Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/336

314 native regent and the Dutch resident, and by the quaint little messigit, or Mohammedan mosque. The last mufti, or head priest of the prophet, at Garoet was a man of such intelligence and liberality that he had but one wife, and allowed her to go with face uncovered, to learn Dutch, and to meet and freely converse with all his foreign visitors, men as well as women. Travelers brought letters to this mufti and quoted him in their books, but since his death the more regular, illiberal order has ruled at Mohammedan headquarters.

The great excursion from Garoet is to the crater of Papandayang, a mountain whose extended lines (fifteen miles in length by six in breadth) match its syllables; which has been in vigorous eruption within a century; and which still steams and rumbles, and, like the Goenoeng Goentor, or "Thunder Mountain," across the plain, may burst forth again at any moment. At the last eruption of Papandayang, in 1772, there was a great convulsion, a solid mass of the mountain was blown out into the air, streams of lava poured forth, and ashes and cinders covered the earth for seven miles around with a layer five feet thick, destroying forty villages and engulfing three thousand people in one day. The scar of the great crater, or "blow-out hole," near the summit of the mountain, is still visible from the plain, and the plumes and clouds of steam ascending from it remind one of its unpleasant possibilities. We made a start early one rainy morning, and drove twelve miles across the plain, along hard, sandy white roads, continuously bordered with shade-trees. The frequent villages were damp and cheerless, and the little basket houses, that