Thus We Have An Actual Struggle For Life In
The Vegetable Kingdom, Not Less Fatal To The Vanquished Than The
Struggles Among Animals Which We Can So Much More Easily Observe
And Understand.
The advantage of quicker access to light and
warmth and air, which is gained in one way by climbing
Plants, is
here obtained by a forest tree, which has the means of starting
in life at an elevation which others can only attain after many
years of growth, and then only when the fall of some other tree
has made room for then. Thus it is that in the warm and moist and
equable climate of the tropics, each available station is seized
upon and becomes the means of developing new forms of life
especially adapted to occupy it.
On reaching Sarawak early in December, I found there would not be
an opportunity of returning to Singapore until the latter end of
January. I therefore accepted Sir James Brooke's invitation to
spend a week with him and Mr. St. John at his cottage on Peninjauh.
This is a very steep pyramidal mountain of crystalline
basaltic rock, about a thousand feet high, and covered with
luxuriant forest. There are three Dyak villages upon it, and on a
little platform near the summit is the rude wooden lodge where
the English Rajah was accustomed to go for relaxation and cool
fresh air. It is only twenty miles up the river, but the road up
the mountain is a succession of ladders on the face of
precipices, bamboo bridges over gullies and chasms, and slippery
paths over rocks and tree-trunks and huge boulders as big as
houses. A cool spring under an overhanging rock just below the
cottage furnished us with refreshing baths and delicious drinking
water, and the Dyaks brought us daily heaped-up baskets of
Mangosteens and Lansats, two of the most delicious of the subacid
tropical fruits. We returned to Sarawak for Christmas (the second
I had spent with Sir James Brooke), when all the Europeans both
in the town and from the out-stations enjoyed the hospitality of
the Rajah, who possessed in a pre-eminent degree the art of
making every one around him comfortable and happy.
A few days afterwards I returned to the mountain with Charles and
a Malay boy named Ali and stayed there three weeks for the
purpose of making a collection of land-shells, butterflies and
moths, ferns and orchids. On the hill itself ferns were tolerably
plentiful, and I made a collection of about forty species. But
what occupied me most was the great abundance of moths which on
certain occasions I was able to capture. As during the whole of
my eight years' wanderings in the East I never found another spot
where these insects were at all plentiful, it will be interesting
to state the exact conditions under which I here obtained them.
On one side of the cottage there was a verandah, looking down
the whole side of the mountain and to its summit on the right,
all densely clothed with forest.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 64 of 219
Words from 32850 to 33366
of 114260
