Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/73

 up the mountain height, which a moment before was unseenand the precipice is behind you. Sometimes the carriage is only supported at the bend by the wheels on the inside of the curve: centrifugal force has raised the outside ones off the ground. It needs a great deal of coolness, not to shut one’s eyes, and whoever travels for the first time in Java, generally writes to his family in Europe, that he has been in danger of his life; but he whose home is in Java laughs at that.

Reader, it is not my intention, particularly at the commencement of this history, to waste time in describing places, scenery, or buildings.—I am too much afraid of disheartening you, by what would resemble prolixity; and therefore, until I feel that I have won your attention, till I observe in your glances and in your countenance that the destiny of the heroine, who jumps somewhere from a fourth storey, interests you, I shall not make her hover in the air, with a bold contempt for all the laws of gravitation, so long as is necessary for the accurate description of the beauty of the landscape, or the building, that seems to be put in somewhere to give occasion for a voluminous essay on mediæval architecture. All those castles resemble each other. They are invariably of heterogeneous architecture; the main building always dates from some earlier reign than the wings which are added to it afterwards under the reign of such and such a king. The towers are in a dilapidated state. Reader, there are no