On arriving at a temple in the suburbs, it came to a halt. The gods were taken out of the sedan-chairs, and with a great exhibition of reverence, replaced in the temple, from which they had been removed in the morning. Then their worshippers bent low before their altars, burning incense, and depositing their gifts. Numerous groups of well-dressed ladies and their children were scattered over the ground in the neighbourhood of the temple; all were kneeling, and apparently they conducted their devotions with great earnestness. A large quantity of paper, in the shape of the Sycee silver ingots, was piled up on the grass by the different devotees, and when the ceremonies of the day were being brought to a conclusion, the whole was burned in honour of, or as an offering to, the gods. CHAPTER VII. _AMONG THE MALAYS: THE SLAMATAN BROMOK; THE DYAKS; THE PAPUAN TRIBES; THE AHETAS._ THE SLAMATAN BROMOK. A religious ceremony exists in Java which has an obvious affinity to the old Nature-Worship, and finds its excuse in the dread with which the uncivilised races regarded the mysterious forces of Nature, unseen in themselves, but palpable in their results. About three miles from the town of Tosari, rises the barren cone of the Bromok, a still active volcano, which is strangely situated in the bosom of green wooded hills and mountains,--a significant blur upon the landscape. The traveller who desires to accomplish its ascent climbs up the rough and almost precipitous slope by a path winding through immense breadths of a tall yellow grass called the alang-alang. When he has attained to the brink of the Monegal, an enormous extinct crater, reputed to be the largest in the world, he will do well to pause, and survey the landscape before him. Of the knot of mountains on which his eye rests, the foremost is called the Batok, or Butak, that is, the Bald; in allusion, probably, to its barren summit, for its sides are well clothed with herbage. It is shaped like a cone, with deep grooves down its declivities, indicating the course taken by the lava-streams formerly ejected from its interior. To its right, a little in the rear, stretches the sharp pointed chain of the Dedari and Widadarea, or “abode of fairies;” while, on the left, shrouded in smoke clouds, which partially conceal its bulk, is situated the mass of the dreary Bromok. Descending into the crater, we cross its sandy floor, the Dasar,--or, as it is appropriately called, the Sandy Sea,--where grows not tree nor shrub, and the only signs of vegetation are a few scattered patches of dried and scrubby grass. The surface is strangely corrugated or ridged, like the sea-sand at ebb of tide; and the whole landscape is as full of gloom as the waste of the African Sahara.