Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/298

276 tan and his women made merry, and the gamelan sounded gaily from the Water Kastel's galleries. Daendels, growing weary, suddenly pushed through the retainers to the mouth of the tunnel, and appeared to the dallying sultan in the Water Kastel without announcement or further ceremony, and with still less ceremony seized the sultan by the arm and led him back to Dutch headquarters, where the interview took place. Another version of this Water Kastel tradition describes the mad marshal as making a dash down terraces and staircases to a water-pavilion sunk deep in foliage at the edge of a tank, where, in a shady cellar of a sleeping-room, shielded and cooled by a water curtain falling in front of it, he dragged the sultan from his bed, and carried him off to headquarters. The opas and the chattering old guardian, who led us about the Kastel's labyrinths, plunged into the green gloom of a long, mossy staircase that led to the platform on which the sultan's sleeping-room opened, to show us the "unlucky bed" and prove by it their particular or favored version of the irruption of Marshal Daendels. The bedstead or couch is an elaborately carved affair, and must once have been the chief ornament of this cool cave-like retreat; but in the reek and gloom of the late afternoon this water boudoir seemed too suggestive of rheumatism, malaria, and snakes by wholesale to invite one to linger, or to suggest repose on the "unlucky bed," which insures an early death to the one who touches it.

Another water-chamber was provided in the Sumoor Gamelan ("Musical Spring"), a deep circular well or tank near the ruined banquet-hall, with vaulted cham-