Viewing page 108 of 185
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
-84- June 8 - We decided today to see some of the country south of Fort de Kock, and started out along the Padang road, although we had no intention of going all the way. We went three kms. off the road to visit the little village of Lassi on its market day and to photograph some of the old houses there. We found one or two without tin roofs, and with beautifully decorated granaries standing in front of the house. In the market we bought small cucumbers, and some Malay apples, a pretty pink fruit that is crisp and juicy but almost completely[[strikethrough]] ess [[/strikethrough]] flavorless. Between purchases we were ducking flying pieces of corrugated iron that the high wind was blowing off the market roof. We stopped next in Fort van de Capellen, and wandered in and out of the shops looking for pickles that Bill had decided he must have with the picinic lunch which the hotel had provided. In one Chinese store we saw a small boy rolling what looked like green marbles in a large flat basket. I thought at first it was a new game, but he kept at it in such a mechanical way that I realized it was work and not play. Behind him stood another Chinese with a long roll of green candy fresh from the stove. This he was cutting into cubes by means of a string, one end of which he held between his teeth, As each little cube fell to the counter a third man picked it up, rounded off the sharp corners with his hands, and passed it to the youngster who rolled it in the basket until it was a perfect sphere. The whole proceeding had somewhat of the precision of a cigarette-cutting achine in a b g factory. Shortly after noon we reached Lake Singgarak, beautiful and blue, but with many whitecaps due to the high wind. In places the waves were working on it, banking the road up with stones, but I was afraid places in it would be quite washed out before we came back over it. We ate our basket lunch in a little pavilion back of the rest house in Singarak, a delightfully cool spot right beside the lake. The Mandoer sold Tommie a python skin, and sold us all on the idea of getting pictures of a pig-tailed macauq climbing a coconut tree. His friend, the owner of the monkey, appeared promptly with an enormous brute on a long rope. The monkey went up the tree, which was an unusually high one and hence poor for pictures, and "caught" three coconuts for us. He broke them off by twisting the nuts between his hands, and then dropping them to the ground. His owner opened them for us, we drank the water, and gave the coconut meat to the monkey as his reward. Altogether a most amusing day. In Padand Pandjang on the way home we stopped to photograph an elaborately carved house, which was spoiled however, by a tin roof, and also to ad ire some of the gold fish and gourami ponds which are so common here. The fish are raised and sold in the market. The giant gourami is very rare in aquaria at home, and we shuddered to think of this exotic specimen (to us) being eaten as ordinary food. Between Padang Padjang and Fort de Kock we got our best view of Merapi, for the first time entirely cloudless, so that we could see
Transcription Notes:
on the strikethrough of completely y is typed directly over the e then 2 ss are x'ed over
