new world. Land and ocean are strangely intermingled. Great islands are disjoined by narrow straits, which, in the case of those of Sunda, lead at once into the smooth waters and green level shores of the interior from the rugged and turbulent outer coast, which would otherwise have opposed to us an unbroken wall more than two thousand miles in length. We pass from one mediterranean sea to another, now through groups of islets so small that we encounter many in an hour, and presently along the coasts of those so large that we might be months in circumnavigating them. Even in crossing the widest of the eastern seas, when the last green speck has sunk beneath the horizon, the mariner knows that a circle drawn with a radius of two days sail would touch more land than water, and even that, if the eye were raised to-a sufficient height, while the islands he had left would reappear on the one side, new shores would be seen on almost every other. But it is the wonderful freshness and greenness in which, go where he will, each new island is enveloped, that impresses itself on his senses as the great distinctive character of the region. The equinoctial warmth of the air, tempered and moistened by a constant evaporation, and purified by periodical winds, seems to be imbued with penetrating life-giving virtue, under the influence of which even the most barren rock becomes fertile. Hence those groups of small islands which sometimes environ the larger ones like clusters of satellites, or mark where their ranges pursue their course beneath the sea, often appear, in particular states of the atmosphere when a zone of while quivering light surrounds them and obliterates their coasts, to be dark umbrageous gardens floating on a wide lake, whose gleaming surface would be too dazzling were if not traversed by the shadows of the clouds, and covered by the breeze with an incessant play of light and shade. Far different from the placid beauty of such scenes is the effect of the mountain domes and peaks which elsewhere rise against the sky. In these the voyager secs the grandeur of European mountains repeated, but all that is austere or savage transformed into softness and beauty, The snow and glaciers are replaced by a mighty forest, which fills every ravine with dark shade, and arrays every peak and ridge in
Page:The Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia (IA journalindianar00loga).pdf/31
