Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/340

318 drooping, swaying, gigantic green fronds, a refined, effeminate, delicate, sensitive sort of palm, the tropic's most tropical, exquisite, wonderful tree. The upper regions of Papandayang are all clothed with real jungle, the forest primeval, with giant creepers writhing and looping serpent-like about the trees, and doing all the extravagant things they are expected to do. Ratans, or climbing palms, enveloped whole trees with their pendant, gracefully decorative leaves; orchids swung in tasseled sprays, starred mossy trunks and branches, and showed in all the green wonderland overhead and around; and in each ravine, where warm streams sprayed the air, a whole hothouse full of blooming, green, and strange loveliness delighted the eye.

We met strings of coolies descending with baskets of sulphur on their backs, the path was yellow with the broken fragments of years' droppings, and infragrant, murky sulphur-streams crossed and ran beside the path, in promise of the stifling caldrons we were fast approaching.

We had a magnificent view back over the Garoet plain, with its checker-board of green and glinting fields, marked with the network of white post-roads and dotted with the clumps of palms that bespoke the hidden villages, and then we passed in through a natural gateway or cutting in the solid mountain-side made by the last eruption. The broad passage or defile led to the kawa, or crater, a bowl or depression deep sunk in rocky walls, with pools of liquid sulphur bubbling all over the five-acre floor and sending off clouds of nauseous steam. These pools, vats of purest molten gold, boiled violently all the time, scattering