thousand years. The only modern innovation is an
occasional 'caster,' or sea tramp, plying its way up the coast to pick
up a precarious profit for its owners by carrying cargoes of
evil-smelling trade from the fishing villages along the shore. Save for
this, there is nothing to show that white men ever visit these seas,
and, sailing up the coast in a native craft, you may almost fancy
yourself one of the early explorers skirting the lovely shores of some
undiscovered country. As you sprawl on the bamboo decking under the
shadow of the immense palm leaf sail--which is so ingeniously rigged
that, if taken aback, the boat must turn turtle, unless, by the blessing
of the gods, the mast parts asunder--you look out through half-closed
eyelids at a very beautiful coast. The waves dance, and glimmer, and
shine in the sunlight, the long stretch of sand is yellow as a
buttercup, and the fringes of graceful _casuarina_ trees quiver like
aspens in the breeze, and shimmer in the heat haze. The wash of the
waves against the boat's side, and the ripple of the bow make music in
your drowsy ears, and, as you glide through cluster after cluster of
thickly-wooded islands, you lie in that delightful comatose state in
which you have all the pleasure of existence with none of the labour of
living. The monsoon threshes across these seas for four months in the
year, and keeps them fresh, and free from the dingy mangrove clumps, and
hideous banks of mud, which breed fever and mosquitoes in the Straits of
Malacca. In the interior, too, patches of open country abound, such as
are but rarely met with on the West Coast, but here, as elsewhere in the
Peninsula, the jungles, which shut down around them, are impenetrable to
anything less persuasive than an axe.

These forests are among the wonderful things of the Earth. They are
immense in extent, and the trees which form them grow so close together
that they tread on one another's toes. All are lashed, and bound, and
relashed, into one huge magnificent tangled net, by the thickest
underwood, and the most marvellous parasitic growths that nature has
ever devised. No human being can force his way through this maze of
trees, and shrubs, and thorns, and plants, and creepers; and even the
great beasts which dwell in the jungle find their strength unequal to
the task, and have to follow game paths, beaten out by the passage of
innumerable animals, through the thickest and deepest parts of the
forest. The