- About forty miles southwest of Samarang, on a
mountain called Gunong Prau, an extensive plateau is covered with
ruins.
To reach these temples, four flights of stone steps were
made up the mountain from opposite directions, each flight
consisting of more than a thousand steps. Traces of nearly four
hundred temples have been found here, and many (perhaps all) were
decorated with rich and delicate sculptures. The whole country
between this and Brambanam, a distance of sixty miles, abounds
with ruins, so that fine sculptured images may be seen lying in
the ditches, or built into the walls of enclosures.
In the eastern part of Java, at Kediri and in Malang, there are
equally abundant traces of antiquity, but the buildings
themselves have been mostly destroyed. Sculptured figures,
however, abound; and the ruins of forts, palaces, baths,
aqueducts, and temples, can be everywhere traced. It is
altogether contrary to the plan of this book to describe what I
have not myself seen; but, having been led to mention them, I
felt bound to do something to call attention to these marvellous
works of art. One is overwhelmed by the contemplation of these
innumerable sculptures, worked with delicacy and artistic feeling
in a hard, intractable, trachytic rock, and all found in one
tropical island. What could have been the state of society, what
the amount of population, what the means of subsistence which
rendered such gigantic works possible, will, perhaps, ever remain
a mystery; and it is a wonderful example of the power of
religious ideas in social life, that in the very country where,
five hundred years ago, these grand works were being yearly
executed, the inhabitants now only build rude houses of bamboo
and thatch, and look upon these relics of their forefathers with
ignorant amazement, as the undoubted productions of giants or of
demons.
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