only modern innovation is an occasional 'caster,' or sea tramp, plying its way up
the coast to pick up a precarious profit for its owners by carrying cargoes of evil-
smelling trade from the fishing villages along the shore. Save for this, there is
nothing to show that white men ever visit these seas, and, sailing up the coast in
a native craft, you may almost fancy yourself one of the early explorers skirting
the lovely shores of some undiscovered country. As you sprawl on the bamboo
decking under the shadow of the immense palm leaf sail—which is so
ingeniously rigged that, if taken aback, the boat must turn turtle, unless, by the
blessing of the gods, the mast parts asunder—you look out through half-closed
eyelids at a very beautiful coast. The waves dance, and glimmer, and shine in the
sunlight, the long stretch of sand is yellow as a buttercup, and the fringes of
graceful casuarina trees quiver like aspens in the breeze, and shimmer in the
heat haze. The wash of the waves against the boat's side, and the ripple of the
bow make music in your drowsy ears, and, as you glide through cluster after
cluster of thickly-wooded islands, you lie in that delightful comatose state in
which you have all the pleasure of existence with none of the labour of living.
The monsoon threshes across these seas for four months in the year, and keeps
them fresh, and free from the dingy mangrove clumps, and hideous banks of
mud, which breed fever and mosquitoes in the Straits of Malacca. In the interior,
too, patches of open country abound, such as are but rarely met with on the West
Coast, but here, as elsewhere in the Peninsula, the jungles, which shut down
around them, are impenetrable to anything less persuasive than an axe.
These forests are among the wonderful things of the Earth. They are immense in
extent, and the trees which form them grow so close together that they tread on
one another's toes. All are lashed, and bound, and relashed, into one huge
magnificent tangled net, by the thickest underwood, and the most marvellous
parasitic growths that nature has ever devised. No human being can force his
way through this maze of trees, and shrubs, and thorns, and plants, and creepers;
and even the great beasts which dwell in the jungle find their strength unequal to
the task, and have to follow game paths, beaten out by the passage of
innumerable animals, through the thickest and deepest parts of the forest. The
branches cross and recross, and are bound together by countless parasitic
creepers, forming a green canopy overhead, through which the fierce sunlight
only forces a partial passage, the struggling rays flecking the trees on which they
fall with little splashes of light and colour. The air 'hangs heavy as remembered
sin,' and the gloom of a great cathedral is on every side. Everything is damp, and
moist, and oppressive. The soil, and the cool dead leaves under foot are dank
with decay, and sodden to the touch. Enormous fungous growths flourish