the Evil One was outwitted by the building of a _mesdjid_, a Muhammadan house of prayer, the oldest in the island: two human virtues remained; so many as embraced the true religion went after them. The two remaining virtues got hard pressed when Christian strangers came to explore and exploit: Portuguese, English and Dutch, the latter dominant up to this day. Viewed from the standpoint of the dominated, their god was a god of plunder; their emblem, to suit the symbolism of the Hindu Pantheon, was a _maryam_, a heavy piece of ordnance; their _vahana_, the animal representative of their most characteristic qualities, was the tiger, _machan_ still being synonymous with _orang wolanda_ (Hollander) in confidential, figurative speech. How Skanda, the deity of war, incited and Kuwera, the corpulent bestower of riches, directed their warriors and negotiators after the appearance of Cornelis Houtman’s ships in the Bay of Bantam, need not detain us. That story of the past, with a hint at the possible future, is told in the legend of the legitimately wedded but for the time cruelly separated _maryams_ of which one, very appropriately, awaits the fulfilment of a prophecy at the capital of the intruders, and the other where they first put foot on land, both being objects of veneration and granters of desires, especially kind to barren women who come, in a spirit of humiliation, to pray for the blessing of motherhood. A visit to Batavia is not complete without a pilgrimage to the Pinang gate, once an approach to the East India Company’s castle, now in its supernatural cleanness, with its hideously black funeral urns and statues of Mars and Mercury or whoever they may be, giving access to the old town, the first public monument which attracted the attention of young Verdant Green in the age of sailing vessels after he had paid his due to the customs at the _boom_. Not far from that Pinang gate, symbolic of a colonial system under which short weight flourished with forced labour and trade carried on at the edge of the sword, lies the man-cannon, Kiahi Satomo, whose pommel presents a hand, closed so as to make the gesture of contempt, _la fica_, which Vanni Fucci of Pistoja permitted himself when interrogated in the abode of despair by the poet, _quem genuit parvi Florentia mater amoris_, and which accounts for the peculiar forms sacrifice assumes at this altar. His favourite spouse, discovered floating on the sea near old Bantam, an extraordinary thing to do for such a big heavy piece of metal, was given a temporary home on the spot where finally she lay down to rest from her travels: a certain Haji Bool built her a bambu house after the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, her presence having saved Karang Antu from the fate of Anyer and Cheringin. Waiting for the great consummation, when her reunion with her lord at Batavia will announce the hour of the oppressors’ defeat and their expulsion from Java, she is not less honoured than he.