emonstrates the immense difficulty of
pioneering in a tropical forest, where the interlacing boughs of the
myriad trees, with their impenetrable screen of climbing parasites,
make perpetual walls of living green, defying human progress. Malay
villages, brown and palm-thatched in the immemorial style, stand on
piles above the swampy ground, which seems the approved site of
habitation. A barren district devastated by a forest fire, contains the
disused pits of ancient tin-mines, but these unsightly hollows have
been decorated by Nature's hand with a luxuriant growth of the frilled
pink lotus. Malay children, themselves unadorned, stand on wayside
platforms, every brown hand filled with the rosy chalices of the sacred
Buddhist emblem. Tradition says that the blossom, drawn up from the
mire by the rays of the morning sun, symbolised the earth-stained soul,
made pure and stainless by the attraction of that Divine Glory which
Buddhism, though in distorted form, strove to attain.

At the end of the sixty-mile journey, the English station-master at
Taiping proved a veritable friend in need, arranging for a hot
breakfast at the station, chartering rickshaw coolies, and--greatest
blessing of all--directing the route, with a menacing pantomime
concerning any shirking of duty, which saved all further trouble.
Taiping is in an early stage of progress, and the open _tokos_ in
waringen-shaded streets, show nothing but the necessaries of life, with
terrible mementos of Birmingham in petroleum lamps, hideous oleographs,
and machine-made household goods. Pretty bungalows stand beyond the
interlacing avenues of dusky trees, and a framework toy of a church in
the green outskirts, contains numerous brass tablets recording English
lives laid down in this weary land. These pathetic memorials seem the
only permanent features of the frail edifice in the shadowy God's-acre
already filled with graves. The newly-planted park, with a lake fringed
by a vivid growth of allemanda and hybiscus, stands below the purple
heights of a long mountain chain, but Taiping offers few inducements to
a prolonged stay, and after a hurried glimpse of terrific beasts and
snakes of the jungle, preserved in the local museum, we return to the
station, the kindly chef-de-gare disturbing his wife from her siesta in
the adjacent bungalow, to feast us on tea and bananas. Darkness falls
before the train reaches Penang, but a Chinese gentleman acts as pilot
across some rockin