affords a grateful relief to the almost blinding glare of the Malayan sky, and the
metallic reflections of the ocean.
Some seem only inhabited by a graceful waving burden of strange, tropical
foliage, and by a band of chattering monkeys; on others you detect a Malay
kampong, or village, its umbrella-like houses of attap, close down to the shore,
built high up on poles, so that half the time their boulevards are but vast mud-
holes, the other half—Venice, filled with a moving crowd of sampans and
fishing praus. A crowd of bronzed, naked little figures sport within the shadow
of a maze of drying nets, and flee in consternation as the black, log-like head and
cruel, watchful eyes of a crocodile glide quietly along the mangrove roots.
On another island you discern the grim breastworks and the frowning mouth of a
piece of heavy ordnance.
Soon the island of Singapore reveals itself in a long line of dome-like hills and
deep-cut shadows, whose stolid front quickly dissolves. The tufted tops of a
sentinel palm, the wide-spreading arms of the banian, clumps of green and
yellow bamboo, and the fan-shaped outlines of the traveller’s palm become
distinguishable. As the great, red, tropical sun rises from behind the encircling
hills, the monotony of the foliage is relieved in places by objects which it all but
hid from view. The granite minaret of the Mohammedan mosque, the carved
dome of a Buddhist temple, the slender spire of an English cathedral, the bold
projections of Government House, and the wide, white sides of the Municipal
buildings all hold the eye.
Then a maze of strange shipping screens the nearing shore—the military masts
and yards of British and Dutch men-of-war, the high-heeled, shoe-like lines of
Chinese junks, innumerable Malay and Kling sampans, and great, unwieldy
Borneo tonkangs.
For six miles along the wharves and for six miles back into the island extend the
municipal limits of the city. Two hundred thousand people live within these
limits; while outside, over the rest of the island along the sea-coast, in fishing
villages, and in the interior on plantations of tapioca and pepper, live a hundred
thousand more. Of these three hundred thousand over one hundred and seventy
thousand are Chinese and only fifteen hundred are Europeans.