Ancient City of Modjo-Pahit. Ill 



every six or seven miles is the post-house, where the horses 

 are changed as quickly as were those of the mail in the old 

 coaching-days in England. 



I stopped at Modjo-kerto, a small town about forty miles 

 south of Sourabaya, and the nearest point on the high-road 

 to the district I wished to visit. I had a letter of introduc- 

 tion to Mr. Ball, an Englishman long resident in Java and 

 married to a Dutch lady, and he kindly invited me to stay 

 with him till I could fix on a place to suit me. A Dutch As- 

 sistant Resident as well as a Regent, or native Javanese prince, 

 lived here. The town was neat, and had a nice open grassy 

 space like a village green, on which stood a magnificent fig- 

 tree (allied to the banyan of India, but more lofty), under 

 whose shade a kind of market is continually held, and where 

 the inhabitants meet together to lounge and chat. The day 

 after my arrival Mr. Ball drove me over to the village of 

 Modjo-agong, where he was building a house and premises 

 for the tobacco trade, which is carried on here by a system 

 of native cultivation and advance purchase, somewhat simi- 

 lar to the indigo trade in British India. On our way we 

 staid to look at a fragment of the ruins of the ancient city 

 of Modjo-pahit, consisting of two lofty brick masses, appar- 

 ently the sides of a gateway. The extreme perfection and 

 beaiity of the brick-work astonished me. The bricks are ex- 

 ceedingly fine and hard, with sharp angles and true surfaces. 

 They are laid with great exactness, without visible mortar 

 or cement, yet somehow fastened together so that the joints 

 are hardly perceptible, and sometimes the two surfaces coa- 

 lesce in a most incomprehensible manner. Such admirable 

 brick-w^ork I have never seen before or since. There was no 

 sculpture here, but abundance of bold projections and finely- 

 worked mouldings. Traces of buildings exist for many miles 

 in every direction, and almost every road and pathway shows 

 a foundation of brick-work beneath it — the paved roads of the 

 old city. In the house of the waidono, or district chief, at 

 Modjo-agong, I saw a beautiful figure carved in high relief 

 out of a block of lava, and which had been found buried in 

 the ground near the village. On my expressing a wish to 

 obtain some such specimen, Mr. B. asked the chief for it, and, 

 much to my surprise, he immediately gave it me. It repre- 



