[12] Paraphrases of a fossil statute, periodically paraded and then returned to its pigeon-hole, like a relic carried round in procession on the day of the particular saint it belongs to and then shut away in its repository for the rest of the year. Of what avail are enactments and ordinances persistently ignored and never enforced? [Illustration] CHAPTER II WEST JAVA Quedaron mudos los cuerpos, Solas las almas se hablan, Que en las luces de los ojos Iban y venian las almas.[13] _Romancero Morisco (Celin de Escariche)._ The Batu Tulis, lit. “the inscribed stone”, near Bogor, commemorates the feats of a certain prince, Parabu Raja Purana, otherwise Ratu Dewata, and calls him the founder of Pakuan, ruler, _maharajah ratu aji_, of Pakuan Pajajaran. That kingdom is the centre of everything tradition has transmitted regarding the Hindus in West Java. Its origin, according to native belief, goes back to a settlement of princely adventurers from Tumapel in East Java, and when Mojopahit flourished after the fall of that mighty empire, it rose to equal eminence at the other end of the island, only to be destroyed by the same agency, the growing power of Islām. The subjection of the mountain tribes of the Priangan by the settlers from the East proceeded in the beginning but slowly and the children of the land, even after they had yielded to the inevitable, must have retained a share in the management of their affairs, for Soondanese _pantoons_[14] mention separately, as two factors of government, the _ratu_, king of Pakuan, and the _menak_, nobility of Pajajaran. However this may be, from about 1100 until the beginning of the sixteenth century, Pajajaran was a political unity that counted. She could send an army of a hundred thousand warriors into the field. Her kings disposed at will of large territories, gained by conquest; one of them conferred upon his brother Kalayalang the dominion of Jayakarta, in later years better known under the name of Yacatra, and on his brother Barudin the dominion of Bantam, principalities destined to play an important part in the overthrow of the sovereign state. Nothing, save the meagre accounts of the _babads_ and the scanty remains to be referred to at the end of this chapter, reminds now of Pajajaran, except the Badooy in South Bantam, who constitute a community apart, entirely isolated from the rest of the population and whose peculiar customs and religious observances so far as known, make it probable that they are the descendants of fugitives before the Muhammadan inroad.