Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/183

Rh tailors' row one might conclude that what the barbers are to Seville, as purveyors of news, the tailors are to Tissak Malaya.

All too soon we had to tear ourselves away from the fascinating passer, and, loaded down with our mixed marketing, fly by sadoe to the station at the far end of town. We saw then the magnificent aisle of kanari-trees we had passed through in darkness the night before an avenue more fitted for an emperor's triumphal procession than for our queer little two-wheeled carts, drawn each by a mite of a pony, that was all but lifted from the ground by the shafts when I stepped on the after foot-board untimely, the driver dodoking like a hop-toad on the ground in respectful humility. The natives were streaming down the great allée and in from all the side streets and bypaths toward the passer, and we half wished we might miss the train when we realized what a spectacle that Tissak Malaya passer was about to be.

In Middle Java, where the railway descends from the Preanger hills to the terra ingrata's succession of jungle and swamp at the coast-level, one experiences the same dull, heavy, sickening, depressing heat as in Batavia. After the clear, fresh, mildly cool air, the eternal southern-California climate of the hills, this sweltering atmosphere gave full suggestion of the tropics' deadly perils. Hour after hour the train followed a raised embankment across an endless swamp, the brilliantly flowered lantana-hedges still accompanying the tracks, and a dense forest wall, tangled and matted together with ratans and other creepers, shutting off the view on either side. The malaria and the