Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/103

Rh is nature's greatest and most generously bestowed gift in the tropics, and it was pleasant to eat it picked ripe in its native home, instead of receiving it steam-ripened from Northern fruiterers' warehouses. Every tiny village and almost every little native hut in Java has its banana-patch or its banana-tree, which requires nothing of labor in cultivation, save the weeding away of the old stalks. It was intended as a humane concentration of benefits when nature gave man this food-plant, four thousand pounds of whose fruit will grow with so little human aid in the same space of ground required to raise ninety-nine pounds of potatoes or thirty-three pounds of wheat; both those Northern crops acquired, too, only by incessant sweat of the brow and muscular exertion. The pisang is the tropical staff of life for whites as well as natives, as wholesome and necessary as bread, and an equivalent for the latter as a starchy food. It comes to one with the earliest breakfast cup, appears at every meal, arrives with the afternoon tea-tray, and always ends the late dinner as the inevitable accompaniment of cheese, the happiest substitute for bread or biscuits, tropical gourmets insist.

The lovely red rambutans (Nephelium lappaceum) we would have bought for their beauty alone—those clusters of seemingly green chestnut-burs, with spines tinted to the deepest rose, affording the most exquisite color-study of all the fruits in the passer. The spiny shell pulls apart easily, and discloses a juicy, half-transparent mass of white pulp around a central core of smooth stones. The duku, looking like a big green grape, a fresh almond, or an olive, contains just