Travels in the East Indian archipelago

by Albert S. Bickmore

CHAPTER XI.
THE MINAHASSA.

December 29th.—Early this morning rode about two miles from Sonder in a northwest direction, down over the edge of the plateau on which that village is situated. The road was nothing but a narrow path, and led along a deep ravine, whose sides in several places were high precipices. A short distance beyond the native village of Tinchep is the beautiful waterfall Munte, nine hundred and sixty-four feet above the sea, but six hundred and fifty below Sonder. The height of the fall is about sixty feet, and the width of the stream at this time is nearly twenty. The rock over which it pours is a perpendicular wall of trachytic lava. The place from which travellers view the fall is some two hundred feet above it, where the road runs along the side of a mountain-chain, that curves in the form of a horseshoe around it, and makes a magnificent background for this charming picture. Luxuriant foliage hangs over the stream above the cataract, and vines and small trees have found a foothold in the crevices and on the projecting ledges of the steep wall beneath; and as the showers of falling drops strike the ends of their branches, they continually wave to and fro, though where the beholder stands, not the slightest breeze is moving in the air. We had come at just the right time to see it when it is most charming, for the early sun was then shooting oblique bands of bright light across the falling water, and as the stream is divided into millions of drops the moment it curves over the edge of the cliff, those pearly spheres were now lighted up and now darkened, as repeatedly they shot out of the shaded parts into the bands of golden light.

Returning to Sonder, I proceeded along the main route in the southeast direction to Sonder Tua, “Old Sonder,” and Kawangtoan, and thence to the lovely négri of Tompasso. During this distance, of about eight miles, we had slowly ascended until we were about five hundred and seventy-five feet above Sonder. The view here is open on all sides. In the southwest is Mount Tompasso, which attains an elevation of over thirty-eight hundred feet. In the southeast the high, steep mountains are seen that border this elevated plain on the south. Great land-slides appear on their sides; and the people at Tompasso said that, not long before, three natives, who had cleared and planted large gardens on the steep declivities, went one morning to continue their labor, as usual, when to their great surprise their gardens had disappeared, and all that was left of them was a huge heap of sandstones and fragments of trees piled up on the edge of the plain.

This village is laid out with a large, square pond in the middle, and on a broad dike which crosses it is the highway. A well-graded street borders this pond, and the houses on its four sides are all placed facing its centre. The hedges that border the house-lots are mostly composed of rose-bushes, and the pond itself is nearly filled with the richly-colored and fragrant lotus, Nymphæa lotus, a large water-lily, held sacred in Egypt and India as the symbol of creation. It is the beautiful flower upon which Buddha is represented as sitting in each of the great images, where he is supposed to personify the Past, the Present, and the Future, three immense statues, to be seen in any of the thousand temples in the East dedicated to that heathen god. The “lotus” or “lotos” of northern Africa, the fruit of which was supposed to possess the wonderful power of making all who tasted it forget their “homes and friends and native shores,” is a tree, the Celtis Australis. If the ancients, who delighted so much in fables and myths, had only known of this charming place, they would have located their lotus-land here in the distant East, where the air is so pure and balmy, and the scenery so enchanting.

About a mile and a half beyond Tompasso we came to a number of “mud-wells,” and I began to examine them; but, as a heavy shower was now seen coming up, my attendant and I again leaped into our saddles and dashed off at a fast canter to Langowan, where the chief very politely insisted on my remaining with him instead of going to the next village—an invitation I was happy to accept, for I was determined not to leave this wonderful region until I had visited all the hot-springs in the vicinity, especially as the missionary here offered to go with me on the morrow, so that I should not fail to see those that were most interesting.

December 30th.—Early this morning, in company with the missionary, the hukom tua, and a number of natives rode back nearly to Tompasso to reëxamine the mud-wells seen yesterday. The area in which most of them are found is about half a mile square, on the side of a gentle declivity. Some time before we came to them, we could tell where they were by the quantities of steam and gas rising from them, and, as we came nearer, we could hear the heavy bubbling of the principal one. It is of a triangular form, and measures about thirty feet on a side, one of the angles lying toward the top of the hill. The mud is generally of a lead color, and varies in consistency from the centre, where it is nearly as thin as muddy water, to the edges, where in some places it is as thick as cream, and in others like putty. It boils up like pitch—that is, rises up in small masses, which take a spherical form, and then burst. The distance between the centres of these ebullitions varies from six inches to two feet or more, so that the whole surface is covered with as many sets of concentric rings as there are separate boiling points. Near each of the centres the rings have a circular form; but, as they are pressed outward by the successive bubbling up of the material within them, they are pressed against each other, and become more or less irregular, the corners always remaining round until they are pressed out against those which originated from another point. By that time the rings have expanded from small circles into irregular polygons. They, therefore, exactly represent the lines of concretionary structure frequently seen in schists, and represented in nearly every treatise on geology.[50] If this bubbling action should cease, and in the course of time the clay become changed by heat and pressure into slates, the similarity of the two would perhaps be very close. Have, therefore, the particles now forming the old schists which show this structure been subjected to such mechanical changing in their relative position to each other, before they were hardened into the schists they now form, as the particles of clay in this pool are undergoing at the present time?

Near this large well was a hot-spring about three feet in diameter, and two feet deep. Its temperature was as high as 98° Celsius, 208.4° Fahrenheit, and of course much steam rose from its surface. We boiled some eggs here hard in a few minutes. The water was pure and the natives living in the vicinity frequently come and wash their clothing in this natural boiler. No trace of vegetation could be detected beneath the surface nor on its edges where the bubbling water splashed. At the foot of the hill we visited a considerable lake which was strongly impregnated with sulphur, and near it a pond of thick, muddy water which in several places boiled up at intervals. About twenty of these boiling pools are found on this hill-side, and in the low, marshy land at its feet. Up the hill above the mud-well first described was a naked spot several yards in diameter. It is composed of tana puti, white earth; that is, decomposed lavas. Considerable steam was escaping from two or three holes where the natives had been taking out this white earth or clay, which they mix with rice-water and use in whitewashing their houses, a common practice throughout the Minahassa. We now rode west to Tompasso, and turning to the north came to a small village called Nolok. Thence the natives guided us a short distance in a northeasterly direction to a brook, and following up this for some distance, we came to a large bowl-shaped basin about seventy-five feet in diameter and twenty feet deep. Its sides were of soft clay, and so steep that we had much difficulty in getting near enough to its edge to obtain such a view as I desired, and the only way we accomplished it was by selecting a place where the intertwining roots of many small trees made a kind of turf. The coolies cleared away the shrubbery with their cleavers, and then by taking the left hand of one native while he held fast to another with his right, I was enabled to lean over its soft edge and obtain a complete view of the boiling water which partly covered its miry bottom. The stream which flows down into this basin rises on higher land to the north, and is cool until it comes into this basin. Here it is heated and strongly impregnated with sulphur, and changed to a whitish color. This circular basin I suppose has been wholly formed by the motion of the water that boils with the heat beneath it. One object in visiting these hot springs was to ascertain at what degree of temperature vegetation first began to appear. We therefore went down the stream, and began following its course upward toward this basin. At a place where the temperature was 48° Celsius, 118.4° Fahrenheit, the rocks and sticks in the water were thickly covered with dark-green algæ. A little higher up the temperature was 51° Celsius, 123.8° Fahrenheit, and algæ were still present, though the fumes of sulphur that rose choked me as I stooped to examine the temperature. We had now come to a thick jungle where the ground was so soft and miry it was both difficult and dangerous to get nearer the boiling pool. At last one of the natives was induced by the promise of a large piece of silver to cut away the bamboos and small shrubbery, if I would keep close behind him. Thus we slowly worked our way several yards higher up, when I ordered him to turn toward the stream. This hot-bog was certainly the next place to Tartarus. In several places between the clumps of small trees and bamboos the water was boiling and bubbling furiously, and pouring out great volumes of stifling gases, but I followed my coolie so closely that he had no time to regret his agreement, and at last we reached the bank of the stream, a place was cleared, and fastening my thermometer to the end of a long bamboo, I placed it in the hot, opaque water. Three times I repeated the observation, and each time the mercury stood at 50° Celsius, 122° Fahrenheit, but I judged from the rate it fell after the first reading that it stood at 52°, certainly not higher, before it was raised into the air. In this spot we had unfortunately come among hundreds of ants, that came out and bit me until my ankles seemed to be surrounded with live coals, and at the end of the third reading I dropped the bamboo and ran back with all my might to escape these pests and end my misery. While I held the thermometer in the bubbling (not boiling) water, I ordered the coolie to raise the sticks that were floating in it, but could not discern the slightest appearance of any vegetable growth, though it was very noticeable a little farther down the stream where the temperature of the water was not more than one degree lower, but where the quantity of sulphur in the water must have been much less, judging by the proportionate strength of the fumes that rise in the two places. All the other readings given here were made while the mercury remained in the water, and as the thermometer had been carefully marked the observations are liable to but little error. If some other observer should go to the same places and find a greater or less quantity of water, no doubt the temperature also would be found to have slightly changed. The missionary in our party, who had visited this place several times, assured me that frequently, when the cold stream that flows into this basin is much swollen by heavy rains, the water is thrown up at short intervals as high as a common palm-tree, about fifty feet. The natives also told me they had all often seen it in such violent action. The basin is therefore nothing but the upper, expanding part of a deep geyser-like tube.

We now returned toward Langowan, and visited a large basin of hot water to the left of the road, and about a mile from that village. Its basin is bowl-shaped, nearly circular in form, forty-eight feet in diameter. The water does not boil up except in one or two places, and almost the only gas that escapes is steam. Its temperature is 78° Celsius, 172.4° Fahrenheit. On one side is a small brook which carries off the surplus water, for this is truly a spring, that is, a place where water flows up from the ground. A short distance to the west and north are a number of hills, from which this water no doubt comes. As stifling gases were not pouring out, I had a better opportunity for examining the banks of the brook, which flowed off sixty feet, and was then conducted across the road by a causeway. Tracing it with the current several times, I invariably came to the first indication of vegetable life in the same place. It was a small quantity of algæ on the bottom of the brook, each plant being about as large round as a pin, and an eighth of an inch in length, and resembling the Vaucheria, or brook silk, the green threads of which are seen in the fresh-water ponds by our roadsides in summer. Here the temperature was 76¾° Celsius, 170.15° Fahrenheit. As the water flowed out through this shallow brook, a large part of all the sulphurous gas it contained of course passed off, and I believe the vegetation began at that point, not so much because the water was 1¼° Celsius cooler than in the basin, as because it was much purer, for at a short distance nearer the basin, where the temperature was 77⅛° Celsius, 172.82° Fahrenheit, no kind of vegetation could be detected, and yet the difference in the temperature of the water in the two places was only three-eighths of a degree in Celsius’s scale.

Geologists suppose that our earth was once a molten, liquid mass, which cooled by degrees until a crust was formed, that slowly thickened until condensation began in the surrounding atmosphere, and thus the water of the primeval ocean was formed. At first this water must have been just below the boiling point, and the query has arisen, How cool did the sea become before vegetation began to appear in it, and on the land then above the sea? The partial answer indicated by the few observations above is, that the presence of vegetable life depended more on the chemical composition of the water than on its temperature. If it was as pure then as the larger pool described above, the whole ocean was yet one great steaming caldron when these very simple aquatic plants, each apparently consisting of only a single branching cell, began to grow in the shallow places along its shores. Before this time, however, other algæ, like those which now grow in moist terrestrial places, may have been thriving on the land in the steamy atmosphere.