During his sojourn at Hatian, Dr. Morice paid a visit to a singularly constructed edifice—the ancient Chinese palace of the Maqueuou. This Chinese worthy, it is said, was a simple fisherman; but as the products of his avocation did not enrich him with sufficient rapidity, he began to cultivate a little ground, and started a pepper plantation. One day, while digging, he turned up a store of money,—a supply so ample that it enabled him to bring over to Hatian a large number of his compatriots. He trained them, enrolled them, practised them; and the result was that, one fine morning, Hatian, enriched and largely increased in population, declared itself independent of the empire of Annam, or rather Cambodia, and raised Maqueuou to the throne. He built for himself a splendid palace, and lived for many years afterwards, enjoying the rare pleasure of witnessing the realisation of his dreams. But when he died his organizing genius died with him. Hatian was again annexed to the empire, and the palace fell into ruin; only its four walls are now extant.
The European stranger visits the spot with a feeling of respect for the memory of a bold and energetic man. With some difficulty he clears a path through the luxuriant vegetation, and arrives in front of walls of Cyclopean solidity. Two vast halls, almost choked with balsam, daturas, caster-oil plants, parasites, and refuse, form the entrance. Then come four smaller apartments, in better condition, and each provided with a great circular window. Here some geckos have established their abode, saluting the stranger with astonished glances and piercing cries.
MAQUEUOU’S TOMB.
Next comes an immense chamber, almost exactly square; and several tombs or memorial buildings are here overshadowed by venerable trees. The highest, raised in honour of Maqueuou himself, consists of successive courses of masonry, diminishing gradually from base to summit. Unfortunately, built of bad materials, it has been seriously injured by the action of the sun and the rains. A swarm of bees was domiciled in one of the crannies; and a tree, the seed of which had probably dropped from the bill of some wandering bird, soared upward from the very apex of the pyramid. Four smaller monuments, all oblong in shape, and traditionally appropriated to Maqueuou’s family, are scattered around the former. They still bear traces of the carving with which they were formerly decorated.
Solitude and silence prevail within the precincts of this vast ruin. The geckos, the birds, and a squirrel or two, are its only inmates.
Another remarkable object is the so-called pagoda of Maqui, or the devil. Dr. Morice was greatly surprised to see appended to its walls a complete series of water-colour sketches, on very stout paper, representing the tortures of an Inferno which would bear comparison with Dante’s. The satellites of the Annamite devil are shown in those pictures as engaged in the variety of occupations which the old medieval legends attributed to the imps of Beelzebub. They are roasting, impaling, cutting to pieces, and flaying the guilty; throwing them into caldrons of boiling water, grilling them over fires, and flinging them to the hungry jaws of enormous tigers.
AN UNPLEASANT GUEST.
That Hatian is not without its unpleasantnesses, Dr. Morice discovered in an unexpected fashion. Some workmen, in pulling down an old wall, came on the lair of a large serpent, which lay in “multitudinous coils” hatching its store of eggs. As everybody knew Dr. Morice’s zoological tastes, the workmen sent him immediate information of their “find,” and he quickly arrived on the spot, armed with a stick and a long and strong pair of nippers. Had it not been for its eggs, the animal would probably have retreated; but it remained rolled up in its hole, showing only its spotted and dusky-coloured head. To seize its neck with his nippers, was Dr. Morice’s instant manœuvre; and then, to the great terror of the Chinese workmen, he raised it up bodily, and proceeded to carry it off in triumph. Meanwhile, the irritated creature discharged at its captor’s forehead a jet of liquid, from which, at the time, he felt no disagreeable sensation. On reaching home, Dr. Morice deposited the reptile and its eggs in a chest lined with straw; which he nailed down carefully, and raised above the ground on vessels of water, as a protection against the attacks of ants. Then, and not till then, he washed his forehead, bathing, with due caution, the part touched by the fluid discharge; but still not believing that the serpent was one of the venomous kind. He troubled himself no more about his prisoner until, a few days later, he found in his chamber four tiny serpents, which he took up in his hand, in spite of their angry hissing. These he transferred to a glass jar. The next morning, wishing to examine them, he was unpleasantly surprised to find them rearing their head erect and expanding their neck laterally; and still more disagreeably surprised to detect on the neck thus expanded the characteristic V. A COBRA CAPELLA. They belonged to the genus of the spectacled serpent, the naja of India, the dreaded cobra capella!
MOTHER AND PROGENY.
Dr. Morice hastened to bore some large holes in the chest containing the serpent and the eggs, and by means of these he introduced into the interior a quantity of burning sulphur. When, after a sufficient time had elapsed, he opened it, he found the mother and eighteen young ones suffocated, while four eggs still remained intact. How had the others been hatched? The circumstance was a novel one, for it was supposed that only the great serpents—the pythons and boas—hatched their eggs. At all events, it was an interesting fact that this animal had remained faithful to its brood. Among the sixteen young serpents, only one was a female, and most of them had already once changed their skin. They were about thirteen inches long, and their fangs were clearly discernible. Dr. Morice felt that he had good reason to be thankful that he had not been wounded by the cobra capella when he so rashly pounced upon it.