It is a tropical experience to reverse an umbrella and in a few minutes fill it with golden-hearted white frangipani blossoms, or to find nutmegs lying as thick as acorns on the ground, and break their green outer shell and see the fine coral branches of mace enveloping the dark kernel. It is a delight, too, to see mangosteens and rambutans growing, to find bread, sausages, and candles hanging in plenty from benevolent trees, and other fruits and strange flowers springing from a tree's trunk instead of from its branches. There are thick groves and regular avenues of the waringen, a species of Ficus, and related to the banian- and the rubber-tree, a whole family whose roots crawl above the ground, drop from the branches and generally comport themselves in unconventional ways. Bamboos grow in clumps and thickets, ranging from the fine, feathery-leafed canes, that are really only large grasses, up to the noble giants from Burma, whose stems are more nearly trunks easily soaring to a hundred feet in air, and spreading there a solid canopy of graceful foliage.
The creepers run from tree to tree, and writhe over the ground like gray serpents; ratans and climbing palms one hundred feet in length are common, while uncommon ones stretch to five hundred feet. There is one creeper with a blossom like a magnified white violet, and with all a wood-violet's fragrance; but with only Dutch and botanical names on the labels, one wanders ignorantly and protestingly in this paradise of strange things. The rarer orchids are grown in matted sheds in the shade of tall trees; and although we saw them at the end of the dry season, and few
