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Rustling sago-palms sway their tall plumes on the mountain side, and shadow luxuriant clove gardens, their pungent aroma mingling with nutmeg and cinnamon to steep the soft sea-wind in a wealth of perfume.
We know from the deposits of the chalk epoch in Greenland that late in Secondary times ferns, magnolias, myrtles, and sago-palms an Indian or Mexican flora flourished exceedingly in what is now the dreariest and most ice-clad region of the northern hemisphere.
A merry group, half-hidden in the shadows of clustering sago-palms, gathers the harvest of precious grain, the pith of a large tree producing thirty bundles, each of thirty pounds weight.
When taking a head a cut was made in the slain man's chest with a parang; into the wound the raiders then put their forefingers and sucked the blood from them. Each head-hunter carried rice in a rattan basket, but he depended for food mainly on sago-palms and wild animals that were killed.
We were rewarded for our exertions, by reaching another hollow in which a number of the sago-palms grew. The sago-palm has a creeping root-stem, like a nipa-palm, and Mr Hooker had told me that when it is nearly fifteen years old it sends up an immense terminal spike of flowers, after which it dies. It is not so tall as the cocoa-nut tree, but is thicker and larger.
A heavy shower, like a "thunder-plump," takes up a part of the afternoon, after which the Governor's carriage, with servants in scarlet liveries, rolls slowly out of Malacca, and through the sago-palms and back again. If aught else which is European breaks the monotony of the day I am not aware of it.
Afterward we had a swift and beautiful passage in a canyon through the mountain ridge between almost perpendicular sides, where long rows of sago-palms were the main feature, small cascades on either side adding to the picturesqueness. At the foot of the rapids we made camp in order to enable me to visit a small salt-water accumulation in the jungle a couple of kilometres farther down the river.
We land at the pretty valley of Halong, where a rippling brook traverses a wood of sago-palms, and falls in a white cascade over the rocks of a sheltered bathing-pool, screened by green curtains of banana and tall mangosteens, laden with purple fruit. Makassar-trees rain their yellow blossoms into the water, cloves fill the air with pungent fragrance, and lychees droop over the clear current.
Or take once more the oolitic epoch in England, lithographed on its own mud, with its puzzle-monkeys and its sago-palms, its crocodiles and its deinosaurs, its winged pterodactyls and its whale-like lizards.
On and about the semicircular terrace immediately around the house were planted crape-myrtle, clove trees and sago-palms: some yet remain to indicate what an Eden-like retreat was this garden of spices and bloom half a century ago.
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