good collecting ground.
In the morning after breakfast I started off, but found I had four miles to walk
over a wearisome straight road through coffee plantations before I could get to
the forest, and as soon as I did so, it came on to rain heavily and did not cease
until night. This distance to walk every day was too far for any profitable work,
especially when the weather was so uncertain. I therefore decided at once that I
must go further on, until I found someplace close to or in a forest country. In the
afternoon my friend Mr. Bensneider arrived, together with the Controlleur of the
next district, called Belang, from whom I learned that six miles further on there
was a village called Panghu, which had been recently formed and had a good
deal of forest close to it; and he promised me the use of a small house if I liked
to go there.
The next morning I went to see the hot-springs and mud volcanoes, for which
this place is celebrated. A picturesque path among plantations and ravines
brought us to a beautiful circular basin about forty feet in diameter, bordered by
a calcareous ledge, so uniform and truly curved, that it looked like a work of art.
It was filled with clear water very near the boiling point, and emitted clouds of
steam with a strong sulphureous odour. It overflows at one point and forms a
little stream of hot water, which at a hundred yards' distance is still too hot to
hold the hand in. A little further on, in a piece of rough wood, were two other
springs not so regular in outline, but appearing to be much hotter, as they were in
a continual state of active ebullition. At intervals of a few minutes, a great
escape of steam or gas took place, throwing up a column of water three or four
feet high.
We then went to the mud-springs, which are about a mile off, and are still
more curious. On a sloping tract of ground in a slight hollow is a small lake of
liquid mud, with patches of blue, red, or white, and in many places boiling and
bubbling most furiously. All around on the indurated clay are small wells and
craters full of boiling mud. These seem to be forming continually, a small hole
appearing first, which emits jets of steam and boiling mud, which upon
hardening, forms a little cone with a crater in the middle. The ground for some
distance is very unsafe, as it is evidently liquid at a small depth, and bends with
pressure like thin ice. At one of the smaller, marginal jets which I managed to
approach, I held my hand to see if it was really as hot as it looked, when a little
drop of mud that spurted on to my finger scalded like boiling water.
A short distance off, there was a flat bare surface of rock as smooth and hot as
an oven floor, which was evidently an old mud-pool, dried up and hardened. For
hundreds of yards around where there were banks of reddish and white clay used