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Updated: May 26, 2025
When these several articles of subsistence fail the Sumatran has recourse to those wild roots, herbs, and leaves of trees which the woods abundantly afford in every season without culture, and which the habitual simplicity of his diet teaches him to consider as no very extraordinary circumstance of hardship.
The curious houses of the Sumatran Highlands, with their adjacent rice-barns, form distinctive features of this unique island. The ridge of the steep thatch rises in sharp horns, interlaced with black fibres of arén palm, or covered with glittering tin.
The Sumatran girls, as well as our English maidens, entertain a favourable opinion of the virtues of morning dew as a beautifier, and believe that by rubbing it to the roots of the hair it will strengthen and thicken it. With this view they take pains to catch it before sunrise in vessels as it falls.
He was not naturalist enough to know what the ex-pilot's old Sumatran experience had long ago taught him that the hornbill only lays one egg, and brings forth but a single chick. Whether or no, he was determined to ascend and satisfy himself. He had no fear of being able to climb the tree-ladder.
A Sumatran ever scrupulously abstains from pronouncing his own name; not as I understand from any motive of superstition, but merely as a punctilio in manners. It occasions him infinite embarrassment when a stranger, unacquainted with their customs, requires it of him. As soon as he recovers from his confusion he solicits the interposition of his neighbour.
There are some large quadrupeds too, as the Indian rhinoceros, and the Sumatran tapir; and although the flesh of these great thick-skinned animals is neither tender nor delicate, yet men who can get no other soon find themselves in a position to relish it, despite its toughness and its coarse texture.
The climate is the pleasantest during the north-east monsoon, which lasts from October to April. It is during the south-west monsoon that the heavier rains, accompanied by electrical disturbances, occur. The central mountain range protects the Peninsula alternately from both monsoons, the high Sumatran mountains protecting its west side from the south-west winds.
A sylvan charm belongs even to this Sumatran township, for the wooden houses, with pointed roofs of dried palm-leaves, and broad eaves forming shady verandahs, stand far apart in flowery gardens, aflame with orange or scarlet cannas, and fragrant with golden-hearted frangipanni.
From this habit it derives its name, Dalian; which, in the Sumatran language, signifies the fork of a tree. Not unlike the Rimau-dahan, both in size and markings, is the Nepaul cat: a species, as its name imports, found in Nepaul, in the mountain forests. The Serval is a spotted cat black upon a pale-yellowish ground and considerably larger than the domestic species.
So he landed and, finding himself in a great and pleasant island, paced about it and saw with admiration that its dust was saffron and its gravel carnelian and precious minerals; its hedges were of jessamine, its vegetation was of the goodliest of trees and of the brightest of odoriferous shrubs; its brushwood was of Comorin and Sumatran aloes-wood and its reeds were sugar-canes.
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