It is my great desire to return here to see all these things, poke about these ruins, drop bits of soap down the volcanoes to see if they will go off as do the geysers in Iceland. This is in truth one of the richest and most interesting countries in the world, and so easily got to, so that I do hope I can one day return for a long stay.
I was up at 5 a.m. in the morning, and at 6 o’clock Carel van Haeften took me for a drive with a pair of fast ponies for miles all round Batavia, or through it, perhaps, as we never appeared to get away from beautiful houses and gardens. We seemed, indeed, to pass countless houses, some of which are really very fine, with huge white marble pillared porticoes and marble floors, and each house set in a lovely garden full of wonderful trees, plants, and flowers. These white-pillared porticoes are gay, too, with flowers in Chinese and Japanese vases. Apparently these fine houses spread out for miles, and many are without walls or fences, It never struck me before how we wall and bar ourselves into our domains at home; but no wonder when one thinks of the coarse, ill- mannered, ungentle, unpleasant, dishonest people we have to keep out of them! For, in truth, when you think it out and compare our “free-born Britons ’’ and other Europeans of the lower classes with the same class of people in the East, it does give one pause! We are so used to it in Europe it never strikes us, and that is the best, or the worst, of travel—you are for ever learning that your own countryfolk are in no way superior to the people of other lands, and often do not equal them. Even among savages now and again a sort of feeling of dismay comes over one as to what our so-called civilisation really is, and if we are not all blind mistaken idiots pursuing wrong ideals. I suppose every one feels this in “uncivilised”’
