Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/62

 There are, on such occasions, moments when the carriage rests on nothing but the wheels on the outside of the curve you describe; the centrifugal force has lifted the inside wheels from the ground. It requires self-control to refrain from shutting one’s eyes, and he who travels in Java for the first time writes home to his people in Europe that he has been in danger of his life. But when one feels at home there, one laughs at such fear.

It is not my intention, especially at the outset of my story, to occupy the reader at any length with descriptions of places, landscapes, or buildings. I fear too much that I might put him off by what would perhaps seem wire-drawn diffuseness; and only later on, when I feel that I shall have won him, when I see in his look and attitude that the fate of the heroine, who somewhere leaps from the balcony of a fourth storey, holds him spellbound, then, with a bold contempt for the law of gravitation, I shall leave her floating between heaven and earth, until I have relieved my feelings with an accurate sketch of the beauties of the landscape, or of the building that appears to have been placed there to supply a pretext for an essay covering several pages on mediæval architecture. All those castles resemble each other. Invariably their style of building is heterogeneous. The residential portion always dates back a few more reigns than the annexes that were added under some later king.” The towers are in a state of dilapidation

Dear reader, there are no towers. A tower is a conception, a dream, an ideal, an invention, an unbearable boast! There are semi-towers and turrets.

The fanaticism that conceived it as a duty to place towers on edifices erected in honour of this saint or that one, did not last long enough to complete them, and the spire that is intended to point the faithful to heaven usually rests a couple of landings too low on the massive base, reminding one of the man without thighs at the fair. Only turrets, and tiny steeples on village churches, have ever been completed.

It is truly not flattering for Western civilization, that rarely the