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The country is finely mountainous, and there is much virgin forest still left upon the hills, together with some of the oldest coffee-plantations in Java, where the plants have attained almost the dimensions of forest trees. About 500 feet below the summit level of the pass there is a road-keeper's hut, half of which I hired for a fortnight, as the country looked promising for making collections.
On our route, we visited some beautiful coffee-plantations, and passed through the pretty and romantic-looking village of Salatiga. We had a splendid view of the far-famed Gunung Marapi, or fire-mountain; and, on every side, we saw evidence of the thriving condition of this magnificent part of Java.
As you sail along it you cannot help admiring its beautiful coffee-plantations, in places so abrupt and steep that you would pronounce them almost inaccessible.
According to the natives, the whole chain of mountains from hence southward, as far as the country where the coffee-plantations begin, is intersected by similar cultivated valleys at some distance from each other, the intermediate space consisting chiefly of barren rocky soil. From Wady Mohram we again crossed uneven, mountainous ground, where I found sand-stone and silex.
The finest coffee-plantations are now found in the savannah of Ocumare, near Salamanca, and at Rincon, in the mountainous countries of Los Mariches, San Antonio Hatillo, and Los Budares.
Prior to 1840, and before coffee-plantations had been extensively opened in the Kandyan ranges, there was not a mountain or a lofty feature of land of Ceylon which they had not traversed, in their periodical migrations in search of water; and the sagacity which they display in "laying out roads" is almost incredible.
Trollope, "that half the sugar-estates in Jamaica, and I believe more than half the coffee-plantations, have gone back into a state of bush? that all this land, rich with the richest produce only some thirty years since, has now fallen back into wilderness?"
Halfway clearings for coffee-plantations, with a lime-washed bungalow, the President's country-quarters, lead to the feathered and forested crest which bears the 'pharos. This protection against wreck is worse than nothing; it is lighted with palm-oil every night, and then left to its own sweet will.
When the seed has germinated it is sown, and it produces plants capable of bearing the heat of the sun better than those which spring up in the shade in coffee-plantations. In this country five thousand three hundred coffee-trees are generally planted in a fanega of ground, amounting to five thousand four hundred and seventy-six square toises.
Opposite the garden is one of the largest sugar-plantations, and, in the neighbourhood, a number of coffee-plantations. In my opinion, the situation of Candy is most beautiful, but many affirm that it is too near the mountains, and lies in a pit. At any rate, this pit is a very lovely one, abounding in the most luxuriant vegetation.
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