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Updated: May 7, 2025
"The mulberry tree," continued their governess, "belongs to the bread-fruit family, but the other members of this remarkable family, except the Osage orange, are found only in foreign countries. The bread-fruit tree itself, the fig, the Indian fig, or banyan tree, and the deadly upas tree, are all relations of the mulberry."
The nightmares began on that night; and the nightmares have followed me home. This is the worst of all. Helen calls me the Upas tree the poisoner of her content. Utterly, preposterously, altogether, selfish!" He turned on the electric lights, and walked up and down the room, with desperate, restless tread. "Poisoning all it touches," he said.
There the judge passed sentence upon them, by which they are doomed to suffer death by a lancet poisoned with Upas. After this the Alcoran was presented to them, and they were, according to the law of their great prophet Mahomet, to acknowledge and to affirm by oath, that the charges brought against them, together with the sentence and their punishment, were fair and equitable.
The sickness caused by it would continue for a while, and it might be some time before their strength or energies would be fully restored. But of dying there was no danger, as the poison of the upas does not kill, when only inhaled as a vapour; unless the inhalation be a long time continued. Its sap taken internally, by the chewing of its leaves, bark, or root, is certain death, and speedy death.
My rides were sometimes solitary; and it was on these occasions I most enjoyed these forest paths, now as healthful as beautiful; yet, let only a few months pass away, and to sleep one night within their shade would be death as certain as though it were spent beneath the boughs of the poisonous Upas.
With this instrument, it being poisoned with the gum of the Upas, the unhappy wretches were lanced in the middle of their breasts, and the operation was performed upon them all in less than two minutes.
In short, manners are the habits of a people: these are good whenever society draws from them true felicity and solid happiness; they are bad, they are detestable in the eye of reason, when the happiness of society does not spring from them; they are unwholesome when they have nothing more in their favour than the suffrage of time, and the countenance of prejudice which rarely consults experience, which is almost ever at variance with good sense: notwithstanding they may have the sanction of the law, custom, religion, public opinion, or example, they may be unworthy and may be disgraceful, provided society is in disorder; that crime abounds; that virtue shrinks beneath the basilisk eye of triumphant vice; they may then be said to resemble the UPAS, whose luxuriant yet poisonous foliage, the produce of a rank soil, becomes more baneful to those who are submitted to its vortex, in proportion as it extends its branches.
The aspect of these blasted monuments of ruined vegetation is strange and peculiar; and the air of desertion and desolation which pervades their neighbourhood, reminds one of the stories that are told of the Upas valley of Java, for here too not a bird is to be seen.
Henry and Helen remained where they had passed the night, under the shadow of a spreading tree; which, although of a species unknown to the travellers, had been cautiously scrutinised by them, and seemed to be neither a durion nor a upas. They were cautioned not to stir a step from the spot till the others should return.
As to the tree itself, it does no manner of injury to those around it. I have sat under its shade, and seen birds alight upon its branches; and as to the story of grass not growing beneath it, everyone who has been in a forest must know that grass is not found in such situations." The information given by Rumphius upon the subject of the Ipo or Upas, in his Herb. Amboin.
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