One Man Was
Executed For Murder Last Year Under A Sentence Signed By The Datu
Klana.
I have not been in a prison since I was in that den of horrors,
the prison of the Naam-Hoi magistrate at Canton, and I felt a little
satisfaction in the contrast.
The same afternoon we all made a very pleasant expedition to the
Sanitarium, a cabin which the Resident has built on a hill three miles
from here. A chair with four Chinese bearers carried Miss Shaw up, her
sister and the two gentlemen walked, and I rode a Sumatra pony, on an
Australian stock-man's saddle, not only up the steep jungle path, but
up a staircase of two hundred steps in which it terminates, the
sagacious animal going up quite cunningly. One charm of a tropical
jungle is that every few yards you come upon something new, and every
hundred feet of ascent makes a decided difference in the vegetation.
This is a very grand forest, with its straight, smooth stems running up
over one hundred feet before branching, and the branches are loaded
with orchids and trailers. One cannot see what the foliage is like
which is borne far aloft into the summer sunshine, but on the ground I
found great red trumpet flowers and crimson corollas, like those of a
Brobdingnagian honeysuckle, and flowers like red dragon-flies
enormously magnified, and others like large, single roses in yellow
wax, falling slowly down now and then, messengers from the floral
glories above, "wasting (?) their sweetness on the desert air." A
traveler through a tropical jungle may see very few flowers and be
inclined to disparage it.
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