped, and found I was still alive. But there and then I vowed to myself I would never so much as look at a rice-table again.

I haven broken that vow; I say it proudly. It is but a dull mind which cannot change a first opinion, or go back upon a hasty resolve. And now I know hoii' to eat rice, I love it. Still, that first meal was a shock.

But to return to that first "rice-table." After the rice, curries, etc. had been disposed of, beef and salad appeared, and, to my infinite astonishment, were disposed of in their turn, to be followed by the dessert—pine-apples, mangosteens, velvety "rambootans," and an exceedingly picturesque and prettily-shaped fruit — spheres of a pale gold containing colourless pellucid fiesh — which I heard called "doekoe." Then the guests began to leave the table, and I was told it was time for the siesta — another Javanese institution, not a whit less important, it would appear, than the famous rice table — and vastly more popular with newcomers. Perhaps the preceding meal possesses somniferous virtue; or, perhaps, the heat and glare of the morning predispose one to sleep; or, perhaps — after so many years of complaining about "being waked too soon" — the sluggard in us rejoices at being bidden, in the name of the natural fitness of things, to "go and slumber again." I will not attempt to decide which of those three possible causes is the true one; but so much is certain: even those who kick most vigorously at the rice-table, lie them down with lamb-like meekness to the siesta."