第96章 LETTER XVIII(1)

Province Wellesley--Water Buffaloes--A Glorious Night--Perak Officials--A "Dismal Swamp"--Elephants at Home--An Epigrammatic Description--The British Residency at Taipeng--Sultan Abdulla's Boys--A

Chinese Mining Town--The "Armed Police"--An Alligator's Victim--Major Swinburne--A Larut Dinner Party--A Morning Hymn BRITISH RESIDENCY, LARUT, February 11.

I left Mr. Justice Wood's yesterday, and his servant dispatched me from the jetty in a large boat with an attap awning and six Kling rowers, whose oars worked in nooses of rope. The narrow Strait was very calm, and the hot, fiery light of the tropic evening resting upon it, made it look like oil rather than water. In half an hour I landed on the other side in the prosperous Province Wellesley, under a row of magnificent casuarina trees, with gray, feathery foliage drooping over a beach of corals and, behind which are the solemn glades of cocoa-nut groves. On the little jetty a Sikh policeman waited for me; and presently Mrs.

Isemonger, wife of the police magistrate of the Province, met me on the bright, green lawn studded with clumps of alamanda, which surrounds their lovely, palm-shaded bungalow.

Though the shadows were falling, Mr. Isemonger took me to see something of the back country in a trap with a fiery Sumatra pony. There are miles of cocoa-nut plantations belonging to Chinamen all along the coast, with the trees in straight lines forming long, broad avenues, which have a certain gloomy grandeur about them. Then come sugarcane and padi, and then palm plantations again.

The cocoa-nut palm grows best near salt water, no matter how loose and sandy the soil is, and in these congenial circumstances needs neither manure nor care of any kind. It bends lovingly toward the sea, and drops its ripe fruit into it. But if it is planted more than two hundred yards from the beach, it needs either rich or well-manured soil, or the proximity of human habitations. It begins to bear fruit between its fourth and tenth years, according to soil, and a well-placed, generous tree bears from one hundred and forty to one hundred and fifty nuts a year. They are of wonderfully slow growth. It is three months from the time the blossom appears before the fruit sets, then it takes six months to grow, and three months more to ripen, and after that will hang two months on the tree before it falls--fourteen months from the first appearance of the flower!

It is certainly not beautiful as grown in Province Wellesley, and I am becoming faithless to my allegiance to it in this region of areca and other more graceful palms.

In returning we saw many Malay kampongs under the palms, each with a fire lighted underneath it, and there were many other fires for the water-buffaloes, with groups of these uncouth brutes gathered invariably on the leeward side, glad to be smoked rather than bitten by the mosquitoes. These huge, thin-skinned animals have a strange antipathy to white people. They are petted and caressed by the Malays, and even small boys can do anything with them, and can ride upon their backs, but constantly when they see white people they raise their muzzles, and if there be room charge them madly. A buffalo is enormously strong, but he objects to the sun, and likes to bathe in rivers, and plaster himself with mud, and his tastes are much humored by his owners. A buffalo has often been known to vanquish a tiger when both have had fair play. Most of the drive back was accomplished by nearly incessant flashes of sheet lightning.

We had a most pleasant evening. Mrs. Isemonger, who is a sister of Mr.

Maxwell, my present host, is gentle, thoughtful, well-informed, and studious, and instead of creating and living in an artificial English atmosphere which is apt to make a residence in a foreign country a very unproductive period, she has interested herself in the Malays, and has not only acquired an excellent knowledge of Malayan, but is translating a Malayan book.

I felt much humiliated by my ignorance of Province Wellesley, of which in truth I had never heard until I reached Malacca. It is a mere strip, however, only thirty-five miles long by about ten broad, but it is highly cultivated, fertile, rich, prosperous, and populous. From Pinang one sees its broad stretches of bright green sugar-cane and the chimneys of its sugar factories, and it grows rice and cocoa-nuts, and is actually more populous than Pinang or Malacca, and contains as many Malays as Sungei Ujong, Selangor and Pinang together--fifty-eight thousand! Mr. Maxwell had promised to bring the Kinta, a steam- launch, across from Georgetown by 8 P.M., and it shows how very pleasant the evening was, that though I was very tired, eight, nine, ten, and eleven came, and the conversation never flagged.

Soon after eleven the Kinta appeared, a black shadow on a silver sea, roaring for a boat, but the surf was so heavy that it was some time before the police boat was got off; and then Mr. Maxwell, whose cheery, energetic voice precedes him, and Mr. Walker landed, bullying everybody, as people often do when they know that they are the delinquents! It was lovely in the white moonlight with the curving shadows of palms on the dewy grass, the grace of the drooping casuarinas, the shining water, and the long drift of surf. It was hard to get off, and the surf broke into the boat; but when we were once through it, the sea was like oil, the oars dripped flame, and, seen from the water, the long line of surf broke on the shore not in snow, but in a long drift of greenish fire.