is almost always seen on trees. On these islands, too, grow many
plants and trees which are invaluable to the use of man--sugar-cane,
coffee and tea, rice and tobacco, spices, coco-palms, and the tree the
bark of which yields the remedy for fever, quinine. This remedy is
needed not least on the Sunda Islands themselves, for fever is general
in the low-lying districts round the coasts, though the climate 4000 or
5000 feet above sea-level, among the mountains which occupy the interior
of the islands, is good and healthy.

The equator passes through the middle of Sumatra and Borneo, and
therefore perpetual summer with very moist heat prevails in these
islands. The only seasons really distinguishable are the rainy and dry
seasons, and the Sunda Islands constitute one of the rainiest regions in
the world. The people are Malays and are heathen, but along the coasts
Mohammedanism has acquired great influence. The savage tribes of the
interior have a blind belief in spirits, which animate all lifeless
objects, and the souls of the dead share in the joys and sorrows of the
living.

The larger Sunda islands are four: Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and Celebes.
Java, one of the most beautiful and most productive countries in the
world, has an area nearly equal to that of England without Wales, and
its population is also nearly the same--about 30 millions. Sumatra,
which the _Delhi_ has just left to starboard, is three times the size of
Java, but has only one-seventh of its population. The curiously shaped
island of Celebes, again, is about half the size of Sumatra, while
Borneo is the third largest island on the globe not ranking as a
continent, its area being about 300,000 square miles. The Sunda Islands
are subject to Holland, only the north-eastern part of Borneo belonging
to England.

In the strait between Sumatra and Java lies a very small volcanic
island, Krakatau, which in the summer of 1883 was the scene of one of
the most violent eruptions that have taken place in historic times. The
island was uninhabited, and was only visited occasionally by fishermen
from Sumatra; but if it had been inhabited, not a soul would have
survived to relate what took place, for on two other islands which lay a
few miles distant the inhabitants were killed to the last man.

The outburst proper began on August 26, and the fire-breathing mountain
cast out such quantities of ashes that a layer three feet thick was
deposited on the deck of a vessel w