In time they got word that Greta, Alexandra, and Mina had been evacuated by their Gurkha and Sikh protectors to a more easily defended location closer to what was then called Batavia and would soon be called Jakarta. Johannes reckoned that he would be able to reach the place via railway and, along with Hendrik, set out to do just that. The journey was halting as the train kept getting held up in provincial towns by local gangs of revolutionaries. In some places a kind of order was being maintained by what would eventually become the government of Indonesia, or by vestigial British or Dutch forces. Other places it seemed more like mob rule. As anyone who wasn’t deaf could tell, the latter were communicating up and down the line by the "coconut telegraph," which was a traditional system of sending information from village to village by beating on hollow logs.