Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/200

196 Borneo Company on the opposite bank, contrasts strongly with the typical Chinese architecture of the rest of the city.

The population is about equally made up of Chinese and Malays, the latter occupying a special quarter on the outskirts of the town. A small number of Tamils from southern India and an occasional Sikh from the northern Indian provinces add variety to a decidedly variegated population. The Chinese women often adopt the gay Malay dress and may easily be mistaken for Malays. The latter are fond of bright colors, and a bevy of native women in their gay sarongs and delicately tinted jackets would be hard to beat as a color study. In Sarawak especially they also affect veils of various bright tints which they drape about their head and shoulders with all the grace of a Spanish woman's mantilla. Indeed, the artist in search of novel and striking color studies could not do better than to pitch his easel in Kuching.

The steamy hothouse atmosphere of Sarawak is of the true equatorial type. Kuching, lying within a degree of the equator, has a uniformly hot and humid climate, under whose forcing influence the vegetation attains a luxuriance which few places, even in equatorial lands, can equal. All the commoner forms of tropical vegetation abound. Palms, bamboos, bananas, orchids and the other plants familiar to those who know the tropics grow everywhere, and the gardens in Kuching exhibit a wonderful profusion of rare and beautiful trees and shrubs. Moreover, the stems of the palms and the trunks and branches of the other trees are laden with ferns, orchids and other epiphytes in bewildering profusion, while creepers with brilliant flowers of every hue are draped over the fences and clamber up the trees.

In the immediate vicinity of Kuching the original forest has mostly disappeared; but in many places the second growth of trees is of good size, and there is a dense undergrowth composed of a great variety of shrubs and herbaceous plants.

One does not have to go far, however, to see samples of the primitive forest, which is very difficult to explore, as the ground is usually a swamp, or else is covered with an impenetrable thicket.

Ferns are abundant, both epiphytic and terrestrial species. Among the most characteristic are species of Gleichenia forming dense thickets, and some very beautiful climbing ferns of the genus Lygodium.

Pitcher plants (Nepenthes) are extremely common, as they seem to be everywhere in Borneo.

Among the showy flowers noted about Kuching were various Acanthaceæ and Melastomaceæ, and perhaps the most striking plant is Wormia pulchella, a shrub belonging to the Dilleniaceæ. It is a common plant of the Malayan region, and its big golden yellow flowers and handsome foliage make it extremely ornamental. Sometimes a bright scarlet Æschynanthus was seen, climbing up the trunk of a tree, but this was not very common.