Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/231

Rh their days in penitence and prayer. As a last divine favor, he was told that the crime would be forgiven if within ten days he could construct a Boro Boedor. All the artists and workmen of the kingdom were summoned, and working with zeal and frenzy to save their ruler, completed the temple, with its hundreds of statues and its miles of carvings, within the fixed time. But it was then found that the pile was incomplete, lacking just one statue of the full number required. Prayers and appeals were useless, and the gods turned the prince, the mother, and the child to stone, and they sit in the cell at Mendoet as proof of the tale for all time.

With such interests we quite forgot the disagreeable episode in the steaming, provincial town beyond the mountains, and cared not for toelatings-kaart or assistant resident. Nothing from the outer world disturbed the peace of our Nirvana. No solitary horseman bringing reprieve was ever descried from the summit dagoba. No file of soldiers grounded arms and demanded us for Dutch dungeons. Life held every tropic charm, and Boro Boedor constituted an ideal world entirely our own. The sculptured galleries drew us to them at the beginning and end of every stroll, and demanded always another and another look. A thousand Mona Lisas smiled upon us with impassive, mysterious, inscrutable smiles, as they have smiled during all these twelve centuries, and often the realization, the atmosphere of antiquity was overpowering in sensation and weird effect.

Boro Boedor is most mysterious and impressive in the gray of dawn, in the unearthly light and stillness