Empire of the East Read Online Free PDF

deforestation had taken place in past times, leaving a tangle of weeds, buffalo grass and secondary growth extending back to the distant mountains. Even as we passed, a woman swinging an enormous axe cut down a seedling large enough to supply a little firewood, and further on, where the forest cover had taken over, again a tree had been felled and left lying to be dragged away under cover of darkness.
    Coming into Takingeun it seemed conceivable at first glance that it did in fact receive only one hundred visitors a year, for at this time of political crisis it came close to being a ghost town. WELCOME , in Indonesian, said a banner stretched across the street, but there was no one about but a few children, and the losmen which had been recommended to us was closed. The view of Lake Tawar was of extreme charm. It was five or six miles across, eternally placid according to all accounts, and enclosed in a coronet of low, pointed mountains which were mantled as if in velvet of the deepest green. At regular intervals little triangular valleys opened out on the lake. These were walled in by slopes which gave out a close-cropped, burnished appearance, as did the glades revealed in openings in the trees. This supremely tropical vista reflected the harmony and spaciousness of a landscape that has escaped interference. Fishermen from invisible villages were out in flotillas of canoes. The lake is said to contain large numbers of small fish, valued not only for their flavour but for their stimulation of the sexual urge. We watched the nearest canoe in action, consisting of putting down the net, then driving the fish into it by splashing the surface of the shallow water with a paddle. The result, so far as we could see, was unpromising, yet two or three fairly minute fish were caught in an operation taking a few minutes. With five or six hours out on the lake it all added up.
    The Hotel Renggali had been built upon a spit of land just above the water. In this part of the world people like to put up notices and it came as no surprise that the hotel should have displayed at its entrance a large banner worded in English: WELCOME TO ACEH THE SPIRITUAL DESTINATION OF THE EAST. The building harmonized with its grandiose surroundings in a way that such intrusions so rarely do. It was faintly reminiscent of childhood fairy tales in which castles may be emptied of their inhabitants by a spell, for there were no signs of life in the vicinity of the hotel. A longish wait followed at the reception before there were stirrings in the remote interior of the building, and a clerk who might have been reluctantly aroused from sleep came on the scene.
    This hotel came close to being a magnificent shell. We were shown to splendid rooms, admired the astonishing panoply of mountains, forest and water through windows cunningly contrived to embrace half the curve of the horizon. The door closed softly behind the porter and silence fell again. Everything about the Renggali impressed: the thick pile of its carpets, the furniture of dark, richly grained wood with its metal inlay based probably on Persian models of Islamic calligraphy, the antique panels carved and painted with ethnic designs decorating the lounge, the music-room in which a row of instruments, most of them unfamiliar, awaited on a podium the arrival of performers instinct told us would never appear.
    The hotel had its wonderfully landscaped, empty gardens arranged in terraces and lawns through close-clipped hedges and shrubberies in blossom, which attracted a cloud of butterflies as they descended to the lake. Waiting at the water’s edge was the canoe mentioned in a leaflet picked up at the reception, to conduct guests in the mood for a dip in the lake to areas where it was safe to swim. Why safe when all the lake within easy reach was so shallow? The leaflet explained. Although devout Muslims, the locals also contrived to be animists and they refused to allow visitors to risk their lives in