untain Paradise, walled in
by dense jungle and savage precipice, brings the glamour of dreamland
into the stern environment of mysterious forest and frowning peak. A
rudely-paved and mossy path, shadowed by the black foliage of stately
casuarinas, leads into the gloomy jungle. The forest monarchs are
curtained with tangled creepers and roped together with serpent-like
lianas, stag-horn ferns, and green veils of filmy moss fluttering from
every bough. A swampy path through rank grass and rough boulders
pierces the dense thickets, matted together with inextricable
confusion, teak and tamarind, acacia and bread-fruit, palm and
tree-fern losing their own characteristics and merging themselves into
concrete form. The appalling stillness and solemnity of the dense
jungle appears emphasised by a solitary brown figure, with pipe and
betel-box, beneath a thatched shed at an angle of the narrow track,
where he presides over a little stall of cocoanuts, bananas, and
coloured syrups, for the refreshment of coolies on their way from the
Tjibodas garden to villages across the heights of Gedeh. No voice ever
seems raised in these remote recesses of the mountains, where even the
children of each brown hamlet play silently as figures in a dream. Our
bearers, swishing through wet grass and splashing across brimming
brooks, push with renewed energies up a steep ascent to the heart of
the wild solitude, where three mighty waterfalls dash in savage
grandeur from a range of over hanging cliffs into a churning river,
descending by continuous rapids over a stairway of brown-striped
trap-rock and swirling between lichen-clad banks, to lose itself in the
green gloom of the impenetrable woods. One of these huge cascades
would make the fortune of a Swiss valley, and we need no further
efforts of our willing bearers in the cause of sight-seeing, but as
neither words nor gestures prove intelligible to Western obtuseness, a
brown coolie seizes each arm, and rushes us up a grassy hill to a huge
cavern, hung with myriad bats, and containing a pool of crystal water.
The simple minds of these kindly mountaineers shirk no trouble for the
benefit of the stranger, who, though regarded as a madman, must be
humoured as such, not only to the top of his bent, but often beyond it.
A descent through rice-fields and _desas_ skirts the serrated cliffs of
Gedeh's northward side, though tree-ferns growing in thousands afford
shelter from the daily showers. The sudden