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"But I say, I know who pitched that spear at you." "You do?" "Yes, it was that Malay chap you offended with the durian." "Then he must be taken and punished." "First catch your brown hare, master officer of infantry," said Bob, smiling. "He won't set foot here again, depend upon it, unless he slinks in at night. By George, what a malicious lot they must be, to act like that!"
Besides, it had brought a Durian fruit to the banks of the stream and thrown it down, so that either taste or eccentricity must have induced it to prefer the shoots. Perhaps its digestion was out of order and it required a tonic. Anyhow, it continued to devour a good many young shoots while our travellers were peeping at it in mute surprise through the bushes.
When a Durian strikes a man in its fall, it produces a dreadful wound, the strong spines tearing open the flesh, while the blow itself is very heavy; but from this very circumstance death rarely ensues, the copious effusion of blood preventing the inflammation which might otherwise take place.
Like all the good things in Nature tempests, breakers, sunsets, &c. durian is indescribable. It is meat and drink and an unrivalled delicacy besides, and you may gorge to repletion and never have cause for penitence. It is the one case where Nature has tried her hand at the culinary art and beaten all the CORDON BLEUE out of heaven and earth. Would to Heaven she had been more lavish of her essays!
This pulp is the edible portion and has an indescribable flavour and consistence. You can safely eat all you want of it, and the more you eat the more you will want. To eat durian, as Mr Wallace says, is alone worth a voyage to the East. But it has one strange quality it smells so badly as to be at first almost nauseating; some people even can never bring themselves to touch it.
According to the natives these trees are plentiful in the utan, but in the kampong they, as well as the famous durian and the rambutan, have been raised from seed. Borneo certainly possesses fine wild fruits, but as the jungle is laborious to pass through it would be most difficult to find the trees.
It is said that when one is opened in the market it takes but a few moments to clear the vicinity of Americans, while if a man be courageous enough to brave the strong smell and take a bite of the fruit, his presence will be unwelcome in polite society for some time thereafter; yet the durian is delightful to the palate, and would doubtless be oftener eaten did not one become so steeped in its anything but Sabean odour.
For vegetables there were the Malay lobak, a tender white radish, and the cocoa-nut bud stewed in the milk of the ripe fruit; and as dessert we had placed before us, for the first time, the far-famed durian, so universal a favorite among Orientals as to command a higher price than any other fruit in market, yet so abominably disgusting in smell that the olfactories of few strangers can tolerate its approach.
"Perhaps this is a better one," said my uncle, stretching out his hand for the untouched half, but upon tasting it he did not find it so satisfactory as that which we had, and we made a very poor dessert, as far as the durian was concerned, greatly to our friend's chagrin.
"What is it?" said the ensign, who was deep in the mysterious flavour of the delicious mangosteen. "I never believed in old Darwin, and his development, and evolution, and that sort of thing, till now." "Why now?" said Tom Long. "Because I feel such a pig," said Bob, attacking another durian.
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