Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/232

of that eerie hour. Sunrise touches the old walls and statues to something of life; and sunset, when all the palms are silhouetted against skies of tenderest rose, and the warm light flushes the hoary gray pile, is the time when the green valley of Eden about the temple adds all of charm and poetic suggestion. Pitch-darkness so quickly follows the tropic sunset that when we left the upper platform of the temple in the last rose-light, we found the lamps lighted, and huge moths and beetles flying in and about the passagrahan's portico. Then lizards "chuck-chucked," and ran over the walls; and the invisible gecko, gasping, called, it seemed to me, "Becky! Becky! Becky! Becky! Becky! Becky!" and Rebecca answered never to those breathless, exhausted, appealing cries, always six times repeated, slowly over and over again, by the fatigued soul doomed to a lizard's form in its last incarnation. There was infinite mystery and witchery in the darkness and sounds of the tropic night—sudden calls of birds, and always the stiff rustling, rustling of the cocoa-palms, and the softer sounds of other trees, the shadows of which made inky blackness about the passagrahan; while out over the temple the open sky, full of huge, yellow, steadily glowing stars, shed radiance sufficient for one to distinguish the mass and lines of the great pyramid. Villagers came silently from out the darkness, stood motionless beside the grim stone images, and advanced slowly into the circle of light before the portico. They knelt with many homages, and laid out the cakes of palm-sugar, the baskets and sarongs, we had bought at their toy village. Others brought frangipani blossoms that they heaped in mounds at our feet. They