Nothing did our heroes find either that could hurt, apart from the ever busy ever bloodthirsty mosquito, or some jet-black wasps that made their nests or paper hives on the lime-trees.
Re the mosquito, although it may be a digression—and you are at liberty therefore to skip it—I would like to tell my readers something curious. The same holds good, you will understand, about the mosquito’s second cousin, the gnat, who dwells in Merrie England, and sucks our blood by night.
Well then, first and foremost, it is only the lady-mosquito who bites and bleeds us; the gentleman mosquito is quiet and social. After she has filled herself with blood, she seeks out some quiet spot near to a pool of stagnant water. There she meditates on things in general for five or six days. Then off she flies, and alighting gently on the water, lays her eggs, and—drops down dead. After floating about a few days, the eggs give birth to tiny swimming larvæ. These swim about and grow fast, frequently casting their skins to allow of expansion.
Later on they pass into the nympha stage, and soon float on the top of the water. After a time, the shell or little coffin cracks along the top, and out comes a pure white mosquito. He stands on his empty shell till he photographs down to his proper colour, and his wings get dry and rigid. Then away he flies, with all the sunny world before him. I don’t respect the mosquito, and the larva for its size is a perfect tiger, eating everything it can come across, if soft enough—even the dead body of its late mother is devoured, so that these wild islands of the Pacific contain not only cannibal men, but cannibal mosquitoes.
But limes were not the only fruit on those charming isles. There were oranges, plantains, and bananas, the luscious and flesh-like pomolo, the pine-apple, the ubiquitous cocoa-nut and guavas, that tasted like strawberries smothered in cream.
The Zingara took in thousands of cocoa-nuts, also cassava-root, and many boxes of arrowroot, besides gum-copal, and nutmegs and spices.
. . . . . .
Fain would they have landed at Borneo; but some kind of internecine war was going on there, and Antonio had no desire to be mixed up therein. So on he went past Singapore, far to the north, through the Straits of Sunda, ’twixt Sumatra and Java, and in a few weeks’ time they found themselves far away on the blue bosom of the Indian Ocean, sailing west and by south, and bearing up for the heath-clad hills that stand sentry over Capetown.