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These Arab ships are built of teak, ranging from one hundred and fifty to five hundred tons per register, and are altogether remarkably fine vessels. From the islands of Lombok and Bally, directly eastward of Java, the market of Singapore receives a large annual supply of rice of fair quality, a small quantity of coffee, and some coarse native cloths, to which I may add, a few good stout poneys.
"Now I wish you to observe that the numerous islands to the east of Celebes and Lombok have a strong resemblance to Australia and New Guinea, as much indeed as the western islands have to Asia. Australia is a very remarkable country. It is, indeed, in several respects, unlike any other part of the world.
At last I reached Elias's mountain, and sprang over Behring's Straits into Asia; I followed the western coast in its various windings, carefully observing which of the neighboring isles was accessible to me. From the peninsula of Malacca my boots carried me to Sumatra, Java, Bali, and Lombok.
They know nothing of agriculture and to them salt and lombok are non-existent. Few of them survive. On the authority of missionaries there are some three hundred such savages at the headwaters of the Kahayan, who are described as very Mongolian in appearance, with oblique eyes and prominent cheekbones, and who sleep in trees.
Trailing from the eastern end of Java in a twelve-hundred-mile-long chain, like the wisps of paper which form the tail of a kite, and separated by straits so narrow that artillery can fire across them, are the Lesser Sundas Bali, noted for its superb scenery and its alluring women; Lombok, the northernmost island whose flora and fauna are Australian; Sumbawa, where the sandalwood comes from; Flores, whose inhabitants consider the earth so holy that they will not desecrate it by digging wells or cultivation; Timor, the northeastern half of which, together with Goa in India and Macao in China, forms the last remnant of Portugal's once enormous Eastern empire; Rotti, Kei, and Aroo, the great chain thus formed linking New Guinea, the largest island in the world, barring Australia, with the mainland of Asia.
In the islands of Bali and Lombok, when the time of harvest has come, the owner of the field himself makes a beginning by cutting "the principal rice" with his own hands and binding it into two sheaves, each composed of one hundred and eight stalks with their leaves attached to them. One of the sheaves represents a man and the other a woman, and they are called "husband and wife."
This and the two following days we were sailing along the north side of the island Lombok, on which is a high mountain. Most of the islands in this route are distinguished by high mountains. Lombok appears to be well clothed with wood. In the nights we saw fires upon the high lands at a distance from the coast. Sunday 6.
What is known as Wallace's line corresponds with the deep channel running between the islands of Bali and Lombok and continuing northwards to the west of Celebes. On the eastern side the fauna are non-Asiatic. Yet somehow into Australia with its queer monotremes and marsupials entered triumphant man man and the dog with him.
This led to three expeditions; one in 1845, another, which was undertaken with an insufficient force and ended in disaster to the Dutch, in 1847, and the third and final one, successfully carried out by an army of 10,000 men and six warships, together with 6000 auxiliary troops from the island of Lombok.
The Oriental Borneo and Bali are respectively divided from the Australian Celebes and Lombok by a narrow belt of sea known as "Wallace's line," on the opposite side of which the indigenous mammalia are as widely divergent as in any two parts of the world.
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