Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/274

252 and two other attendants, enter an angle of the court in whose shady arcade we were for the moment resting. Suddenly all four men dropped to their heels in the dodok, and, crouching, sidled and hopped along for a hundred feet to the steps of a pavilion. The cup-bearer insinuated himself up those four steps, still squatting on his heels, and at the same time balancing his burden on his two extended hands, and proffered the gold salver to a shadowy figure half reclining in a long chair. We stood motionless, unseen in our dark arcade, and watched this precious bit of court comedy through, and saw the cup-bearer retire backward down the steps, across the court, to the spot where he might rise from his ignoble attitude and walk like a human being again. While exacting this much of the old etiquette, this prince of European education and tastes has the finest ball-room in Solo—a vast white-marble-floored pringitan, or open-sided audience-hall, which is lighted with hundreds of electric lights, and on whose shining surface great cotillions are danced, and rich favors distributed to companies blazing with diamonds.