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It corresponded in every respect to the mental picture which I had drawn of a Bornean town. It straggles for two miles or more along a dusty road shaded by a double row of flaming fire-trees. Facing on the road are a few-score miserable shops kept by Chinese and Arabs and the somewhat more pretentious buildings which house the offices of the European trading companies.
The glancing rays of the sun on the fire-trees; the green moss; the winter birds, more fully feathered and more familiar than those of summer; the mountain streams, whose white and frothing waters dashed down the sides of the sloping meadows, and meeting in some ravine fell with sonorous and splashing murmurs from the black and shining rocks into the lake; the cadenced sound of the oar, which seemed to accompany us with its mysterious and plaintive regrets, like some friendly voice hidden beneath the waters; the perfect repose we felt in this warm and luminous atmosphere, so near each other, and separated from the world by an abyss of waters, gave us at times so great an enjoyment in the sense of existence, such fulness of inward joy, such an overflowing of peace and love, that we might have defied Heaven itself to add to our felicity.
The gilded, cone-shaped towers of Buddhist temples rising above steep roofs tiled in orange, red, or blue, their eaves hung with hundreds of tiny bells which tinkle musically in every breeze. The scarlet splotches of spreading fire-trees against whitewashed walls. Shaven-headed priests in yellow robes offering flowers and food to stolid-faced images of brass and clay.
At the summit of the hill, reached by a steeply winding carriage road, are the bungalows of the Europeans, their white walls, smothered in crimson masses of bougainvillæa and shaded by stately palms and blazing fire-trees, peeping out from a wilderness of tropic vegetation. Viewed from the harbor, Sandakan is one of the most enchanting places that I have ever seen.
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