smoke and chew betel with his favourite wife, and eat scarcely anything;
and even when he went to the cock-fight did not seem to care whether his
best birds won or lost. For several days he remained in this sad state,
and all the court were afraid some evil eye had bewitched the Rajah; and
an unfortunate Irish captain who had come in for a cargo of rice and
who squinted dreadfully, was very nearly being krissed, but being first
brought to the royal presence was graciously ordered to go on board and
remain there while his ship stayed in the port.
One morning however, after about a week's continuance of this
unaccountable melancholy, a welcome change took place, for the Rajah
sent to call together all the chiefs, priests, and princes who were
then in Mataram, his capital city; and when they were all assembled in
anxious expectation, he thus addressed them:
"For many days my heart has been very sick and I knew not why, but now
the trouble is cleared away, for I have had a dream. Last night the
spirit of the 'Gunong Agong'--the great fire mountain--appeared to me,
and told me that I must go up to the top of the mountain. All of you may
come with me to near the top, but then I must go up alone, and the
great spirit will again appear to me and will tell me what is of great
importance to me and to you and to all the people of the island. Now go
all of you and make this known through the island, and let every village
furnish men to make clear a road for us to go through the forest and up
the great mountain."
So the news was spread over the whole island that the Rajah must go to
meet the great spirit on the top of the mountain; and every village sent
forth its men, and they cleared away the jungle and made bridges over
the mountain streams and smoothed the rough places for the Rajah's
passage. And when they came to the steep and craggy rocks of the
mountain, they sought out the best paths, sometimes along the bed of a
torrent, sometimes along narrow ledges of the black rocks; in one place
cutting down a tall tree so as to bridge across a chasm, in another
constructing ladders to mount the smooth face of a precipice. The chiefs
who superintended the work fixed upon the length of each day's journey
beforehand according to the nature of the road, and chose pleasant
places by the banks of clear streams and in the neighbourhood of shady
trees, where they built sheds and huts of bamboo well thatched with the
leaves of palm-trees, in which the Rajah and his attendants might eat
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