Pasoondan may be repeated what a Javanese historian said of Demak, where the Evil One was outwitted by the building of a mesdjid, a Muhammadan house of prayer, the oldest in the island: two human virtues remained; so many as embraced the true religion went after them.

The two remaining virtues got hard pressed when Christian strangers came to explore and exploit: Portuguese, English and Dutch, the latter dominant up to this day. Viewed from the standpoint of the dominated, their god was a god of plunder; their emblem, to suit the symbolism of the Hindu Pantheon, was a maryam, a heavy piece of ordnance; their vahana, the animal representative of their most characteristic qualities, was the tiger, machan still being synonymous with orang wolanda (Hollander) in confidential, figurative speech. How Skanda, the deity of war, incited and Kuwera, the corpulent bestower of riches, directed their warriors and negotiators after the appearance of Cornelis Houtman’s ships in the Bay of Bantam, need not detain us. That story of the past, with a hint at the possible future, is told in the legend of the legitimately wedded but for the time cruelly separated maryams of which one, very appropriately, awaits the fulfilment of a prophecy at the capital of the intruders, and the other where they first put foot on land, both being objects of veneration and granters of desires, especially kind to barren women who come, in a spirit of humiliation, to pray for the blessing of motherhood. A visit to Batavia is not complete without a pilgrimage to the Pinang gate, once an approach to the East India Company’s castle, now in its supernatural cleanness, with its hideously black funeral urns and statues of Mars and Mercury or whoever they may be, giving access to the old town, the first public monument which attracted the attention of young Verdant Green in the age of sailing vessels after he had paid his due to the customs at the boom. Not far from that Pinang gate, symbolic of a colonial system under which short weight flourished with forced labour and trade carried on at the edge of the sword, lies the man-cannon, Kiahi Satomo, whose pommel presents a hand, closed so as to make the gesture of contempt, la fica, which Vanni Fucci of Pistoja permitted himself when interrogated in the abode of despair by the poet, quem genuit parvi Florentia mater amoris, and which accounts for the peculiar forms sacrifice assumes at this altar. His favourite spouse, discovered floating on the sea near old Bantam, an extraordinary thing to do for such a big heavy piece of metal, was given a temporary home on the spot where finally she lay down to rest from her travels: a certain Haji Bool built her a bambu house after the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, her presence having saved Karang Antu from the fate of Anyer and Cheringin. Waiting for the great consummation, when her reunion with her lord at Batavia will announce the hour of the oppressors’ defeat and their expulsion from Java, she is not less honoured than he. Dressed in a white cloth, which covers the circular inscription in Arabic characters on breech and cascabel, while the priming hole is decorated in square ornament, with five solid rings to facilitate conveyance if she prefers being carried to moving by her own exertion as of yore, anointed and salved with boreh,[5] the spouse, expecting the summons in the fragrance of incense and flowers, kananga and champaka, is often surrounded by fervent devotees, muttering their dzikr on their prayer-mats, grateful for bounty received or hopeful of future delivery from bondage. Husband and wife will meet and then a third cannon, far away in Central Java, in the aloon aloon[6] before the kraton[6] of the Susuhunan of Surakarta, inhabited by a ghost, dispenser of dreams, the sapu jagad, will vindicate that name, “broom of the world”, by sweeping all infidels into the sea. Though the scoffing unbeliever counts this a dream of dreams, to the confiding children of the land it is a disclosure of things hidden in the womb of time, not the less true because Kiahi Satomo has an older mate, Niahi Satomi, the wife of his youth, the robed in red of the Susuhunan’s artillery park, which glories in many maryams renowned in myth and history, among them another married couple, Koomba-rawa and Koomba-rawi, who shielded the ancient Sooltans of Pajang, being the official defenders of their palace. But Kiahi Satomo’s heart is in Bantam, at Karang Antu, as Niahi Satomi has reason to suspect since she, the more legitimate and more advanced in age, cannot keep him at her side. It avails nothing that the Susuhunan’s retainers chain the reluctant head of the family to the Bangsal Pangrawit, the imperial audience-chamber constructed after a heavenly model in gold; always and always he flies back to Batavia, anxious to be ready where the beloved bini muda (lit. young wife) has trysted him for sweet dalliance, from which victory will be born and release.

While predictions of the kind may be laughed at, the native belief in them and the foundations on which that belief rests, are no laughable matter by any means. Stories of mythical beings like Kiahi Satomo and Niahi Satomi, transformed into pieces of ordnance connected with the legendary lore of Trunajaya on one side and Moslim fanaticism personified in the cannon of Karang Antu on the other, prove that the native mind is still strongly imbued with pre-Muhammadan and even pre-Hindu ideas and modes of thought. Its imagination is fed by the fortunes (and misfortunes!) of an island which may be compared in the heterogeneous factors of its culture with Sicily, where Greek colonists built their temples in the high places of aboriginal idolatry; and the Saracens constructed their qubbehs overtopping the churches and cloisters into which the Christians had transformed the cellae and colonnades consecrated to Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Pallas Athene, Artemis, the Dioscuri; and the Normans added their arched doorways and massive masonry to perplex posterity entirely. In Java the Hindu element, with a strong Buddhist admixture, predominates; it prevails wholly in ancient architectural activity, not to speak of Soondanese and Javanese folklore and literature, while later Christian influence is negligible if not negative. Everywhere in the island we find under the Muhammadan coating the old conceptions of life from which the Loro Jonggrang group and the Boro Budoor sprang: scratch the orang slam and the Saiva or Buddhist will immediately appear. As the Padang Highlands, which preserve the traditions of Menangkabau, still ring with the fame of the Buddhist King Adityawarman, and scrupulously Moslim Palembang still cherishes the memory of Buddhist San-bo-tsaï, while South Sumatra clings to Hindu customs and habits for all its submission to Islām, so Java reveres whatever has been handed down from her pantheistic tempo dahulu (time of yore), however attached to the law of the Prophet. Sivaïsm and Buddhism were deeply rooted in the island; if the political power of its old creeds was broken in 1767 with the taking of Balambangan, Hinduïsm nevertheless lingering among the Tenggerese and in