THE LOTUS.
Under the stimulating sunshine of the tropics a profusion of rare shrubs and some of the most beautiful flowers reward slight labor with a rapidity of growth and bloom unknown in colder regions. Roses of one sort or another are perennial. Bright geraniums, brilliant lilies and numberless plants indigenous to the country are in great demand and cultivated extensively for domestic or religious uses. There are seven varieties of the lotus, the favorite sacred flower of all Buddhist countries. The red pond-lotus is most common; the blue, green, light and dark-yellow flowers are rarer. The smallest variety has a white flower scarcely larger than a daisy, and is found in the rivers, principally at the season of inundation. The rose-colored lotus, whose golden stamens breathe a delicious fragrance, is the ornament of all festivities, and is sent as an offering to royalty, the priests and Buddha himself. The mali, a fragrant white flower about the size of a pink, is much cultivated in the neighborhood of Bangkok. It grows on a shrub about three feet high. The wreaths worn around the topknots of children are braided from this flower, which is also used for necklaces, bracelets and to perfume water. Rare and beautiful orchids are also here in large numbers, and many of the varicolor-leaved plants find this their native home.
Throughout the Indo-Chinese peninsula are great belts of trackless forests of teak and other valuable woods, tropical trees yielding rich gums and aromatic odors—the tall, exquisitely graceful wood-oil tree; the india-rubber, gutta-percha—first discovered in Malayland—and other varieties of the Ficus; the cajaput, the upas, the gamboge. There are thousands of miles of these jungles never yet subdued by man, through whose green twilight the traveler can only force his way axe in hand. Here are majestic trees, it may be a hundred and fifty feet high and of great girth, draped with a whole world of dangling vines and parasite trailers, spreading everywhere a canopy of leaf and gorgeous blossoms; the liana hanging its scarlet and orange clusters a hundred feet overhead across some stream; tough ratan cables a thousand feet long, knotting together a whole grove; avenues of intersecting branches, like the aisles of a Gothic cathedral, covered with yellow flowers of a most delicious fragrance; the white and purple of the pemea, combining the beauties of the rhododendron and horse-chestnut; the blue-blossoming Thunbergia; the Burmese Amherstia, like a giant fuchsia on the scale of an oak. Then there is the graceful palm tribe—the palmyra; the date; the lofty areca with its sweet-scented buds and great clusters of nuts; the tufted-crowned, sea-loving cocoanut, whose fruit supplies food, drink and oil, its fibrous casing ropes, vessels and mats, and its plaited leaves dishes and the thatch of the native’s cottage, the large stalks fences, and whose slender bole is adapted for innumerable uses from a post to a canoe. Underneath all this Oriental shade a lovely confusion of fungi, mosses, and every variety of ferns, from delicate maiden-hair to the tall fronds fifteen and twenty feet high.
BIRD OF PARADISE.
Birds of brilliant plumage and beautiful form inhabit these Oriental forests—long-legged swamp-fowls, tall as a man and swift as a greyhound; paroquets with green bodies and scarlet beaks fly screaming from tree to tree; the snowy pelican, the white ibis, the argus, the blue-jay, the black and white robin; birds of paradise and humming-birds. The sea-swallow builds her nest in the hollows and caves of the rocky coast, and doves and pigeons are in endless variety. Winged things of myriad kinds troop, great and small—immense butterflies, jewel-like beetles, brilliant dragon-flies, thousands of moths—while at dusk swarms of fire-flies illumine the glades, and the night is noisy with the flitting and buzzing of the insect world.
Animals fierce and large as those of Africa infest these jungles; their footprints are all along the paths—wild elephants and boars, the tapir, the royal tiger, the one-horned rhinoceros, the buffalo, herds of deer, wild hogs and squirrels, afford a sportsman plenty of use for his gun; uncanny flying-foxes, and chattering monkeys linked, chain-fashion, hand to tail, or pelting each other with fruit and nuts. Innumerable water-snakes glide among the reeds; the cobra or hooded serpent is abundant; surly alligators, with their ugly red mouths wide open, and huge saurians bask in sunny spots or float like logs upon the surface of the water; leeches abound in the swampy lowlands; frogs and turtles and tortoises, larger than any ever seen in temperate regions, throng the marshes and streams.
