It Was Getting Dark When I Reached The Wharf, And The
Darkness Enabled Me To Hobble Unperceived On Board On
My bandaged feet.
The heat of the murky, lurid evening was awful, and as thousands of
mosquitoes took possession of
The ship, all comfort was banished, and I
was glad when we steamed down the palm-fringed Saigon or Donnai waters,
and through the mangrove swamps at the mouths of the Me-kong river, and
past the lofty Cape St. Jacques, with its fort, into the open China
Sea.
I. L. B.
LETTER VII
Beauties of the Tropics - Singapore Hospitality - An Equatorial
Metropolis - An Aimless Existence - The Growth of Singapore - "Farms" and
"Farmers" - The Staple of Conversation - The Glitter of "Barbaric
Gold" - A Polyglot Population - A Mediocre People - Female Grace and
Beauty - The "Asian Mystery" - Oriental Picturesqueness - The
Metamorphosis of Singapore
SINGAPORE, January 19, 1879.
It is hot - so hot! - but not stifling, and all the rich-flavored,
colored fruits of the tropics are here - fruits whose generous juices
are drawn from the moist and heated earth, and whose flavors are the
imprisoned rays of the fierce sun of the tropics. Such cartloads and
piles of bananas and pine-apples, such heaps of custard-apples and
"bullocks' hearts," such a wealth of gold and green giving off
fragrance! Here, too, are treasures of the heated, crystal seas - things
that one has dreamed of after reading Jules Verne's romances. Big
canoes, manned by dark-skinned men in white turbans and loin-cloths,
floated round our ship, or lay poised on the clear depths of aquamarine
water, with fairy freights - forests of coral white as snow, or red,
pink, violet, in massive branches or fern-like sprays, fresh from their
warm homes beneath the clear warm waves, where fish as bright-tinted as
themselves flash through them like "living light." There were displays
of wonderful shells, too, of pale rose-pink, and others with rainbow
tints which, like rainbows, came and went - nothing scanty, feeble, or
pale!
It is a drive of two miles from the pier to Singapore, and to eyes
which have only seen the yellow skins and non-vividness of the Far
East, a world of wonders opens at every step. It is intensely tropical;
there are mangrove swamps, and fringes of cocoa-palms, and
banana-groves, date, sago, and travelers' palms, tree-ferns,
india-rubber, mango, custard-apple, jack-fruit, durion, lime,
pomegranate, pine-apples, and orchids, and all kinds of strangling and
parrot-blossomed trailers. Vegetation rich, profuse, endless, rapid,
smothering, in all shades of vivid green, from the pea-green of spring
and the dark velvety green of endless summer to the yellow-green of the
plumage of the palm, riots in a heavy shower every night and the heat
of a perennial sun-blaze every day, while monkeys of various kinds and
bright-winged birds skip and flit through the jungle shades. There is a
perpetual battle between man and the jungle, and the latter, in fact,
is only brought to bay within a short distance of Singapore.
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