Java by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore — Read

At daylight we saw that our portico looked full upon the front of Mount Salak, green to the very summit with plantations and primeval forests. Deep down below us lay a valley of Eden, where thousands of palm-trees were in constant motion, their branches bending, swaying, and fluttering as softly as ostrich-plumes to the eye, but with a strange, harsh, metallic rustle and clash, different from the whispers and sighs and cooing sounds of temperate foliage. As stronger winds threshed the heavy leaves, the level of the valley rippled and tossed in green billows like a barley-field. There was a basket village on the river-bank, where tropic life went on in as plain pantomime as in any stage presentation. At sunrise the people came out of their fragile toy houses, stretched their arms to the sky and yawned, took a swim in the river, and then gathered in the dewy shade to eat their morning curry and rice from their plantain-leaf plates. Then the baskets and cooking-utensils were held in the swift-flowing stream,-such a fastidious, ideal, adorable sort of dish-washing! -and the little community turned to its daily vocations. The men went away to work, or sat hammering and hewing with implements strangely Japanese, and held in each instance in the Japanese way. The women pounded and switched clothing to and fro in the stream, and spread it out in white and brilliant-colored mosaics on the bank to dry. They plaited baskets and painted sarongs, and the happy brown children, in nature's dress, rolled at play under the cocoanut-trees, or splashed like young frogs in and out of the stream.

While this went on below, and we watched the dark indigo mass of Salak turning from purple and azure to sunlit greens in the light of early day, the breakfast of the country was brought to our porch: cold toast, cold meats, eggs, fruit, tea or the very worst coffee in all the world-something that even the American railway restaurant and frontier hotel would spurn with scorn. Java coffee, in Java, comes to one in a stoppered glass bottle or cruet, a dark-brown fluid that might as well be walnut catsup, old port, or New Orleans molasses. This double extract of coffee, made by cold filtration, is diluted with hot water and hot milk to a muddy, gray-brown, lukewarm drink, that is uniformly bad in every hotel and public place of refreshment that a tourist encounters on the island. In private houses, where the fine Arabian berry is toasted and powdered, and the extract made fresh each day, the morning draught is quite another fluid, and worthy the cachet the name of Java gives to coffee in far countries.