Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/354

332 memorable, and put me at last in line with my climatic expectations. Yet that was at the end of November, when the monsoon was supposed to have sent off its irregular fireworks and settled down to the fixed program of a three-o'clock shower every afternoon, in order to precipitate its annual eighty inches of rain.

Even the thermometer disappointed one in this land comprised between the parallels of 5º and 8º south of the equator. Not once in my stay did it register as great a heat as I have once seen it register in Sitka in July—94º Fahrenheit; but as the column of mercury is often small gage or warrant for one's own sensations, he must believe, even if with mental reservations, that Batavia's mean temperature was but 78.69º for twelve years, with a monthly mean range of but two degrees. If one has been out in the sun at that hour, he feels skeptical about Batavia's annual average noonday temperature being but 83º, all of four degrees cooler than Samarang's and Sourabaya's average noon temperature. He may believe that the thermometer very seldom falls below 70º or rises above 90º, but a quality in the air, a weight and appreciable humidity, make Batavia's mean, exhausting, lifeless 83º noondays the climax of one's discomfort.

With the upas-tree, the great snakes, the tigers, the pirates, and the good coffee exposed as myths; the white ants never eating out the contents of a trunk overnight; mildew ignoring the luggage left for over a fortnight at Buitenzorg; and the trunks left at Singapore for more than a month equally innocent of fungus-mold, I felt that the tropics had defrauded me