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ALSO BY MARY BALOGH
The Ravenswood Series
REMEMBER LOVE

The Westcott Series

SOMEONE TO LOVE
SOMEONE TO HOLD

SOMEONE TO WED
SOMEONE TO CARE
SOMEONE TO TRUST

SOMEONE TO HONOR
SOMEONE TO REMEMBER
SOMEONE TO ROMANCE

SOMEONE TO CHERISH
SOMEONE PERFECT

The Survivors’ Club Series

THE PROPOSAL
THE ARRANGEMENT

THE ESCAPE
ONLY ENCHANTING
ONLY A PROMISE

ONLY A KISS

ONLY BELOVED

The Horsemen Trilogy

INDISCREET
UNFORGIVEN

IRRESISTIBLE

The Huxtable Series

FIRST COMES MARRIAGE
THEN COMES SEDUCTION

AT LAST COMES LOVE

SEDUCING AN ANGEL

A SECRET AFFAIR

The Simply Series

SIMPLY UNFORGETTABLE

SIMPLY LOVE

SIMPLY MAGIC

SIMPLY PERFECT

The Bedwyn Saga

SLIGHTLY MARRIED

SLIGHTLY WICKED

SLIGHTLY SCANDALOUS
SLIGHTLY TEMPTED

SLIGHTLY SINFUL
SLIGHTLY DANGEROUS

The Bedwyn Prequels

ONE NIGHT FOR LOVE
A SUMMER TO REMEMBER

The Mistress Trilogy

MORE THAN A MISTRESS

NO MAN’S MISTRESS
THE SECRET MISTRESS

The Web Series

THE GILDED WEB
WEB OF LOVE

THE DEVIL’S WEB

Classics
THE IDEAL WIFE

THE SECRET PEARL

A PRECIOUS JEWEL

A CHRISTMAS PROMISE

DARK ANGEL/LORD CAREW’S BRIDE

A MATTER OF CLASS
THE TEMPORARY WIFE/A PROMISE OF SPRING

THE FAMOUS HEROINE/THE PLUMED BONNET

A CHRISTMAS BRIDE/CHRISTMAS BEAU

A COUNTERFEIT BETROTHAL/THE NOTORIOUS RAKE

UNDER THE MISTLETOE

BEYOND THE SUNRISE

LONGING

HEARTLESS
SILENT MELODY
 BERKLEY
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright © 2023 by Mary Balogh

Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes
free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for
complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without
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every reader.

BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Balogh, Mary, author. Title: Remember me : a Ravenswood novel / Mary Balogh.
Description: New York : Berkley, [2023] | Series: A Ravenswood novel ; 2
Identifiers: LCCN 2022043390 (print) | LCCN 2022043391 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593438152 (hardcover) | ISBN
9780593438169 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PR6052.A465 R463 2023 (print) | LCC PR6052.A465 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914—
dc23/eng/20220909
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022043390
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022043391

Cover design by Katie Anderson

Cover photograph of woman by Lee Avison / Trevillion Images
Book design by George Towne, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

pid_prh_6.0_143821068_c0_r0
 CONTENTS

Cover
Also by Mary Balogh
Title Page
Copyright
The Ware Family of Ravenswood

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Epilogue

About the Author

_143821068_
 CHAPTER ONE

Lucas Arden, Marquess of Roath, sank into one of the old brown
leather armchairs in the library at Greystone Court in Worcestershire,
a glass of after-dinner port in one hand, and looked around fondly at
all the bookcases crammed with books. He would wager that his
grandfather, the Duke of Wilby, had read most if not all of them. He
had read a good many himself. The library here had always been his
favorite room. He looked at the heavy oak desk before the south
window, at the old furnishings and the Persian carpet, at the heavy
brocade curtains and the painting of a hunting scene in a gilded
frame hanging above the mantel. Nothing had been changed or
renewed for as far back as he could remember. He hoped nothing
ever would be.
His grandfather had changed quite noticeably, however, over the
past couple of years or so. He was no longer just elderly. He was
old. It was a distinction Lucas would be unable to explain in words,
but he knew in his heart what it meant, and it saddened him. His
Grace was standing now before the fire, his back to it, his feet apart,
his hands resting palms out against his backside, warming before
the blaze. He was a small man in both height and girth—and smaller
now, surely, than he had once been—with a round head that had
always seemed too large for his body. His grizzled, bushy hair, once
as dark red as Lucas’s was now, had thinned and even disappeared
altogether from his temples and the crown of his head. His
eyebrows, however, were as thick and shaggy as ever. He was
dressed, as was usual for the evening, in tailed coat, embroidered
waistcoat, old-fashioned knee breeches and stockings, and an
elaborately folded neckcloth tied about high, starched shirt points
even though there had been no outside guests for dinner—just the
duke and duchess and their grandson and heir.
Lucas waited instead of making any attempt to initiate
conversation. His grandfather had invited him to bring his port into
the library rather than sit with it at the dining table as they usually
did. His grandmother had already moved to the drawing room to
leave them alone together. Obviously His Grace had something to
say that was not for the ears of his butler or the footman who had
waited upon them while they dined. He had probably been building
to this moment since his grandson’s arrival here two days ago, in
fact. Lucas had been invited to spend a week or so over Easter.
Though it had been more of a summons than an invitation. Jenny—
Lady Jennifer Arden, Lucas’s younger sister, that was, who lived with
him at Amberwell in Leicestershire—had not been invited.
“I am an old man, Luc,” his grandfather began now, his eyes,
which had been gazing thoughtfully at the carpet, turning to regard
his grandson keenly. “The Good Book allots us threescore years and
ten if we are fortunate enough to dodge all the possible hazards
along the way. I have outlived that allotment by nine years, going on
ten. I cannot expect many more. Perhaps, indeed, not any more.”
“Do you know something I do not, Grandpapa?” Lucas asked,
feeling a twinge of alarm, though he knew, of course, that no one
could live forever.
“Well, for one thing, I can still count,” the duke told him. “And
seventy-nine is a very advanced age. When I look around for
acquaintances of my generation, I find very few of them still
remaining. For another thing, that old quack of a physician I have
been bringing here twice a year from London at considerable
expense had the effrontery to inform me a few weeks ago that my
heart is not what it used to be. I paid him his usual exorbitant fee to
tell me what was as obvious as the nose on his face.”
Lucas knew that Dr. Arnold, the duke’s longtime physician, had
come here recently on his semiannual visit to check upon the
general health of the duke and the duchess. Lucas had written to his
grandparents to ask what the report had been since he had not been
here in person to question the doctor himself. The man would have
given only the vaguest of answers anyway since he felt himself
bound by professional ethics to respect the privacy of his patients.
His usual response was that Their Graces were as well as could be
expected. Which was the polite equivalent of saying nothing at all.
The duke’s answering letter had stated that he and the duchess
were in cracking good health and it had been a waste of a small
fortune to drag Arnold all the way to Greystone to tell them so and
eat them out of house and home before deciding to take himself off
back to London.
“It is a serious condition?” Lucas asked now. He dreaded the
answer. He did not want to know.
“Serious or not,” his grandfather said, “the fact is that I have an
old heart in an old body, Luc. And another fact is that my only son is
dead and he had only the one son. That is two facts. I am dearly
fond of my daughter and my grandson of her line and of all my
granddaughters, but none of them can carry on my name or my
position no matter how many sons they produce. Only you can. I
have an affection for my Cornish first cousin, but he is only three
years my junior, and he complains with every letter he sends me that
old age is for the hardy but hardiness deserted with his sixties.
Besides, of the seven children he produced with his two wives, not
one of them was a son. Not a single one. Seven daughters, Lord love
them. They all married and produced sons as well as daughters, but
much good those sons do me. Someone on high has been enjoying
a jest at the expense of a few generations of my family and yours,
Luc.”
Lucas had met the Cornish cousins a few times when he was a
boy and his father was still alive. But he could not say he knew any
of them well. Those of his generation were third cousins and had
never really felt like relatives.
“My Yorkshire cousin, on the other hand, was always a thorn in
my side when we were boys,” his grandfather said. “If you should
die without male issue, Luc, then it is his grandson who would no
doubt step into your shoes. And I recall how you felt about him
during your own boyhood. Kingsley Arden would inherit the
dukedom and Greystone and everything else that is entailed. I will
be in my grave and thus be spared from having to witness his
ascension to such lofty heights. You will be in your grave and spared
too. But there will be plenty of our family still alive who will witness
it and suffer the consequences but be powerless to prevent it. Even
Amberwell would belong to him.”
It was not a pleasant prospect.
Kingsley had been at school with Lucas for a few years, one
class above him. He had tried constantly to bully his younger relative
and had succeeded more than once in making his life miserable. The
thought of his living here at Greystone was not a pleasant one. Even
less pleasant was the prospect of his owning Amberwell one day.
Amberwell was where Lucas had grown up until he was fifteen and
where he lived again now. More important, it was where Jenny lived
and probably always would—unless Kingsley became Duke of Wilby
and turned her out, as he almost undoubtedly would. He had always
despised Jenny even though he had never met her. He had liked to
ask Lucas when other boys were around how his crippled sister was
doing and how he felt about being burdened with her for the rest of
his life.
“Then I will have to see to it that I live to your present age and
beyond, Grandpapa,” Lucas said now. “And that I father a dozen
sons or more in the meanwhile.”
His Grace moved away from the fire and lowered himself stiffly
into the chair beside it. He was still stubbornly resistant to any
suggestion that he use a cane. He gazed into the fire while Lucas
got to his feet to put on some coal and poke it into more vigorous
life.
“Your father died at the age of forty,” the duke said after Lucas
had resumed his seat and taken a sip of his port. “Less than a year
after your mother died soon after she gave birth to your stillborn
brother. The damned fool of a son of mine was always an excellent
horseman and proud of it, but no one is immune to accident when
he insists upon jumping a six-foot-high hedge. Especially when he
does so while still engulfed by grief over the loss of his wife and son
—the son who would have been his spare, born more than fourteen
years after he had done his duty and produced the heir. You, that is.
Life is an unpredictable business at best, Luc.” He paused and
transferred his gaze from the fire to his grandson. “Her Grace and I
have made a decision.”
And it was going to be something he did not like, Lucas could
safely predict. His grandfather always invoked the name of
Grandmama whenever he knew what he was about to say would be
unwelcome. Like the time both grandparents had come to Amberwell
after their son’s death and informed Lucas that he would be leaving
both school and home and returning to Greystone with them, where
he would stay until he reached his majority—except for the
scholastic terms he would spend at Oxford when the time came. At
Greystone he would learn all he needed to know about his future
role and duties as the Duke of Wilby.
Only Lucas was to go there, though. Aunt Kitty, the widowed
Lady Catherine Emmett, his father’s sister, would be moving to
Amberwell to live with Jenny and make all the arrangements for the
wedding of Charlotte, Lucas’s older sister, to Sylvester Bonham,
Viscount Mayberry. The nuptials had been delayed twice, first by
their mother’s death, then by their father’s. They had finally wed two
weeks after the year of mourning for their father was over. Poor
Charlotte. It could not have been the wedding she had dreamed of.
But the marriage was undoubtedly a happy one and had produced
three children in the ten years since.
Lucas had fought and argued and sulked over that ducal decree,
but his protests had been in vain. Two days after his father’s funeral
he had left for Greystone with his grandparents, leaving a tearful
Jenny and Charlotte behind but refusing to weep himself with a
fierce grinding of his teeth and fists so tightly curled into his palms
that he had left behind the bloody marks of eight fingernails.
Despite himself he had come to love Greystone. And his
grandparents too, of whom he had always been fond, but in a
remote sort of way since he did not see them often.
It was pretty obvious, of course, what decision they had made
now. Even though he was only—God damn it!—twenty-six years old.
There was that missing generation. His father had died. From more
than just a moment’s recklessness on horseback, caused by
debilitating grief over the loss of his wife and stillborn son, however.
No other living soul had an inkling of the full truth except Lucas. The
heaviness of his secret knowledge had weighed him down for longer
than a decade and probably would for the rest of his life. He had
been in the wrong place at the wrong time one rainy afternoon
during a school holiday, and his life had been drastically and forever
blighted as a result.
“As soon as Easter is behind us,” his grandfather said now, “we
will be going to London, Her Grace and I. It is time I did my duty
and showed my face in the House of Lords once more. I did not go
at all last year or the year before, to my shame. And it is time your
grandmother and I renewed our acquaintance with the ton in a place
where almost the whole of it gathers for the spring Season. Perish
the thought, but it is unavoidable. We will need to find out who is in
town. Your grandmother is better at that than I am, of course. She
will know within a day or two what might take me a whole week.
There will be any number of young girls there, fresh out of the
schoolroom and eager to make their mark upon society and reel in
the most eligible of the bucks and marry them before the Season is
over. There will be a positive frenzy among them all—not to mention
their mamas and some of their papas too—when it becomes known
that you are on hand at last, Luc. The Marquess of Roath, heir to the
Duke of Wilby and Greystone Court and other properties and a vast
fortune besides. The very elderly duke, that is.”
He paused to gaze keenly at his grandson from beneath those
shaggy brows. There was no point in attempting any protest or any
reply at all, though. Lucas had learned his lessons well during the six
years he had lived here before he turned twenty-one and returned to
take up residence at Amberwell. He knew what his primary duty
was.
It was to produce an heir and a spare or two, to put it bluntly.
“There will be pretty ones and alluring ones and ones you will
fancy more than others,” the duke continued when Lucas said
nothing. “There will be wealthy ones and ones whose papas have
pockets to let. There will be very few, however, who will be eligible
in both birth and breeding to be the future Duchess of Wilby and
Other documents randomly have
different content
suasion and fashion, and not of force. The old cults faded, lost
prestige, and vanished without stress of arms or an inquisition.
 XVI
BORO BOEDOR AND MENDOET

With five hundred Buddhas in near neighborhood, one might expect

a little of the atmosphere of Nirvana, and the looking at so many
repetitions of one object might well produce the hypnotic stage akin
to it. The cool, shady passagrahan at Boro Boedor affords as much
of earthly quiet and absolute calm, as entire a retreat from the outer,
modern world, as one could ever expect to find now in any land of
the lotus. This government rest-house is maintained by the resident
of Kedu, and every accommodation is provided for the pilgrim, at a
fixed charge of six florins the day. The keeper of the passagrahan
was a slow-spoken, lethargic, meditative old Hollander, with whom it
was always afternoon. One half expected him to change from battek
pajamas to yellow draperies, climb up on some vacant lotus
pedestal, and, posing his fingers, drop away into eternal meditation,
like his stony neighbors. Tropic life and isolation had reduced him to
that mental stagnation, torpor, or depression so common with single
Europeans in far Asia, isolated from all social friction, active, human
interests, and natural sympathies, and so far out of touch with the
living, moving world of the nineteenth century. Life goes on in
placidity, endless quiet, and routine at Boro Boedor. Visitors come
rarely; they most often stop only for riz tavel, and drive on; and not
a half-dozen American names appear in the visitors’ book, the first
entry in which is dated 1869.
I remember the first still, long lotus afternoon in the
passagrahan’s portico, when my companions napped, and not a
sound broke the stillness save the slow, occasional rustle of palm-
branches and the whistle of birds. In that damp, heated silence,
where even the mental effort of recalling the attitude of Buddha
elsewhere threw one into a bath of perspiration, there was exertion
enough in tracing the courses and projections of the terraced temple
with the eye. Even this easy rocking-chair study of the blackened
ruins, empty niches, broken statues, and shattered and crumbling
terraces, worked a spell. The dread genii by the doorway and the
grotesque animals along the path seemed living monsters, the
meditating statues even seemed to breathe, until some “chuck-
chucking” lizard ran over them and dispelled the half-dream.
In those hazy, hypnotic hours of the long afternoon one could best
believe the tradition that the temple rose in a night at miraculous
bidding, and was not built by human hands; that it was built by the
son of the Prince of Boro Boedor, as a condition to his receiving the
daughter of the Prince of Mendoet for a wife. The suitor was to build
it within a given time, and every detail was rigidly prescribed. The
princess came with her father to inspect the great work of art, with
its miles of bas-reliefs and hundreds of statues fresh from the
sculptor’s chisel. “Without doubt these images are beautiful,” she
said coldly, “but they are dead. I can no more love you than they
can love you”; and she turned and left her lover to brood in eternal
sorrow and meditation upon that puzzle of all the centuries—the
Eternal Feminine.
At last the shadows began to stretch; a cooler breath came;
cocoanut-leaves began to rustle and lash with force, and the musical
rhythm of distant, soft Malay voices broke the stillness that had been
that of the Sleeping Beauty’s enchanted castle. A boy crept out of a
basket house in the palm-grove behind the passagrahan, and walked
up a palm-tree with that deliberate ease and nonchalance that is not
altogether human or two-footed, and makes one rub his eyes
doubtingly at the unprepared sight. He carried a bunch of bamboo
tubes at his belt, and when he reached the top of the smooth stem
began letting down bamboo cups, fastening one at the base of each
leaf-stalk to collect the sap.
Everywhere in Java we saw them collecting the sap of the true
sugar-palm and the toddy-palm, that bear such gorgeous spathes of
blossoms; but it is only in this region of Middle Java that sugar is
made from the cocoa-palm. Each tree yields daily about two quarts
of sap that reduce to three or four ounces of sugar. The common
palm-sugar of the passers looks and tastes like other brown sugar,
but this from cocoa-palms has a delicious, nutty fragrance and flavor,
as unique as maple-sugar. We were not long in the land before we
learned to melt cocoa-palm sugar and pour it on grated ripe
cocoanut, thus achieving a sweet supreme.
The level valley about Boro Boedor is tilled in such fine lines that it
seems in perspective to have been etched or hatched with finer tools
than plow and hoe. There is a little Malay temple surrounded by
graves in a frangipani-grove near the great pyramid, where the
ground is white with the fallen “blossoms of the dead,” and the tree-
trunks are decked with trails of white and palest pink orchids. The
little kampong of Boro Boedor hides in a deep green grove—such a
pretty, picturesque little lot of basket houses, such a carefully
painted village in a painted grove,—the village of the Midway
Plaisance, only more so,—such a set scene and ideal picture of Java,
as ought to have wings and footlights, and be looked at to slow
music. And there, in the early summer mornings, is a busy passer in
a grove that presents more and more attractive pictures of Javanese
life, as the people come from miles around to buy and to sell the
necessaries and luxuries of their picturesque, primitive life, so near
to nature’s warmest heart.
All the neighborhood is full of beauty and interest, and there are
smaller shrines at each side of Boro Boedor, where pilgrims in
ancient times were supposed to make first and farewell prayers. One
is called Chandi Pawon, or more commonly Dapor, the kitchen,
because of its empty, smoke-blackened interior resulting from the
incense of the centuries of living faith, and of the later centuries
when superstitious habit, and not any surviving Buddhism, led the
humble people to make offerings to the recha, the unknown,
mysterious gods of the past.
 THE RIGHT-HAND IMAGE AT MENDOET.

Chandi Mendoet, two miles the other side of Boro Boedor, is an

exquisite pyramidal temple in a green quadrangle of the forest, with
a walled foss and bridges. Long lost and hidden in the jungle, it was
accidentally discovered by the Dutch resident Hartman in 1835, and
a space cleared about it. The natives had never known of or
suspected its existence, but the investigators determined that this
gem of Hindu art was erected between 750 and 800 A. D. The
workmanship proves a continued progress in the arts employed at
Boro Boedor, and the sculptures show that the popular faith was
then passing through Jainism back to Brahmanism. The body of the
temple is forty-five feet square as it stands on its walled platform,
and rises to a height of seventy feet. A terrace, or raised
processional path, around the temple walls is faced with bas-reliefs
and ornamental stones, and great bas-reliefs decorate the upper
walls. The square interior chapel is entered through a stepped arch
or door, and the finest of the Mendoet bas-reliefs, commonly spoken
of as the “Tree of Knowledge,” is in this entrance-way. There Buddha
sits beneath the bo-tree, the trunk of which supports a pajong, or
state umbrella, teaching those who approach him and kneel with
offerings and incense. These figures, as well as the angels overhead,
the birds in the trees, and the lambs on their rocky shelf, listening to
the great teacher, are worked out with a grace and skill beyond
compare. Three colossal images are seated in the chapel, all with
Buddha’s attributes, and Brahmanic cords as well, and the long
Nepal ears of the Dhyani ones. They are variously explained as the
Hindu trinity, as the Buddhist trinity, as Buddha and his disciples, and
local legends try to explain them even more romantically. One
literary pilgrim describes the central Adi Buddha as the statue of a
beautiful young woman “counting her fingers,” the mild, benign, and
sweetly smiling faces of all three easily suggesting femininity.
One legend tells that this marvel of a temple was built by a rajah
who, when once summoned to aid or save the goddess Durga, was
followed by two of his wives. To rid himself of them, he tied one wife
and nailed the other to a rock. Years afterward he built this temple
in expiation, and put their images in it. An avenging rival, who had
loved one of the women, at last found the rajah, killed him, turned
him to stone, and condemned him to sit forever between his abused
partners.
 A legend related to Herr Brumund told that “once upon a time”
the two-year-old daughter of the great Prince Dewa Kosoumi was
stolen by a revengeful courtier. The broken-hearted father wandered
all over the country seeking his daughter, but at the end of twelve
years met and, forgetting his grief, demanded and married the most
beautiful young girl he had ever seen. Soon after a child had been
born to them, the revengeful courtier of years before told the prince
that his beautiful wife was his own daughter. The priests assured
Prince Dewa that no forgiveness was possible to one who had so
offended the gods, and that his only course of expiation lay in
shutting himself, with the mother and child, in a walled cell, and
there ending their days in penitence and prayer. As a last divine
favor, he was told that the crime would be forgiven if within ten days
he could construct a Boro Boedor. All the artists and workmen of the
kingdom were summoned, and working with zeal and frenzy to save
their ruler, completed the temple, with its hundreds of statues and
its miles of carvings, within the fixed time. But it was then found
that the pile was incomplete, lacking just one statue of the full
number required. Prayers and appeals were useless, and the gods
turned the prince, the mother, and the child to stone, and they sit in
the cell at Mendoet as proof of the tale for all time.
With such interests we quite forgot the disagreeable episode in
the steaming, provincial town beyond the mountains, and cared not
for toelatings-kaart or assistant resident. Nothing from the outer
world disturbed the peace of our Nirvana. No solitary horseman
bringing reprieve was ever descried from the summit dagoba. No file
of soldiers grounded arms and demanded us for Dutch dungeons.
Life held every tropic charm, and Boro Boedor constituted an ideal
world entirely our own. The sculptured galleries drew us to them at
the beginning and end of every stroll, and demanded always another
and another look. A thousand Mona Lisas smiled upon us with
impassive, mysterious, inscrutable smiles, as they have smiled
during all these twelve centuries, and often the realization, the
atmosphere of antiquity was overpowering in sensation and weird
effect.
 Boro Boedor is most mysterious and impressive in the gray of
dawn, in the unearthly light and stillness of that eerie hour. Sunrise
touches the old walls and statues to something of life; and sunset,
when all the palms are silhouetted against skies of tenderest rose,
and the warm light flushes the hoary gray pile, is the time when the
green valley of Eden about the temple adds all of charm and poetic
suggestion. Pitch-darkness so quickly follows the tropic sunset that
when we left the upper platform of the temple in the last rose-light,
we found the lamps lighted, and huge moths and beetles flying in
and about the passagrahan’s portico. Then lizards “chuck-chucked,”
and ran over the walls; and the invisible gecko, gasping, called, it
seemed to me, “Becky! Becky! Becky! Becky! Becky! Becky!” and
Rebecca answered never to those breathless, exhausted, appealing
cries, always six times repeated, slowly over and over again, by the
fatigued soul doomed to a lizard’s form in its last incarnation. There
was infinite mystery and witchery in the darkness and sounds of the
tropic night—sudden calls of birds, and always the stiff rustling,
rustling of the cocoa-palms, and the softer sounds of other trees,
the shadows of which made inky blackness about the passagrahan;
while out over the temple the open sky, full of huge, yellow, steadily
glowing stars, shed radiance sufficient for one to distinguish the
mass and lines of the great pyramid. Villagers came silently from out
the darkness, stood motionless beside the grim stone images, and
advanced slowly into the circle of light before the portico. They knelt
with many homages, and laid out the cakes of palm-sugar, the
baskets and sarongs, we had bought at their toy village. Others
brought frangipani blossoms that they heaped in mounds at our feet.
They sat on their heels, and with muttered whispers watched us as
we dined and went about our affairs on the raised platform of the
portico, presenting to them a living drama of foreign life on that
regularly built stage without footlights. One of the audience pierced
a fresh cocoanut, drank the milk, and then rolling kanari and benzoin
gum in corn-fiber, lighted the fragrant cigarette, and puffed the
smoke into the cocoa-shell. “It is good for the stomach, and will
keep off fever,” they answered, when we asked about this
incantation-like proceeding; and all took a turn at puffing into the
shell and reinhaling the incense-clouds. The gentle little Javanese
who provided better dinners for passagrahan guests than any island
hotel had offered us, came into the circle of light, with her mite of a
brown baby sleeping in the slandang knotted across her shoulder.
The old landlord could be heard as he came back far enough from
his Nirvana to call for the boy to light a fresh pipe; and one felt a
little of the gaze and presence of all the Dhyani Buddhas on the
sculptured terraces in the strange atmosphere of such far-away
tropic nights by the Boedor of Boro.
When we came “gree-ing” back by those beautiful roads to Djokja,
and drew up with a whirl at the portico of the Hotel Toegoe, the
landlord of beaming countenance ran to meet us, greet us with
effusion, and give us a handful of mail—long, official envelops with
seals, and square envelops of social usage.
“Your passports are here. They came the next day. They are so
chagrined that it was all a stupid mistake. The assistant resident at
Buitenzorg telegraphed to the resident here to tell the three
American ladies who were to arrive in Djokja that he had posted
their passports, and to have every attention paid you. He wished to
commend you and put you en rapport with the Djokja officials, that
you might enjoy their courtesies. Then the telegraph operator
changed the message so as not to have to send so many words on
the wire, and he made them all think you were some very dangerous
people whom they must arrest and send back. The assistant resident
knew there was some mistake as soon as he saw you.” (Did he?)
“He is so chagrined. And it was all the telegraph operator’s fault, and
you must not blame our Djokja Residency.”
Instead of mollifying, this rather irritated us the more, and the
assistant resident’s long, formal note was fuel to the flame.

“Ladies: This morning I telegraphed to the secretary-general

what in heaven’s name could be the reason you were not to
go to Djokja. I got no answer from him, but received a letter
from the chief of the telegraph, who had received a telegram
 from the telegraph office of Buitenzorg, to tell me there had
been a mistake in the telegram. Instead of ‘The permission is
not given,’ there should have been written, ‘The papers of
permission I have myself this moment posted. Do all you can
in the matter,’ etc. Perhaps you will have received them the
moment you get this my letter.
“So I am so happy I did not insist upon your returning to
Buitenzorg, and so sorry you had so long stay at Boro
Boedor; and I hope you will forget the fatal mistake, and feel
yourself at ease now,” etc.

Evidently the little episode was confined to the bureau of

telegraphs entirely, the messages to the American consul, secretary-
general, and Buitenzorg resident all suppressed before reaching
them. Certainly this was no argument for the government ownership
and control of telegraphs in the United States. There were regrets
and social consolations offered, but no distinct apology; and we
were quite in the mood for having the American consul demand
apology, reparation, and indemnity, on pain of bombardment, as is
the foreign custom in all Asia. Pacification by small courtesies did not
pacify. Proffered presentation to native princes, visits to their bizarre
palaces, and attendance at a great performance by the sultan’s
actors, dancers, musicians, and swordsmen, would hardly offset
being arrested, brought up in an informal police-court, cross-
questioned, bullied, and regularly ordered to Boro Boedor under
parole. We would not remain tacitly to accept the olive-branch—not
then. The profuse landlord was nonplussed that we did not humbly
and gratefully accept these amenities.
“You will not go back to Buitenzorg now, with only such unhappy
experience of Djokja! Every one is so chagrined, so anxious that you
should forget the little contretemps. Surely you will stay now for the
great topeng [lyric drama], and the wedding of Pakoe Alam’s
daughter!”
 “No; we have our toelatings-kaarten, and we leave on the noon
train.”
And then the landlord knew that we should have been locked up
for other reasons, since sane folk are never in a hurry under the
equator. They consider the thermometer, treat the zenith sun with
respect, and do not trifle with the tropics.
 XVII
BRAMBANAM

“In the whole course of my life I have never met with such stupendous
and finished specimens of human labor and of the science and taste of
ages long since forgot, crowded together in so small a compass, as in this
little spot [Brambanam], which, to use a military phrase, I deem to have
been the headquarters of Hinduism in Java.” (Report to Sir Stamford
Raffles by Captain George Baker of the Bengal establishment.)

There are ruins of more than one hundred and fifty temples in the
historic region lying between Djokjakarta and Soerakarta, or Djokja
and Solo, as common usage abbreviates those syllables of
unnecessary exertion in this steaming, endless mid-summer land of
Middle Java. As the train races on the twenty miles from Djokja to
Brambanam, there is a tantalizing glimpse of the ruined temples at
Kalasan; and one small temple there, the Chandi Kali Bening, ranks
as the gem of Hindu art in Java. It is entirely covered, inside as well
as outside, with bas-reliefs and ornamental carvings which surpass
in elaboration and artistic merit everything else in this region, where
refined ornament and lavish decoration reached their limit at the
hands of the early Hindu sculptors. The Sepoy soldiers who came
with the British engineers were lost in wonder at Kalasan, where the
remains of Hindu art so far surpassed anything they knew in India
itself; while the extent and magnificence of Brambanam’s Brahmanic
and Buddhist temple ruins amaze every visitor—even after Boro
Boedor.
 TEMPLE OF LORO JONGGRAN AT BRAMBANAM.

We had intended to drive from Boro Boedor across country to

Brambanam, but, affairs of state obliging us to return from our
Nirvana directly to Djokja, we fell back upon the railroad’s promised
convenience. In this guide-bookless land, where every white resident
knows every crook and turn in Amsterdam’s streets, and next to
nothing about the island of Java, a kind dispenser of misinformation
had told us that the railway-station of Brambanam was close beside
the temple ruins; and we had believed him. The railway had been
completed and formally opened but a few days before our visit, and
our Malay servant was also quite sure that the road ran past the
temples, and that the station was at their very gates.
When the train had shrieked away from the lone little station
building, we learned that the ruins were a mile distant, with no sort
of a vehicle nor an animal nor a palanquin to be had; and
archæological zeal suffered a chill even in that tropic noonday. The
station-master was all courtesy and sympathy; but the choice for us
lay between walking or waiting at the station four hours for the next
train on to Solo.
We strolled very slowly along the broad, open country road under
the deadly, direct rays of the midday sun,—at the time when, as the
Hindus say, “only Englishmen and dogs are abroad,”—reaching at
last a pretty village and the grateful shade of tall kanari-trees, where
the people were lounging at ease at the close of the morning’s busy
passer. Every house, shed, and stall had made use of carved temple
stones for its foundations, and the road was lined with more such
recha—artistic remains from the inexhaustible storehouse and quarry
of the neighboring ruins. Piles of tempting fruit remained for sale,
and brown babies sprawled content on the warm lap of earth, the
tiniest ones eating the green edge of watermelon-rind with avidity,
and tender mothers cramming cold sweet potato into the mouths of
infants two and four months old. There was such an easy, enviable
tropical calm of abundant living and leisure in that Lilliput village
under Brobdingnag trees that I longed to fling away my “Fergusson,”
let slip life’s one golden, glowing, scorching opportunity to be
informed on ninth-century Brahmanic temples, and, putting off all
starched and unnecessary garments of white civilization, join that
lifelong, happy-go-lucky, care-free picnic party under the kanari-
trees of Brambanam; but—
A turn in the road, a break in the jungle at one side of the
highway, disclosed three pyramidal temples in a vast square court,
with the ruins of three corresponding temples, all fallen to rubbish-
heaps, ranged in line facing them. These ruined piles alone remain
of the group of twenty temples dedicated to Loro Jonggran, “the
pure, exalted virgin” of the Javanese, worshiped in India as Deva,
Durga, Kali, or Parvati. Even the three temples that are best
preserved have crumbled at their summits and lost their angles; but
enough remains for the eye to reconstruct the symmetrical piles and
carry out the once perfect lines. The structures rise in terraces and
broad courses, tapering like the Dravidian gopuras of southern India,
and covered, like them, with images, bas-reliefs, and ornamental
carvings. Grand staircases ascend from each of the four sides to
square chapels or alcoves half-way up in the solid body of the
pyramid, and each chapel once contained an image. The main or
central temple now remaining still enshrines in its west or farther
chamber an image of Ganesha, the hideous elephant-headed son of
Siva and Parvati. Broken images of Siva and Parvati were found in
the south and north chambers, and Brahma is supposed to have
been enshrined in the great east chapel. An adjoining temple holds
an exquisite statue of Loro Jonggran, “the maiden with the beautiful
hips,” who stands, graceful and serene, in a roofless chamber,
smiling down like a true goddess upon those who toil up the long
carved staircase of approach. Her particular temple is adorned with
bas-reliefs, where the gopis, or houris, who accompany Krishna, the
dancing youth, are grouped in graceful poses. One of these bas-
reliefs, commonly known as the “Three Graces” has great fame, and
one and two thousand gulden have been vainly offered by British
travelers anxious to transport it to London. Another temple contains
an image of Nandi, the sacred bull; but the other shrines have fallen
in shapeless ruins, and nothing of their altar-images is to be
gathered from the rubbish-heaps that cover the vast temple court.
 CLEARING AWAY RUBBISH AND VEGETATION AT BRAMBANAM TEMPLES.

The pity of all this ruined splendor moves one strongly, and one
deplores the impossibility of reconstructing, even on paper, the
whole magnificent place of worship. The wealth of ornament makes
all other temple buildings seem plain and featureless, and one set of
bas-reliefs just rescued and set up in line, depicting scenes from the
Ramayan, would be treasure enough for an art museum. On this
long series of carved stones disconsolate Rama is shown searching
everywhere for Sita, his stolen wife, until the king of the monkeys,
espousing his cause, leads him to success. The story is wonderfully
told in stone, the chisel as eloquent as the pen, and everywhere one
reads as plainly the sacred tales and ancient records. The graceful
figures and their draperies tell of Greek influences acting upon those
northern Hindus who brought the religion to the island; and the
beautifully conventionalized trees and fruits and flowers, the
mythical animals and gaping monsters along the staircases, the
masks, arabesques, bands, scrolls, ornamental keystones, and all the
elaborate symbols and attributes of deities lavished on this group of
temples, constitute a whole gallery of Hindu art, and a complete
grammar of its ornament.

KRISHNA AND THE THREE GRACES.

These temples, it is believed, were erected at the beginning of the

ninth century, and fixed dates in the eleventh century are also
claimed; but at least they were built soon after the completion of
Boro Boedor, when the people were turning back to Brahmanism,
and Hindu arts had reached their richest development at this great
capital of Mendang Kumulan, since called Brambanam. The fame of
the Javanese empire had then gone abroad, and greed for its riches
led Khublai Khan to despatch an armada to its shores; but his
Chinese commander, Mengki, returned without ships or men, his
face branded like a thief’s. Another expedition was defeated, with a
loss of three thousand men, and the Great Khan’s death put an end
to further schemes of conquest. Marco Polo, windbound for five
months on Sumatra, then Odoric, and the Arab Ibn Batuta, who
visited Java in the fourteenth century, continued to celebrate the
riches and splendor of this empire, and invite its conquest, until Arab
priests and traders began its overthrow. Its princes were conquered,
its splendid capitals destroyed, and with the conversion of the
people to Mohammedanism the shrines were deserted, soon
overgrown, and became hillocks of vegetation. The waringen-tree’s
fibrous roots, penetrating the crevices of stones that were only fitted
together, and not cemented, have done most damage, and the
shrines of Loro Jonggran went fast to utter ruin.
A Dutch engineer, seeking to build a fort in the disturbed country
between the two native capitals, first reported these Brambanam
temples in 1797; but it was left for Sir Stamford Raffles to have them
excavated, surveyed, sketched, and reported upon. Then for eighty
years—until the year of our visit—they had again been forgotten,
and the jungle claimed and covered the beautiful monuments. The
Archæological Society of Djokja had just begun the work of clearing
off and rescuing the wonderful carvings, and groups of coolies were
resting in the shade, while others pottered around, setting bas-
reliefs in regular lines around the rubbish-heaps they had been taken
from. This salvage corps chattered and watched us with well-
contained interest, as we, literally at the very boiling-point of
enthusiasm, at three o’clock of an equatorial afternoon, toiled up the
magnificent staircases, peered into each shrine, made the rounds of
the sculptured terraces, or processional paths, and explored the
whole splendid trio of temples, without pause.
Herr Perk, the director of the works, and curator of this
monumental museum, roused by the rumors of foreign invasion,
welcomed us to the grateful shade of his temporary quarters beside
the temple, and hospitably shared his afternoon tea and bananas
with us, there surrounded by a small museum of the finest and most
delicately carved fragments, that could not safely be left
unprotected. While we cooled, and rested from the long walk and
the eager scramble over the ruins, we enjoyed too the series of
Cephas’s photographs made for the Djokja Society, and in them had
evidence how the insidious roots of the graceful waringen-trees had
split and scattered the fitted stones as thoroughly as an earthquake;
yet each waringen-gripped ruin, the clustered roots streaming, as if
once liquid, over angles and carvings, was so picturesque that we
half regretted the entire uprooting of these lovely trees.

LORO JONGGRAN AND HER ATTENDANTS.

When the director was called away to his workmen, we bade our
guiding Mohammedan lead the way to Chandi Sewou, the
“Thousand Temples,” or great Buddhist shrine of the ancient capital.
“Oh,” he cried, “it is far, far from here—an hour to walk. You must go
to Chandi Sewou in a boat. The water is up to here,” touching his
waist, “and there are many, many snakes.” Distrusting, we made him
lead on in the direction of Chandi Sewou; perhaps we might get at
least a distant view. When we had walked the length of a city block
down a shady road, with carved fragments and overgrown stones
scattered along the way and through the young jungle at one side,
we turned a corner, walked another block, and stood between the
giant images that guard the entrance of Chandi Sewou’s great
quadrangle.
 The “Thousand Temples” were really but two hundred and thirty-
six temples, built in five quadrilateral lines around a central cruciform
temple, the whole walled inclosure measuring five hundred feet
either way. Many of these lesser shrines—mere confessional boxes in
size—are now ruined or sunk entirely in the level turf that covers the
whole quadrangle, and others are picturesque, vine-wreathed
masses, looking most like the standing chimneys of a burnt house.
This Buddhist sanctuary of the eleventh century has almost the
same general plan as Boro Boedor, but a Boro Boedor spread out
and built all on the one level. The five lines of temples, with broad
processional paths between them, correspond to the five square
terraces of Boro Boedor; and the six superior chapels correspond to
the circles of latticed dagobas near Boro Boeder’s summit. The
empty central shrine at Chandi Sewou has crumbled to a heap of
stones, with only its four stepped-arch entrance-doors distinct; and
the smaller temples, each of them eleven feet square and eighteen
feet high, with inner walls covered with bas-reliefs, are empty as
well. When the British officers surveyed Chandi Sewou, five of the
chapels contained cross-legged images seated on lotus pedestals—
either Buddha, or the tirthankars, or Jain saints; but even those
headless and mutilated statues are missing now. Every evidence
could be had of wilful destruction of the group of shrines, and the
same mysterious well-hole was found beneath the pedestal of the
image in each chapel—whether as receptacle for the ashes of priests
and princes; a place for the safe keeping of temple treasures; as an
empty survival of the form of the earliest tree-temples, when the
mystery of animate nature commanded man’s worship; or, as M. de
Charnay suggests, the orifice from which proceeded the voice of the
concealed priest who served as oracle.
With these Brambanam temples, when Sivaism or Jainism had
succeeded Buddhism, and even before Mohammedanism came, the
decadence of arts and letters began. The Arab conquest made it
complete, and the art of architecture died entirely, no structures
since that time redeeming the people and religion which in India and
Spain have left such monuments of beauty.
 PLAN OF CHANDI SEWOU (“THOUSAND TEMPLES”).

From Sir Stamford Raffles’s “History of Java.”

The ruins of the “Thousand Temples” are more lonely and

deserted in their grassy, weed-grown quadrangle, more forlorn in
their abandonment, than any other of the splendid relics of Java’s
past religions. The glorious company of saintly images are vanished
past tracing, and the rows of little sentry-box chapels give a different
impression from the soaring pyramids of solid stone, with their
hundreds of statues and figures and the wealth of sculptured
ornament, found elsewhere. The vast level of the plain around it is a
lake or swamp in the rainy season, and the damp little chapels, with
their rubbish-heaps in dark corners and the weed-grown well-hole,
furnish ideal homes for snakes. As our Mohammedan had suggested
snakes, we imagined them everywhere, stepping carefully, throwing
stones ahead of us, and thrusting our umbrellas noisily into each
chapel before we ventured within; but the long-anticipated, always
expected great snake did not materialize to give appropriate incident
to a visit to such complete ruins. Only one small wisp of a lizard
gave the least starting-point for a really thrilling traveler’s tale. The
only other moving object in sight at Chandi Sewou was a little girl,
with a smaller sister astride of her hip, who followed us timidly and
sat for a time resting on the knee of one of the hideous gate
guardians—one of the Gog and Magog stone monsters, who,
although kneeling, is seven feet in height, and who, with a club in
his right hand, a snake wound around his left arm, and a ferocious
countenance, should frighten any child into spasms rather than
invite familiarity.
Herr Perk pointed out to us, on the common between the two
great temples, a formless green mound which he would excavate the
following week, and showed us also the Chandi Lompang, a temple
cleared off eighty years ago, but covered with a tangle of
underbrush and a few tall trees—a sufficient illustration of what all
the Loro Jonggran temples had been when the Djokja Society began
its work of rescue and preservation. The British engineers could see
in 1812 that Chandi Lompang had been a central shrine surrounded
by fourteen smaller temples, whose carved stones have long been
scattered to fence fields and furnish foundation-stones for the
neighborhood. It was hoped that the kind mantle of vegetation had
preserved a series of bas-reliefs of Krishna and the lovely gopis,
wrought with an art equal to that employed by the sculptors of the
“Three Graces” at Loro Jonggran which the British surveyors
uncovered. Every one must rejoice that a period of enlightenment
has at last come to the colony, and that steps are being taken to
care for the antiquities of the island.
 FRAGMENT FROM LORO JONGGRAN TEMPLE.

There are other regions of extensive temple ruins in Java, but

none where the remains of the earlier civilization are so well
preserved, the buildings of such extent and magnificence, their cults
and their records so well known, as at Boro Boedor and Brambanam.
The extensive ruins of the Singa Sari temples, four miles from
Malang, near the southeastern end of the island, are scattered all
through a teak and waringen forest, half sunk and overgrown with
centuries of vegetation. Images of Ganesha, and a colossal Nandi, or
sacred bull of Siva, with other Brahmanic deities, remain in sight;
and inscriptions found there prove that the Singa Sari temples were
built at about the same time as the Loro Jonggran temples at
Brambanam. The mutilation and signs of wanton destruction of the
recha suggest that it was not a peaceful conversion from
Brahmanism to Mohammedanism in that kingdom either.
On the Dieng plateau, southwest of Samarang, and not far from
Boro Boedor, there are ruins of more than four hundred temples,
and the traces of a city greater than any now existing on the island.
This region has received comparatively little attention from
archæologists, although it has yielded rich treasures in gold, silver,
and bronze objects, a tithe of which are preserved in the museum of
the Batavian Society. For years the Dieng villagers paid their taxes in
rough ingots of gold melted from statuettes and ornaments found on
the old temple sites, and more than three thousand florins a year
were sometimes paid in such bullion. The Goenoeng Praoe, a
mountain whose summit-lines resemble an inverted praoe, or boat,
is the fabled home of the gods; and the whole sacred height was
once built over with temples, staircases of a thousand steps, great
terraces, and embankment walls, now nearly lost in vegetation, and
wrecked by the earthquakes of that very active volcanic region.
These Dieng temples appear to have been solid structures, whose
general form and ornamentation so resemble the ruins in Yucatan
and the other states of Central America that archæologists still
revolve the puzzle of them, and hazard no conjectures as to the
worshipers and their form of worship, save that the rites or sacrifices
were very evidently conducted on the open summits or temple-tops.
I could not obtain views of these ruined pyramid temples from any
of the Batavia photographers, to satisfy me as to their exact lines
even in decay. There are other old Siva temples in that region
furtively worshiped still, and the “Valley of Death,” where the fabled
upas grew, was long believed to exist in that region, where the cult
of the destroyer was observed.
 GANESHA, THE ELEPHANT-HEADED GOD.

M. de Charnay did not visit these pyramid temples of the Dieng

plateau; but after seeing the temple of Boro Boedor, and those at
Brambanam, he summed up the resemblances of the Buddhist and
Brahmanic temples of Java to those at Palenque and in Yucatan as
consisting: in the same order of gross idols; the pyramid form of
temple, with staircases, like those of Palenque and Yucatan; the
small chapels or oratories, with subterranean vaults beneath the
idols; the same interior construction of temples; the stepped arches;
the details of ornamentation, terraces, and esplanades, as in Mexico
and Yucatan; and the localization of temples in religious centers far
from cities, forming places of pilgrimage, as at Palenque, Chichen-
Itza, and, in a later time, at Cozumel.[5]
 XVIII
SOLO: THE CITY OF THE SUSUNHAN

As the two native states of Middle Java, the Vorstenlanden, or

“Lands of the Princes,” were last to be brought under Dutch rule,
Djokjakarta and Soerakarta are the capitals and head centers of
native supremacy, where most of Javanese life remains unchanged.
The Sultan of Djokja, and the so-called emperor, or susunhan, of
Solo, were last to yield to over-sea usurpers, and, as tributary
princes enjoying a “protected and controlled independence,” accept
an “advisory elder brother,” in the person of a Dutch resident, to sit
at their sovereign elbows and by “suggestions” rule their territories
for the greater good of the natives and the Holland exchequer. All
the region around Djokja and Solo is classic ground, and the oldest
Javanese myths and legends, the earliest traditions of native life,
have their locale hereabout. These people are the Javanese, and
show plainly their Hindu descent and their higher civilization, which
distinguish them from the Sundanese of West Java; yet the
Sundanese call themselves the “sons of the soil,” and the Javanese
“the stranger people.” The glories of the Hindu empire are declared
by the magnificent ruins so lately uncovered, but the splendor of the
Mohammedan empire barely survives in name in the strangely
interesting city of the susunhan set in the midst of the plain of Solo
—a plain which M. Désiré de Charnay described as “a paradise which
nothing on earth can equal, and neither pen, brush, nor
photography can faithfully reproduce.”
At this Solo, second city of the island in size, one truly reaches the
heart of native Java—the Java of the Javanese—more nearly than
elsewhere; but Islam’s old empire is there narrowed down to a
kraton, or palace inclosure, a mile square, where the present
susunhan, or object of adoration, lives as a restrained pensioner of
the Dutch government, the mere shadow of those splendid
potentates, his ancestors.
The old susunhans were descended from the Moormen or Arab
pirates who harried the coast for a century before they destroyed
the splendid Hindu capital of Majapahit, near the modern Soerabaya.
They followed that act of vandalism with the conquest of Pajajaran,
the western empire, or Sundanese end of the island; and religious
conversion always went with conquest by the followers of the
prophet. There was perpetual domestic war in the Mohammedan
empire, which by no means held the unresisting allegiance of the
Javanese at any time, and the Hindu princes of Middle Java were
never really conquered by them or the Dutch. The Java war of the
last century between the Mohammedan emperor, the Dutch, and the
rebellious native prince, Manko Boeni, lasted for thirteen years; and
in this century the same sort of a revolt cost the Dutch as imperial
allies more than four millions of florins, and made the British rejoice
that their statesmen had wisely handed back such a troublesome
and expensive possession as Java proved to be. The great Mataram
war of the last century, however, established the family of the
present susunhan on the throne, after dividing his empire with a
rebellious younger brother, who then became Sultan of Djokjakarta,
and a new capital was built on the broad plain cut by the Bengawan
or Solo River, which is the largest river of the island. At the death of
the susunhan, Pakoe Bewono II (“Nail of the Universe”), in 1749, his
will bequeathed his empire to the Dutch East India Company, and at
last gave Holland control of the whole island. Certain lands were
retained for the imperial family, and its present head, merely
nominal, figurehead susunhan that he is, receives an annuity of one
hundred thousand florins—a sum equal to the salary of the
governor-general of Netherlands India.
 THE SUSUNHAN.

The present susunhan of Solo is not the son of the last emperor,
but a collateral descendant of the old emperors, who claims descent
from both Mohammedan and Hindu rulers, the monkey flag of
Arjuna and the double-bladed sword of the Arab conquerors alike his
heirlooms and insignia. His portraits show a gentle, refined face of
the best Javanese type, and he wears a European military coat, with
the native sarong and Arab fez, a court sword at the front of his belt,
and a Solo kris at the back. Despite his trappings and his sovereign
title, he is as much a puppet and a prisoner as any of the lesser
princes, sultans, and regents whom the Dutch, having deposed and
pensioned, allow to masquerade in sham authority. He maintains all
the state and splendor of the old imperialism within his kraton,
which is confronted and overlooked by a Dutch fort, whose guns,
always trained upon the kraton, could sweep and level the whole
imperial establishment at a moment’s notice. The susunhan may
have ten thousand people living within his kraton walls; he may have
nine hundred and ninety-nine wives and one hundred and fifty
carriages, as reported; but he may not drive beyond his own gates
without informing the Dutch resident where he is going or has been,
with his guard of honor of Dutch soldiers, and he has hardly the
liberty of a tourist with a toelatings-kaart. He may amuse himself
with a little body-guard of Javanese soldiers; but there is a petty
sultan of Solo, an ancient vassal, whose military ambitions are
encouraged by the Dutch to the extent of allowing him to drill and
command a private army of a thousand men that the Dutch believe
would never by any chance take arms against them, as allies of the
susunhan’s fancy guard. Wherever they have allowed any empty
show of sovereignty to a native ruler, the Dutch have taken care to
equip a military rival, with the lasting grudge of an inherited family
feud, and establish him in the same town. But little diplomacy is
required to keep such jealousies alive and aflame, and the Dutch are
always an apparent check, and pacific mediators between such rivals
as the susunhan and the sultan at Solo, and the sultan and Prince
Pakoe Alam at Djokja.
The young susunhan maintains his empty honors with great
dignity and serenity, observing all the European forms and etiquette
at his entertainments, and delighting Solo’s august society with
frequent court balls and fêtes. Town gossip dilates on his marble-
floored ball-room, the fantastic devices in electric lights employed in