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Anak was in the crowd with her father, the old chief, and her affianced, Noa. She had put on her silk sarong and kabaya, and some curious gold brooches that were her mother's. In her coal-black hair she had stuck some sprays of the sweet-smelling chumpaka flower. On her slender bare feet were sandals cunningly wrought in colored beads.
"Some day," she thought, "I may see his Highness, and he may notice me and smile." For had not his Highness spoken twice to her father and called him a good man? So whenever she went to Johore she put on her best sarong and kabaya> and in her jetty black hair she put the pin her aunt had given her, with a spray of sweet-smelling chumpaka flower.
Under these giants stand the lesser trees grouped in glorious confusion, cocoa, sago, areca, and gomuti palms, nipah and nibong palms, tree ferns fifteen and twenty feet high, the bread-fruit, the ebony, the damar, the india rubber, the gutta-percha, the cajeput, the banyan, the upas, the bombax or cotton tree, and hosts of others, many of which bear brilliant flowers, but have not yet been botanized; and I can only give such barbarous names as chumpaka, Kamooning, marbow, seum, dadap; and, loveliest of all, the waringhan, a species of ficus, graceful as a birch; and underneath these again great ferns, ground orchids, and flowering shrubs of heavy, delicious odor, are interlocked and interwoven.
Mingled with these, on the shore farthest from the town, were the dadap trees, whose ripe scarlet blossoms stood out in rich relief as they gave colour to a landscape already dotted with the blooms of the chumpaka, both yellow and white, shedding a sweet scent that Doctor Bolter said was like Cape jasmin, but which Bob Roberts declared to resemble tea made with lavender water.
First, her maids washed it beautifully clean with the juice of the lime and the lather of the soap-nut; then it was combed and brushed until every hair glistened like ebony; next it was twisted up and stuck full of the quaint golden and tortoise-shell bodkins, with here and there a spray of jasmine and chumpaka. Busuk's milky-white teeth had to be filed off more than a fourth.
She showed no interest in the arranging of her glossy black hair with jewelled pins and chumpaka flowers, or in the draping of her sarong and kabaya. Only her lacerated gums ached until one tear after another forced its way from between her blackened lids down her rouged cheeks.
Ophir, and sprays of jasmine and chumpaka. Under her silken sarong would have been an inner garment of white cotton, about her waist a zone of beaded cloth held in front by an oval plate, and over all would have been thrown a long, loose dressing-gown, called the kabaya, falling to her knees and fastened down the front to the silver girdle with golden brooches.
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