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Updated: June 7, 2025
Both sexes are enslaved by the hateful and pernicious habit of chewing betel and areca, which they contract even while they are children, and practise incessantly from morning till night.
The roof and sides of the house were of attap. This is made from the long, arrow-like leaves of the nipah palm. Unlike its brother palms the cocoa, the sago, the gamooty, and the areca the nipah is short, and more like a giant cactus in growth. Its leaves are stripped off by the natives, then bent over a bamboo rod and sewed together with fibres of the same palm.
A bamboo pole decked with leaves and green fruit of the areca palm is placed in the center of a room and is surrounded with cooked food. After this has been offered to the spirits, it is eaten by the guests who then indulge in dancing about the decorated pole. This generally lasts eight days, but in one instance the festivities continued for sixteen days and nights.
The boat is decked with blossoms of the areca palm and with ribbons made from its leaves, and thus adorned the little craft is allowed to float out to sea with the ebb-tide, bearing, as the people fondly think or hope, the sickness away with it. Often the vehicle which carries away the collected demons or ills of a whole community is an animal or scapegoat.
Campbell and myself, however, found that it is an admirable fodder for horses, who prefer it to any other green food to be had in these mountains. Areca gracilis and Licuala peltata are the only other palms in Sikkim; but Cycas pectinata, with the India-rubber fig, occurs in the deepest and hottest valleys the western limit of both these interesting plants.
The loud-tongued stream of crystal water was very full, and through the deep greenery, and among the great, gray, granite boulders, it flung its broad drifts of foam, rejoicing in its strength; and every green thing leaned lovingly toward it or stooped to touch it, and all exquisite things which love damp, all tender mosses and selaginellas, all shade-loving ferns and aroids, flourish round it in perennial beauty; while high above, in the sunshine, amid birds and butterflies, the graceful areca palm struggles with the feathery bamboo for precarious root-hold on rocky ledges, and spikes of rose-crimson blossoms, and dark green fronds of bananas, and all the leafy wealth born of moisture and sunshine, cling about it tenderly.
This prevents the reinfection of the pastures every spring, and the young lambs are not exposed to this form of infection. The most effective treatment that the writer has ever used is the following formula recommended by Dr. Law: Arsenous acid one dram, sulfate of iron five drams, powdered areca nut two ounces, common salt four ounces. This is sufficient for one dose for thirty sheep.
Under the city of London is a vast deposit of clay in which thousands of specimens of fossil fruit have been found like our date, cocoanut, areca, custard-apple, gourd, melon, coffee, bean, pepper, and cotton plant, but no sign of man. Why was his development so tardy? What animal profited by this rich vegetable life?
The coast districts of Canara and Malabar being famed for their betel nuts, the trade name of the article was taken from the languages current there, and was tortured by the Portuguese into areca.
His village home lay there at the end of the waste land, beyond the sugar-cane field, hidden among the shadows of the banana and the slender areca palm, the cocoa-nut and the dark green jack-fruit trees.
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