Others Have A Single Unbranched Stem, Six Or Seven Feet
High, The Upper Part Clothed With The Spirally Arranged Leaves,
And bearing a single terminal fruit ac large as a swan's egg.
Others of intermediate size have irregular clusters of
Rough red
fruits, and all have more or less spiny-edged leaves and ringed
stems. The young plants of the larger species have smooth glossy
thick leaves, sometimes ten feet long and eight inches wide,
which are used all over the Moluccas and New Guinea, to make
"cocoyas" or sleeping mats, which are often very prettily
ornamented with coloured patterns. Higher up on the bill is a
forest of immense trees, among which those producing the resin
called dammar (Dammara sp.) are abundant. The inhabitants of
several small villages in Batchian are entirely engaged in
searching for this product, and making it into torches by
pounding it and filling it into tubes of palm leaves about a yard
long, which are the only lights used by many of the natives.
Sometimes the dammar accumulates in large masses of ten or twenty
pounds weight, either attached to the trunk, or found buried in
the ground at the foot of the trees. The most extraordinary trees
of the forest are, however, a kind of fig, the aerial roots of
which form a pyramid near a hundred feet high, terminating just
where the tree branches out above, so that there is no real
trunk. This pyramid or cone is formed of roots of every size,
mostly descending in straight lines, but more or less obliquely-
and so crossing each other, and connected by cross branches,
which grow from one to another; as to form a dense and
complicated network, to which nothing but a photograph could do
justice (see illustration at Vol.
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