Java the Garden of the East Author:Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1899 Original Publisher: The Century Co. Subjects: Java (Indonesia) History / Asia / General History / Asia / Southeast Asia Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the Gene... more »ral Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: Ill BATAVIA, QUEEN OF THE EAST HEN one has driven through the old town of Batavia and seen its crowded bazaars and streets, and has followed the lines of bricked canals, where smallnatives splash and swim, women beat the family linen, and men go to and fro in tiny boats, all in strange travesty of the solemn canals of the old country, he comes to the broader avenues of the new town, lined with tall tamarind- and waringen-trees, with plumes of palms, and pyramids of blazing Madagascar flame-trees in blossom. He is driven into the long garden court of the Hotel Nederlanden, and there beholds a spectacle of social life and customs that nothing in all travel can equal for distinct shock and sensation. We had seen some queer things in the streets, -- women lolling barefooted and in startling dishabille in splendid equipages, -- but concluded them to be servants or half-castes; but there in the hotel was an undress parade that beggars description, and was as astounding on the last as on the first day in the country. Woman's vanity and man's conventional ideas evidently wilt at the line, and no formalities pass the equator, when distinguished citizens and officials can roam and lounge about hotel courts in pajamas and bath slippers, and bare-ankled women, clad only in the native sarong, or skirt, and a white dressing-jacket, go unconcernedly about their affairs in streets and public places until afternoon. It is a dishabille beyond all burlesque pantomime, and only shipwreck on a desert ...« less