The Drive Had Brought Us Out Of The Chinese Country Into A Region Very
Thinly Peopled By Malays Only, Here
And there along the roadside,
living in houses of all Malay styles, from the little attap cabin with
its gridiron
Floor supported on stilts, to the large picturesque house
with steep brown roofs, deep eaves and porches, and walls of matting or
bamboo basket work in squares, light and dark alternately, reached by
ladders with rungs eighteen inches apart, so difficult for shod feet.
The trees and plants of the jungle were very exciting. Ah! what a
delight it is to see trees and plants at home which one has only seen
as the exotics of a hothouse, or read of in books! In the day's journey
I counted one hundred and twenty-six differing trees and shrubs,
fifty-three trailers, seventeen epiphytes, and twenty-eight ferns. I
saw more of the shrubs and epiphytes than I have yet done from the
altitude of an elephant's back. There was one Asplenium nidus [bird's
nest fern] which had thirty-seven perfect fronds radiating from a
centre, each frond from three and a quarter to five and a half feet
long, and varying from myrtle to the freshest tint of pea-green!
There was an orchid with hardly visible leaves, which bore six crowded
clusters of flowers close to the branch of the tree on which it grew;
each cluster composed of a number of spikes of red coral tipped with
pale green. In the openings there were small trees with gorgeous
erythrina-like flowers, glowing begonias, red lilies, a trailer with
trumpet-shaped blossoms of canary yellow, and a smaller trailer, which
climbs over everything that is not high, entwining itself with the blue
Thunbergia, and bearing on single stalks single blossoms,
primrose-shaped, of a salmon orange color with a velvety black centre.
In some places one came upon three varieties of nepenthes or "monkey
cups," some of their pitchers holding (I should think) a pint of fluid,
and most of them packed with the skeletons of betrayed guests; then in
moist places upon steel blue aspleniums and luxuriant selaginellas; and
then came caelogynes with white blossoms, white flowered dendrobiums
(crumentatum?), all growing on or clinging to trees, with
scarlet-veined bauhinias, caladiums, ginger worts, and aroids,
inclining one to make incessant exclamations of wonder and delight. You
cannot imagine how crowded together this tropical vegetation is. There
is not room for half of it on the ground, so it seeks and finds its
home high up on the strong, majestic trees which bear it up into the
sunshine, where, indeed one has to look for most of the flowers.
It is glorious to see the vegetation of eternal summer and the lavish
prodigality of nature, and one revels among hothouse plants "at home,"
and all the splendor of gigantic leaves, and the beauty and grace of
palms, bamboos, and tree-ferns; the great, gaudy flowers are as
marvelous as the gaudy plumaged birds, and I feel that no words can
convey an idea of the beauty and magnificence of an equatorial jungle;
but the very permanence of the beauty is almost a fault.
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