Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/286

264 Lawu, when his carriage broke down; he spent the night at a village, and returned the next morning to Solo, "sufficiently humiliated with" his "failure," he wrote. He did not repeat the attempt, as there was a great fête occurring at the emperor's palace which occupied his remaining days. He says that every one at Solo consoled him for his failure to reach the Suku temples by saying that the visible ruins there were only the attempted restorations of an epoch of decadence, and dated only from the fourteenth century. M. de Charnay quotes all that Sir Stamford Raffles and Fergusson urge as to the striking and extraordinary resemblance of these particular temples to those of Mexico and Yucatan; and as ethnologists admit that the Malays occupied the archipelagos from Easter Island to Madagascar, he thinks it easy to believe that they or a parent race extended their migrations to the American continent, and that if this architectural resemblance be an accident, it is the only one of its kind in the universe.

The three-domed summit of the mountain is visited now by Siva worshipers, who make offerings and burn incense to the destroying god who manifests himself there, and the region is one to tempt a scientist across the seas to exploit it, and should soon invite the attention of the exploring parties which Mr. Morris K. Jesup has enlisted in the search for proofs of early Asiatic and American contact.