branch a tuft of immense sword-shaped leaves, six or eight inches wide, and as
many feet long. Others have a single unbranched stem, six or seven feet high, the
upper part clothed with the spirally arranged leaves, and bearing a single
terminal fruit ac large as a swan's egg. Others of intermediate size have irregular
clusters of rough red fruits, and all have more or less spiny-edged leaves and
ringed stems. The young plants of the larger species have smooth glossy thick
leaves, sometimes ten feet long and eight inches wide, which are used all over
the Moluccas and New Guinea, to make "cocoyas" or sleeping mats, which are
often very prettily ornamented with coloured patterns. Higher up on the bill is a
forest of immense trees, among which those producing the resin called dammar
(Dammara sp.) are abundant. The inhabitants of several small villages in
Batchian are entirely engaged in searching for this product, and making it into
torches by pounding it and filling it into tubes of palm leaves about a yard long,
which are the only lights used by many of the natives. Sometimes the dammar
accumulates in large masses of ten or twenty pounds weight, either attached to
the trunk, or found buried in the ground at the foot of the trees. The most
extraordinary trees of the forest are, however, a kind of fig, the aerial roots of
which form a pyramid near a hundred feet high, terminating just where the tree
branches out above, so that there is no real trunk. This pyramid or cone is
formed of roots of every size, mostly descending in straight lines, but more or
less obliquely-and so crossing each other, and connected by cross branches,
which grow from one to another; as to form a dense and complicated network, to
which nothing but a photograph could do justice (see illustration at Vol. I. page
130). The Kanary is also abundant in this forest, the nut of which has a very
agreeable flavour, and produces an excellent oil. The fleshy outer covering of the
nut is the favourite food of the great green pigeons of these islands (Carpophaga,
perspicillata), and their hoarse copings and heavy flutterings among the branches
can be almost continually heard.
After ten days at Langundi, finding it impossible to get the bird I was
particularly in search of (the Nicobar pigeon, or a new species allied to it), and
finding no new birds, and very few insects, I left early on the morning of April
1st, and in the evening entered a river on the main island of Batchian (Langundi,
like Kasserota, being on a distinct island), where some Malays and Galela men
have a small village, and have made extensive rice-fields and plantain grounds.
Here we found a good house near the river bank, where the water was fresh and
clear, and the owner, a respectable Batchian Malay, offered me sleeping room
and the use of the verandah if I liked to stay. Seeing forest all round within a
short distance, I accepted his offer, and the next morning before breakfast