Explore "Tide Marks" by H.M. Tomlinson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The moist heat of Java's plains and seaports, even when the interest of a place is just a little more remarkable than the temperature, soon turns one to thoughts of escape, in the bare hope that Java somewhere in its garden has a bower which has not the peculiar virtue of a vapor bath. "Why, if you go to Garut," I was told in a voice which suggested a wonder that I was not required to believe without Thomas's proof, "you will want a blanket at night!"
I had never heard of Garut, but one place is as good as another to a traveler who is rewarded by whatever he can get. I found Garut in the mountains of central Java, somewhere behind Tjilatjap. There was no trouble in finding it. Everybody seemed to know it. But I shall remember Garut as I remember Sfax, Taormina, Chartres, Tlemcen, and other odd corners of the earth, some without even a name on the map, where we arrived by chance and disconsolate, and from which we departed with something in our memory, forgotten till then, that had been lighted briefly by what may have been a ray of moonshine. Can such an experience be communicated? But how shall a man define his faith?