Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/297

Rh ments these, however, for a sultan who plays billiards at the club and a sultana who takes a hand at whist.

The old Taman Sarie, or Water Kastel, in the suburbs, built by a Portuguese architect in the middle of the last century for the great sultan Manko Boeni, is an Oriental Trianon, a paradise garden of the tropics, where former greatness spent its hours of ease in cool, half-underground chambers and galleries such as Hindu princes have made for themselves in every part of India. The Taman Sarie is sadly deserted now. The most important buildings were shaken to formless mounds by earthquakes—the last great Djokja earthquake of 1867, when so many lives were lost, making the complete ruins that are covered with vines and weeds. The ornamental waters are choked with weeds and rubbish; the carved stonework is black with mold and lichens; the caves, grottoes, tunnels, staircases, and galleries around the wells are dripping and slippery with green mosses; and the rose-gardens and shrubberies are fast going to jungle. A few pavilions remain, whose roof gables are as deeply recurved as those of Burmese temples, but for the most part all the once splendid carved and gilded constructions are but wrecks and refuges for bats and lizards. The Water Kastel in its better days stood in the midst of a lake, reached only by boat or a secret tunnel; and here the old sultan Hamanku Bewono IV and his harem whiled away their leisure hours, even when an army thundered at the gates.

On one unfortunate day he kept Marshal Daendels waiting in the outer court for an hour beyond the time appointed for an interview, while the sul-