The papaya, a smaller custard-fruit, with unpleasant little curly gray seeds in the mess, is like a coarse, flavorless melon, but is highly extolled as a febrifuge and tonic. The much-heralded and disappointing cherimoyer is grown too, and mangos ripen in every yard; but the Java mangos are coarse and turpentiny, of a deep pumpkiny hue. Pineapples, the nanas, or Portuguese ananassa, grow to perfection all over the low, hot country; but one is warned to be careful in eating them, and they are called the most dangerous, the most choleraic and fever-causing of tropical fruits. The native orange on this south side of the equator is not orange at all, even when ripe, but its peel is a deep, dark, beautiful green, and its flavor unequaled. The big Citrus decumana, the pomelo of China, the pumplemoos of Java, the Batavian lime in British India, the shaddock of the West Indies, and the grapefruit of Florida, appears in the passers, but is coarse, dry, and tasteless, save for the turpentine flavor, which does not lurk within, but stalks abroad.
The fruit of fruits, the prize of the Indies and of all the Malay equatorial regions, where the tree is indigenous, is the mangosteen (Garcinia mangosteen), and the tourist should avail himself of November and December as the months for a tour in Java, if only to know the mangosteen in its perfection. The dark-purple apples hang from the tall trees by woody stems, and the natives bring the manggis to market tied together in bunches of twenties like clusters of gigantic grapes. It is delight enough to the eye alone to cut the thick, fibrous rind, bisect the perfect sphere at the equator line, and see the round ball of “perfumed snow” resting intact in its rose-lined cup. The five white segments separate easily, and may be lifted whole with a fork, and they melt on the tongue with a touch of tart and a touch of sweet; one moment a memory of the juiciest, most fragrant apple, at another a remembrance of the smoothest cream ice, the most exquisite and delicately flavored fruit-acid known—all the delights of nature’s laboratory condensed in that ball of neige parfumée. It is fortunate that the mangosteen is a harmless and wholesome fruit, and that one may eat with impunity, laying store for a lifetime in his one opportunity. I often wondered how it would be if the mangosteen were a dangerous or a forbidden fruit; if it were wicked or a little of a sin to eat it; if mangosteens could be obtained singly, at great risk or expense; or if they should be prescribed for one as a tonic, something antimalarial, a substitute for quinine, to be taken in doses of one, two, or ten before or after each meal. The mangosteen cannot be transported to the temperate zone of Europe,—not even with the aid of modern ships’ refrigerating-machines and when coated with wax,—as in less than a week after leaving the trees the pulp melts away to a brown mass. By the alternation of seasons the mangosteen is always in market at Singapore, as it ripens north of the equator during the summer six months of the northern hemisphere’s year, and during this rainy season of Cochin China is carried from Saigon successfully as far north as Shanghai and Yokohama. The offer by the leading British steamship company of thirty pounds sterling to the ship-captain who will get a basket of mangosteens to the Queen is still open. The tree grows throughout the Malay Peninsula and Archipelago, and groves have been successfully planted in Ceylon, so that there is hope that this incomparable fruit may finally be acclimated in the West Indies, and fast steamers make it known in New York and London. The mangosteen is tinned for export at Singapore; but the faded segments floating in tasteless syrup give one little idea of this peerless fruit in its natural state.
TROPICAL FRUITS.
It had been my particular haunting dream of the tropics to have a small black boy climb a tree and throw cocoanuts down to me; and while we sat admiring the rank beauty of the deserted garden around Raden Saleh’s tomb, one afternoon, the expression of the wish caused a full-grown Malay to saunter across the grass, and, cigarette in mouth, walk up the straight palm-stem as easily as a fly. The Malay toes are as distinct members as the fingers, and almost as long; and clasping the trunk with the sole of the foot at each leaf-scar, that Malay climber gripped the rough palm-stem as firmly with his toes as with claws or extra fingers. It was so easily and commonly done that palm-tree climbing soon ceased to be any more of a feat to watch than berry-picking; but the first native who walked up a palm-tree for my benefit held me rapt, attentive, while he picked the big nuts and sent twenty-pounders crashing down through the shrubbery. We paid him well, and carried two of the nuts home with us; and from them the servant brought us tall glasses, or schooners, filled with the clear, colorless, tasteless milk, and a plate full of a white, leathery stuff—tough, tasteless too, and wilted, like cold omelet without eggs—the saddest sort of a feast of fresh cocoanuts.
We found all the countless common fragrant flowers that are so necessary to these esthetic, perfume-loving people heaped for sale in the flower-market of the passer, along with the oils and the gums and spices that give out, and burn with, such delicious odors. Short-stemmed roses and heaps of loose rose-petals were laid on beds of green moss or in bits of palm-leaf in a way to delight one’s color-sense, and, with the mounds of pale-green petals of the kananga, or ylang-ylang-tree’s blossoms, filled the whole air with fragrance. We dried quantities of kananga flowers for sachets, as they will crisp even in the damp air of Java, and retain their spicy fragrance for years; but the exquisite white-and-gold “Bo-flowers,” the sacred sumboja or frangipani (the Plumeria acutifolia of the botanists), would not dry, but turned dark and mildewed wherever one petal fell upon another. This lovely blossom of Buddha is sticky and unpleasant to the touch when pulled from the tree, and the stem exudes a thick milk. After they have fallen to the ground they may be handled more easily, and fallen flowers retain the spotless, waxen perfection of their thick, fleshy petals for even two days. One wonders that the people do not more often wear these flowers of the golden heart in their black hair; but the sumboja is a religious flower in Java, as in India, and in Buddhist times was almost as much an attribute and symbol of that great faith as the oltus. This Bo-flower is still the favorite offering, together with the champaka, or Arabian jasmine, in the Buddhist temples of Burma and Ceylon, and is often laid before the few images of that old religion now remaining in Java. All through the Malay world, however, it is especially the flower of the dead, associated everywhere with funeral rites and graves, as conventional an expression or accompaniment of grief, death, and burial as the cypress and the weeping willow. For this reason one rarely sees it used as an ornamental tree or hedge, even in a European’s garden or pleasure-grounds, and its presence in hedges or copses indicates that there are graves, or one of Islam’s little open-timbered temples of the dead, within reach of its entrancing fragrance. Our Malay servant would never accept our name of “frangipani” when told to spread out or stir the petals we tried to dry in the sun. He stoically repeated the native “sumboja” after me each time, very rightly resenting the baptism in honor of an Italian marquis, who only compounded an essence imitating the perfume of the West Indian red jasmine, which breathes a little of the cloying sweetness of the peerless sumboja. After but a few trials of its syllables, “sumboja” soon expressed to me more of the fragrance, the sentiment and spirit, of the lovely death-flower than ever could the word “frangipani.” Chinese Buddhists seem not to have any traditions or associations with the Bo-flower, as in South China, where the tree is grown in gardens, it is only the kai tan fa, or “egg-flower,” those hideously matter-of-fact people noting only the resemblance of the lovely petals to the contrasting yolk and albumen of a hard-boiled egg.