There are plenty of
herons, white, black, blue, and divers mixed colours; with many
bastard hawks, and other birds of an infinite variety of kinds and
colours, most having crests on their heads like peacocks.
There are
great store of lizards and camelions also, which agree in the
description given by Pliny, only it is not true that they live on air
without other food; for having kept one on board for only a day, we
could perceive him to catch flies in a very strange manner. On
perceiving a fly sitting, he suddenly darts out something from his
mouth, perhaps his tongue, very loathsome to behold, and almost like a
bird-bolt, with which he catches and eats the flies with such speed,
even in the twinkling of an eye, that one can hardly discern the action.
In the hills there are many spiders on the trees, which spin webs from
tree to tree of very strong and excellent silk of a yellow colour, as if
dyed by art. I found also hanging on the trees, great worms like our
grubs with many legs, inclosed within a double cod of white silk.
[Footnote 212: Called the beautiful beast in Keeling's
voyage. - Purch.]
There grows here great store of the herb producing aloes, and also
tamarind trees by the water side. Here also is great abundance of a
strange plant which I deem a wild species of cocoa-nut, seldom growing
to the height of a tree, but of a shrubby nature, with many long prickly
stalks some two yards long. At the end of each foot-stalk is a leaf
about the size of a great cabbage-leaf, snipt half round like a
sword-grass. From the tops of this plant, among the leaves, there spring
out many woody branches, as thick set with fruit as they can stand,
sometimes forty of them clustering together on one branch. These are
about the size of a great katharine pear; at the first greenish, and
shaped almost like a sheep's bell, with a smooth rind flat at top;
within which rind is a hard substance almost like a cocoa-nut shell, and
within that is a white round hollow kernel of a gristly consistence, yet
eatable, and in the central hollow about a spoonful of cool sweet
liquor, like cocoa-nut milk. There is another tree, as big as a
pear-tree, thick set with boughs and leaves resembling those of the bay,
bearing a large globular fruit like a great foot-ball, hanging by a
strong stalk; The rind is divided by seams into four quarters, and being
cut green, yields a clammy substance like turpentine. The rind is very
thick, consisting of divers, layers of a brown substance like agaric,
but harder, and contains thirteen cells, in each of which is contained a
large kernel of a dirty white colour, hard, bitter, and ill tasted.
In Socotora[213] the natives of Guzerat and the English build themselves
slight stone-houses, with pieces of wood laid across and covered with
reeds and branches of the date palm, merely to keep out the sun, as they
fear no rain during the season of residing here.
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