CHAPTER XXIX
ON THE HIMALAYAS
From Tokio we turned back. Again we stayed in Yokohama, in Kobe, and stopped just long enough to play once in Nagasaki. We spent some time at Hong-Kong. At Penang our boat waited a day, and our English friends came aboard to wish us God-speed. The man we had known best and liked most was not among them. I had named him “Saint of the Camera.” He was a capital amateur photographer, and had tramped about Penang most generously for me when we had been there before, and had fed with innumerable pretty photographs my insatiable craving for “views.” I asked where he was. Alas! he was in the English Hospital, fighting a desperate fight with the fever-fiend.
“I wish that you were as rich as Monte Christo,” I had said to my husband the first evening that we were in Penang.
“Why?” he said, as in duty bound.
“Because then you could buy me this island, and we would stay here for ever.”
“Oh, would we? Well, then, I’m glad that I’m considerably less well off than Monte Christo,” said mine lord, who decidedly prefers Europe to Asia.
Penang is said by some authorities to be the site of the Garden of Eden. Certainly no paradise could be lovelier. Nature laughs and revels in Penang; and there, too, is native life most varied, most picturesque. A dozen different races live in Penang. Their places of worship, their houses, their garments, are insistently differentiated. Penang is one big garden of exotics; among them, we found one sweet home-rose—the rose of English hospitality. From Penang we went to Singapore.
I have no pleasanter memories than my memories of Singapore. No place could be more beautiful, nor more interesting; and I thought that nowhere in the East was there such pleasant European society. And surely no other spot on earth is such a paradise of fruit.
Singapore is a place of splendid varieties. It is the island of a great future.