Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/299

Rh bers opening around it—just such echoing places of green twilight, where it must be cool on the hottest noonday, as one may see in the old palaces at Lucknow, Futtehpore Sikri, and Ahmedabad, in the fatherland whence the ruling princes of Java came. There is, too, a great oval tank with beautiful walls, parapets, and pavilions, well worthy of a Hindu palace; and in this secluded place there lived for many decades a sacred white or dingy yellow turtle with red eyes, an albino to whom the people made offerings and paid homage. The Tainan Sarie has great fascination for one, and at sunset something of romance seems to linger in the old gardens and grottoes, the picturesque courtyards and galleries; and one could imagine scores of legends and harem's mysteries belonging there—that anything and everything had happened there by that lake that burns a rose-red when the palms are silhouetted against the high sunset sky. A group of children played hide-and-seek about the once august court, supple, nimble little bronze fauns, with the carefully folded kerchiefs on their heads their only garments—kerchiefs that they arrange with the greatest care and deliberation many times a day, holding the ends of the cloth with agile toes while they pat and crease and coax the fine folds into the prescribed order of good form. These children dashed through the shrubberies, leaped balusters and walls as lightly and easily as wild creatures, and ran up tall trees like squirrels, to gather tasseled orchids and some strange blue flowers that we pointed to with suggestive coppers, and they hailed us as old friends when we came again.