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. It is necessary to go on adjacent rising
ground and look down where trees and trailers are exhibiting their
gorgeousness. Unlike the coarse weeds which form so much of the
undergrowth in Japan, everything which grows in these forests rejoices
the eye by its form or color; but things which hurt and sting and may
kill, lurk amidst all the beauties. A creeping plant with very
beautiful waxy leaves, said by Captain Murray to be vanilla, grows up
many of the trees.
When we got up to the top of this, which the Resident calls "Plantation
Hill," I was well pleased to find that only the undergrowth had been
cleared away, and that "The Sanitarium" consists only of a cabin with a
single room divided into two, and elevated on posts like a Malay house.
The deep veranda which surrounds it is reached by a stepladder. A
smaller house could hardly be, or a more picturesque one, from the
steepness and irregularity of its roof. The cook-house is a small attap
shed, in a place cut into the hill, and an inclosure of attap screens
with a barrel in it under the house is the bath-room. The edge of the
hill, from which a few trees have been cleared, is so steep that but
for a bamboo rail one might slip over upon the tree-tops below. Some
Liberian coffee shrubs, some tea, cinchona, and ipecacuanha, and some
heartless English cabbages, are being grown on the hillside, and the
Resident hopes that the State will have a great future of coffee.
The view in all directions was beautiful - to the north a sea of densely
wooded mountains with indigo shadows in their hollows; to the south the
country we had threaded on the Linggi river, forests, and small tapioca
clearings, little valleys where rice is growing, and scars where tin-
mining is going on; the capital, the little town of Serambang with its
larger clearings, and to the west the gleam of the shining sea. In the
absence of mosquitoes we were able to sit out till after dark, a rare
luxury. There was a gorgeous sunset of the gory, furnace kind, which
one only sees in the tropics - waves of violet light rolling up over the
mainland, and the low Sumatran coast looking like a purple cloud amidst
the fiery haze.
Dinner was well cooked, and served with coffee after it, just as at
home. The primitive bath-room was made usable by our eleven servants
and chair-bearers being sent to the hill, where the two gentlemen
mounted guard over them. After dark the Chinamen made the largest
bonfire I ever saw, or at all events the most brilliant, with trunks of
trees and pieces of gum dammar, several pounds in weight, which they
obtained by digging, and this was kept up till daylight, throwing its
splendid glare over the whole hill-top, lighting up the forest, and
bringing the cabin out in all its picturesqueness.
I should have liked to be there some time to study the ways of a tribe
of ants. Near the cabin, under a large tree, there was an ant-dwelling,
not exactly to be called an ant-hill, but a subterranean ant-town,
with two entrances. Into this an army of many thousand largish ants, in
an even column three and a half inches wide, marched continually, in
well "dressed" ranks, about twenty-seven in each, with the regularity
of a crack regiment on the "march past," over all sorts of
inequalities, rough ground, and imbedded trunks of small trees, larger
ants looking like officers marching on both sides of the column, and
sometimes turning back as if to give orders. Would that Sir John
Lubbock had been there to interpret their speech!
Each ant of the column bore a yellowish burden, not too large to
interfere with his activity. A column marshaled in the same fashion,
but only half the width of the other, emerged equally continuously from
the lower entrance. From the smaller size of this column I suppose that
a number of the carrier ants remain within, stowing away their burdens
in store-houses. Attending this latter column for eighteen paces, I
came upon a marvelous scene of orderly activity. A stump of a tree,
from which the outer bark had been removed, leaving an under layer
apparently permeated with a rich, sweet secretion, was completely
covered with ants, which were removing the latter in minute portions.
Strange to say, however, a quantity of reddish ants of much larger size
and with large mandibles seemed to do the whole work of stripping off
this layer.
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