The volcanoes of Java are mostly in two lines: one, commencing near Cape St. Nicholas, its northwestern extremity, passes diagonally across the island to its southeastern headland on the Strait of Bali. The other is parallel to this, and extends from the middle of the Strait of Sunda to the south coast in the longitude of Cheribon. They stand along two immense fissures in the earth’s crust, but the elevating power appears only to have found vent at certain separate points along these fissures. At these points sub-aërial eruptions of volcanic ashes, sand, and scoriæ have occurred, and occasionally streams of basaltic and trachytic lava have poured out, until no less than thirty-eight cones, some of immense size, have been formed on this island. Their peculiar character is, that they are distinct and separate mountains, and not peaks in a continuous chain.
The second characteristic of these mountains is the great quantity of sulphur they produce. White clouds of sulphurous acid gas continually wreath the crests of these high peaks, and betoken the unceasing activity within their gigantic masses. This gas is the one that is formed when a friction-match is lighted, and is, of course, extremely destructive to all animal and vegetable life.
At various localities in the vicinity of active volcanoes and in old craters this gas still escapes, and the famous “Guevo Upas” or Valley of Poison, on the flanks of the volcano Papandayang, is one of these areas of noxious vapors. It is situated at the head of a valley on the outer declivity of the mountain, five hundred or seven hundred feet below the rim of the old crater which contains the “Telaga Bodas” or White Lake. It is a small, bare place, of a pale gray or yellowish color, containing many crevices and openings from which carbonic acid gas pours out from time to time. Here both Mr. Reinwardt and Dr. Junghuhn saw a great number of dead animals of various kinds, as dogs, cats, tigers, rhinoceroses, squirrels, and other rodents, many birds, and even snakes, who had lost their lives in this fatal place. Besides carbonic acid gas, sulphurous acid gas also escapes. This was the only gas present at the time of Dr. Junghuhn’s visit, and is probably the one that causes such certain destruction to all the animals that wander into this valley of death. The soft parts of these animals, as the skin, the muscles, and the hair or feathers, were found by both observers quite entire, while the bones had crumbled and mostly disappeared. The reason that so many dead animals are found on this spot, while none exist in the surrounding forests, is because beasts of prey not only cannot consume them, but even they lose their lives in the midst of these poisonous gases.
It was in such a place that the deadly upas was fabled to be found. The first account of this wonderful tree was given by Mr. N. P. Foersch, a surgeon in the service of the Dutch East India Company. His original article was published in the fourth volume of Pennant’s “Outlines of the Globe,” and repeated in the London Magazine for September, 1785. He states that he saw it himself, and describes it as “the sole individual of its species, standing alone, in a scene of solitary horror, on the middle of a naked, blasted plain, surrounded by a circle of mountains, the whole area of which is covered with the skeletons of birds, beasts, and men. Not a vestige of vegetable life is to be seen within the contaminated atmosphere, and even the fishes die in the water!” This, like most fables, has some foundation in fact; and a large forest-tree exists in Java, the Antiaris toxicaria of botanists, that has a poisonous sap. When its bark is cut, a sap flows out much resembling milk, but thicker and more viscid. A native prepared some poison from this kind of sap for Dr. Horsfield. He mingled with it about half a drachm of the sap of the following vegetables—arum, kempferia galanga, anomum, a kind of zerumbed, common onion or garlic, and a drachm and a half of black pepper. This poison proved mortal to a dog in one hour; a mouse in ten minutes; a monkey in seven; a cat in fifteen; and a large buffalo died in two hours and ten minutes from the effects of it. A similar poison is prepared from the sap of the chetek, a climbing vine.
The deadly anchar is thus pictured in Darwin’s “Botanic Garden:”
“Fierce in dread silence, on the blasted heath,
Fell Upas sits, the hydra-tree of death!
So, from one root, the envenomed soil below,
A thousand vegetative serpents grow!
In shining rays the steady monster spreads