IX. THE KALAHARI AND THE BUSHMEN
Reasons why Droughts are prevalent in South Africa--Vegetation admirably suited to the Character of the Country--Number of Tuberous Roots--The Caffre Water-Melon--The Mesembryanthemums--The Animal Life of the Kalahari--The Bushmen, a Nomadic Race of Hunters-- Their Skill in Hunting--Their Food--Acuteness of their Sight and Hearing--Their Intelligence and Perseverance--Their Weapons and Marauding Expeditions--Their Voracity--Their Love of Liberty-- The Bakalahari--Their Love for Agriculture--Their Ingenuity in procuring Water--Trade in Skins--Their timidity.
A geographical position, not unlike that which condemns the plains along the western foot of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes to perpetual aridity, renders also the greater part of tropical and sub-tropical Southern Africa subject to severe droughts, and in general to great scarcity of rain. For the emanations of the Indian Ocean, which the easterly winds carry towards that continent, and which, if equally distributed over the whole surface, would render it capable of bearing the richest productions of the torrid zone, are mostly deposited on the eastern slopes of the mountain-chains, which, under various denominations, traverse eastern South Africa from north to south; and when the moving mass of air, having crossed their highest elevations, reaches the great heated inland plains, the ascending warmth of that hot dry surface gives it greater power of retaining its remaining moisture, and few showers can be given to the central and western lands. Thus, while the sea-board gorges of the eastern zone are clad with gigantic forests, and an annual supply of rain there keeps a large number of streams perpetually flowing, Damara Land, the Namaqua country, and the Kalahari, are almost constantly deprived of moving water.
* * * * *
From these general remarks it might be imagined that regions so scantily supplied with one of the prime necessaries of life could be nothing but a dead and naked waste; yet, strange to say, even the great Kalahari, extending from the Orange river in the south, lat. 29°, to Lake Ngami in the north, lat. 21°, and from about 24° E. long. to near the west coast, has been called a desert simply because it contains no flowing streams and very little water in wells; as, far from being destitute of vegetable or animal life, it is covered with grass and a great variety of creeping plants, interspersed with large patches of bushes and even trees. In general, the soil is a light-coloured, soft sand; but the beds of the ancient rivers contain much alluvial soil, and, as that is baked hard by the burning sun, rain-water stands in pools in some of them for several months in the year.
The abundance of vegetation on so unpromising a soil may partly be explained by the geological formation of the country; for as the basin-shape prevails over large tracks, and as the strata on the slopes where most of the rain falls dip in towards the centre, they probably guide water beneath the plains, which are but ill-supplied with moisture from the clouds.
Another cause, which serves to counteract the want or scarcity of rain, is the admirable foresight of Nature in providing these arid lands with plants suited to their peculiar climate. Thus creepers abound which, having their roots buried far beneath the soil, feel but little the effects of the scorching sun. The number of these which have tuberous roots is very great--a structure evidently intended to supply nutriment and moisture when, during the long droughts, they can be obtained nowhere else.
One of these blessings to the inhabitants of the desert is the Leroshua, a small plant with linear leaves, and a stalk not thicker than a crow’s quill; but on digging down a foot or eighteen inches beneath, the root enlarges to a tuber, often as big as the head of a young child, which, on the rind being removed, is found to be a mass of cellular tissue, filled with fluid much like that in a young turnip. Owing to the depth beneath the surface at which it is found, it is generally deliciously cool and refreshing. Another kind, named mokuri, is seen in other parts of the country, where long-continued heat parches the soil. This plant is an herbaceous creeper, and deposits under ground a number of tubers, some as large as a man’s head, often in a circle, a yard or more horizontally from the stem. The natives strike the ground on the circumference of the circle with stones, till, by hearing a difference of sound, they know the water-bearing tuber to be beneath. They then dig down a foot or so and find it.
But the most wonderful plant of the desert is the Kengwe, the water-melon of the Caffres. In years when more than the usual quantity of rain falls, vast tracts of the country are literally covered with these juicy gourds, and then animals of every sort and name, including man, rejoice in the rich supply.
The creeping plants of the desert serve, moreover, a double purpose; for, besides their use as food, they fix, by means of their extensive ramifications, the constantly shifting sands--thus rendering similar services to those of the sand-reed (Ammophila arundinacea) on the dunes along the sandy coasts of the North Sea.
The Mesembryanthemums are another family of plants admirably adapted to the Kalahari, as their seed-vessels remain firmly shut while the soil is hot and dry, and thus preserve the vegetative power intact during the highest heat of the torrid sun; but when rain falls, the seed-vessel opens and sheds its contents, just when there is the greatest likelihood of their vegetating. This is the more wonderful, as in other plants heat and drought cause the seed-vessels to burst and shed their charge.
One of this family possesses a tuberous root, which may be eaten raw; and all are furnished with thick, fleshy leaves, with pores capable of imbibing and retaining moisture from a very dry atmosphere and soil; so that if a leaf is broken during the greatest drought it shows abundant circulating sap.
The peculiar and comparatively abundant vegetation of the arid plains of South Africa explains how these wastes are peopled by herds of herbivorous animals, which in their turn are preyed upon by the lion, the panther, or the python. Hundreds of elands (Boselaphus oreas) gemsbucks, koodoos, (Strepsiceros capensis), or duikers (Cephalopus mergens), may often be seen thirty or forty miles from the nearest water. These, having sharp-pointed hoofs well adapted for digging, are able to subsist without water for many months at a time, by living on moist bulbs and tubers; while the presence of the rhinoceros, of the buffalo and gnu (Catoblepas Gnu), of the giraffe, the zebra, and pallah (Antilope melampus), is always a certain indication of water being within a distance of seven or eight miles.
The tribes of the Kalahari consist of Bushmen, probably the aborigines of the southern part of the continent, and of Bakalahari, the remnants of an ancient Bechuana emigration.
The diminutive Bushman occupies nearly the lowest degree in the scale of humanity. Equalled in size by the Chimpanzee, far surpassed by the Gorilla, and with as little prominence of the nasal bone as in those highest of the Simiæ, he nevertheless walks erect, and by the equal and uninterrupted series of his comparatively small teeth, by his well-developed great toe and the large opposable thumb, by his plantigrade foot and prehensile hand, vindicates his claim to the genus man. Inhabiting the arid deserts of South Africa, from the confines of the Cape Colony to the banks of the Zambesi, or possibly even as far north as the valley of the Nile, he is the only real nomad in South Africa, as the scanty means of subsistence the land affords compel him to a life of constant wandering. He never cultivates the soil excepting perhaps for the sake of a little dacha or wild hemp for smoking, nor rears any domestic animal save wretched dogs. As a hunter he rivals the American Indian in his intimate acquaintance with the habits of the game, and the skill he evinces in their capture. He follows them in their migrations from place to place, and proves as complete a check upon their inordinate increase as the other carnivora. When game is scarce, he manages to live on bulbs, snakes, lizards, termites, ants’ eggs, locusts, and any other garbage he can get. Inured to every privation, he equals the camel in his endurance of hunger and thirst, and will remain for days without tasting a drop of water, except such as is contained in the pulp of succulent plants. His refuge at night is some natural cave or self-made burrow, or the shelter of a bush, where, covered with the skin of a sheep or antelope, he rests like a wild animal in his lair.
It may naturally be supposed that a life like this must act unfavourably on his physical development; but, though apparently weak, his meagre body is capable of great exertion. His sight and hearing are remarkably acute, as he is constantly practising them in the pursuits of the chase; but it would almost seem as if he were devoid of taste, smell, and feeling, for he expresses no disgust at the most loathsome food, and is quite insensible to all changes of temperature.
When each individual only seeks the momentary gratification of his first animal wants, without any thought of the future, the ties of society must necessarily be very slack. Thus, the whole nation is subdivided into small hordes or families, and even these are frequently forced to separate as the same place does not afford sufficient nourishment for all. There is no distinction of hereditary rank; bodily strength is the only quality conferring superiority, and enables its fortunate possessor to tyrannize over his weaker companions.
Though occupying about the same rank in the human family as the Fuegians, and leading a mere brute existence, the Bushmen give many proofs of intelligence. They are with difficulty roused to exertion, but when they have once conquered their habitual laziness, an uncommon perseverance characterises all their undertakings. Nothing will induce them to quit the spoor of an animal they have once pursued; they will dig for days in places where they expect to find some water.
Both in the fabrication and the use of their weapons, they show great ingenuity and skill. Like the South American Indians, they understand the art of poisoning their arrows, which scarcely ever miss the mark within a distance of eighty paces; they also have recourse to pitfalls, poisoned water, and other stratagems. In the art of surprising their game, they can hardly be surpassed. It is not an easy task, in the midst of a naked plain, to avoid the eye of the shy antelope or of the far-sighted ostrich, so as to be able to approach them within a distance of fifty or sixty paces. This, however, they perform, by slowly creeping along almost on their bellies, by strewing dust over their bodies, so as not to be betrayed by any difference of colour, and by remaining motionless as soon as the animal shows any marks of attention. This tedious pursuit often lasts several hours, without ever tiring their patience; and the prey thus tracked, however swift and wary, but seldom escapes them.
In the marauding expeditions which they frequently undertake for the purpose of stealing the cattle of their neighbours, the Caffres, Bechuanas, or Boors--for, having no property themselves, they have little regard for the property of others--they show no less expertness and cunning, never venturing an attack before having first carefully spied out every circumstance, and taken every precaution to ensure success. At the time of the last quarter of the moon, their thefts are most to be feared, for they then execute their robberies in the dark before midnight, and afterwards profit by the moonlight for a more rapid flight.
Their physiognomy has the characteristic traits of the Hottentot race, but their eye is infinitely more sharp and wild, their countenance more expressive and intelligent, and all their gestures more lively--a difference caused, no doubt, by the greater mental and bodily actions to which a life full of hardships and privations constrains them.
As may be imagined from the few ideas it has to express, their language is very poor, and, on account of its peculiar and characteristic click and its harsh gutturals, more resembles the screeching of an animal than a human idiom.
When a horde has been successful in some hunting or marauding expedition, it keeps the fact as secret as possible, for as soon as the intelligence spreads, everyone hastens to the spot to come in for his share of the feast.
For fear of being obliged to divide with others, the prey is devoured as fast as possible, with inconceivable gluttony, and what cannot be used is instantly destroyed, merely from the dog-in-the-manger motive, to keep others from its enjoyment. When, for instance, the Bushmen have found a nest of ostrich eggs, and circumstances will not allow of their remaining on the spot, they take away as many as they can carry, and break the rest; or, when they meet with a great herd of springbocks, they will wound as many as possible with their poisoned arrows, though six or eight would suffice them with food for many days. It is a state of society like that to which, probably, the communists would reduce civilized Europe, if their insane doctrines could ever be realized. Despite the many privations they have to endure, the Bushmen prefer the utter freedom of the desert to the constraint of an agricultural and pastoral life. They live in the Kalahari by choice, the Bakalahari from compulsion, and both possess an intense love of liberty.
The Bakalahari are traditionally reported to be the oldest of the Bechuana tribes driven into the desert by a fresh migration of their own nation. Though living ever since on the same plains with the Bushmen, under the same influences of climate, enduring the same thirst, and limited to the same scanty food for centuries, they still retain in undying vigour the Bechuana love for agriculture and domestic animals, hoeing their gardens annually, though often all that they can hope for is a supply of melons and pumpkins, and carefully rearing small herds of goats, although to provide them with water is a task of no small difficulty, since the dread of hostile visits from the adjacent Bechuana tribes makes them choose their abode far from the nearest spring or pool, and leads them not unfrequently to hide their supplies by filling the pits with sand and making a fire over the spot. When they wish to draw water for use, the women come with twenty or thirty of their water vessels in a bag or net on their backs. These water vessels consist of ostrich egg-shells, with a hole in the end of each, such as would admit one’s finger. The women tie a bunch of grass to one end of a reed about two feet long, which they insert in a hole dug as deep as the arm will reach, and then ram down the wet sand firmly round it. Applying the mouth to the free end of the reed, they form a vacuum in the grass beneath, in which the water collects, and in a short time rises into the mouth. An egg-shell is placed on the ground alongside the reeds, some inches below the mouth of the sucker. A straw guides the water into the hole of the vessel as she draws mouthful after mouthful from below; and thus the whole stock of water passes through her mouth as a pump, and when taken home is carefully buried to prevent its loss by evaporation. A short stay among the thirsty Bakalaharis might teach us better to appreciate the blessings of an abundant supply of water.
These poor people generally attach themselves to influential men in the different Bechuana tribes near to their desert home, in order to obtain supplies of spears, knives, tobacco, and dogs, in exchange for the skins of animals which they kill. These are small carnivora of the feline race, including two species of jackal, the dark and the golden, the former of which has the warmest fur the country yields, while the latter is very handsome when made into the skin-mantle called kaross. Next in value follow the small ocelot, the lynx, the wild and the spotted cat. Great numbers of duiker and steinbuck skins are also obtained, besides those of lions, panthers, and hyænas.
The Bakalahari are a timid race, and in bodily development frequently resemble the aborigines of Australia. They have thin legs and arms, and large protruding abdomens, caused by the coarse indigestible food they eat. Their children’s eyes have no lustre, and such is their want of the animation so natural at that age that Dr. Livingstone never saw them at play.
A Bechuana may meet a troop of Bakalahari, and domineer over the whole with impunity; but when he meets a Bushman he is fain to adopt a more humble tone, well knowing that if the request for tobacco is refused, the free son of the desert may endeavour to obtain it by a poisoned arrow.
X. THE SAHARA
Its uncertain Limits--Caravan Routes--Ephemeral Streams--Oases-- Inundations--Luxuriant Vegetation of the Oases contrasted with the surrounding Desert--Harsh contrasts of Light and Shade--Sublimity of the Desert--Feelings of the Traveller while crossing the Desert-- Its charms and terrors--Sand-Spouts--The Simoom--The ‘Sea of the Devil’--The Gazelle--Its chase--The Porcupine--Fluctuation of Animal Life according to the Seasons--The Tibbos and the Tuaregs-- Their contempt of the sedentary Berbers.
From the Nile to the Senegal, and from the vicinity of Agades or of Timbuctoo to the southern slopes of the Atlas, extends the desert which above all others has been named the Great.
Surpassing the neighbouring Mediterranean at least three times in extent, and partly situated within the tropical zone, partly bordering on its confines, its limits are in many places as undetermined as the depths of its hidden solitudes. No European has ever travelled along its southern boundary, nor is its interior known, except only along a few roads, traced for many a century by the wandering caravans.
In general the desert may be said to extend in breadth from the thirty-ninth to the seventeenth degree of northern latitude; but while in many parts it passes these bounds, in others fruitful districts penetrate far into its bosom, like large peninsulas or promontories jutting into the sea.
Until within the last few years, it was supposed to be a low plain, partly situated even below the level of the ocean; but the journeys of Barth, Overweg, and Vogel have proved it, on the contrary, to be a high table-land, rising 1,000 or 2,000 feet above the sea. Nor is it the uniform sand-plain which former descriptions led one to imagine; for it is frequently traversed by chains of hills, as desolate and wild as the expanse from which they emerge. But the plains also have a different character in various parts: sometimes over a vast extent of country the ground is strewed with blocks of stone or small boulders, no less fatiguing to the traveller than the loose drift sand, which, particularly in its western part (most likely in consequence of the prevailing east winds), covers the dreary waste of the Sahara. Often also the plain is rent by deep chasms, or hollowed into vast basins. In the former, particularly on the northern limits of the desert, the rain descending from the gulleys of the Atlas, sometimes forms streams, which are soon swallowed up by the thirsty sands, or dried by the burning sunbeams. In spite of this short duration, the sudden appearance of these streams is not unfrequently the cause of serious distress to the oases which border the northern limits of the desert.
For this reason, as soon as the Atlas veils itself with clouds, horsemen from the oases of the Beni-Mzab are sent at full speed into the mountains. They form a chain as they proceed, and announce, by the firing of their rifles, the approach of the waters. The inhabitants of the oases instantly hurry to their gardens to convey their agricultural implements to a place of safety. A rushing sound is heard; in a short time the ground is inundated; and the little village seems suddenly as if by magic transported to the banks of a lake, from which the green tufts of the palm-trees emerge like islands. But this singular spectacle soon passes away like the fantastic visions of the mirage.
The deeper basins of the Sahara are frequently of great extent, and sometimes contain large deposits of salt. Wherever perennial springs rise from the earth, or wherever it has been possible to collect water in artificial wells, green oases, often many a day’s journey apart from each other, break the monotony of the desert. They might be compared with the charming islands that stud the vast solitudes of the South Sea; but they do not appear, like them, as elevations over surrounding plains of sea, but as depressions, where animals and plants find a sufficient supply of water, and a protection, not less necessary, against the terrific blasts of the desert.
A wonderful luxuriance of vegetation characterises these oases of the wilderness. Under and between the date-palms, grow apricot and peach trees, pomegranates and oranges, the henna, so indispensable to Oriental beauty; and even the apple-tree, the pride of European orchards. The vine twines from one date-palm to another, and every spot susceptible of culture produces corn, particularly dourrah or barley, and also clover and tobacco. With a prudent economy the villages are built on the borders of the oases on the unfruitful soil, so that not a foot of ground susceptible of culture may be lost.
The vast tracts of sterile sand, where not even the smallest plant takes root, and which might be called the ‘desert of the desert,’ present the greatest conceivable contrast to its green oases. With the vegetable world the animal kingdom likewise disappears, and for days the traveller pursues his journey without meeting with a single quadruped, bird, or insect. All is solitude and death in this awful wilderness, where, in the Bedouins’ poetical language, ‘nothing exists but Allah!’ Nowhere are the transitions of light and shade more abrupt than in the desert, for nowhere is the atmosphere more thoroughly free from all vapours. The sun pours a dazzling light on the ground, so that every object stands forth with wonderful clearness, while all that remains in the shade is sharply defined, and appears like a dark spot in the surrounding glare.
These harsh contrasts between light and shade deprive the landscape of all grace and harmony; but this want is amply compensated by its singular grandeur. The boundless horizon and the silence which reigns over the whole scene, appeal with powerful effect to the imagination, and thus constantly amuse the mind amid scenery that presents so few objects to occupy it. But in such a country every slight modification of form or colour rivets observation: the senses are sharpened, and perceptive faculties prone to grow dull over a perpetual shifting of scenery, act vigorously when excited by the capability of embracing each detail. To the solitary wayfarer there is an interest in the wilderness unknown to the Alpine glacier and even to the rolling prairie, the effect of continued excitement on the mind, stimulating its powers to their pitch. Above, a sky, terrible in its stainless beauty, and the splendour of a pitiless blinding glare; around you, drifted sand-heaps upon which each puff of wind leaves its own trace in solid waves; naked rocks, the very skeletons of mountains, and hard unbroken plains, over which he who rides is spurred by the idea that the bursting of a water-bag or the pricking of a camel’s hoof would be certain death of torture--a haggard land infested by wild beasts and wilder men--a region whose very fountains seem to murmur the warning words ‘Drink and away.’ What can apparently be more devoid of every charm, and yet in none of her aspects is Nature more fascinating and sublime. Man’s heart bounds in his breast at the thought of measuring his puny force with the desert’s might, and of emerging triumphant from the trial--and this sense of danger never absent invests the scene of travel with an interest not its own.
Thus, in spite of all he may have endured, the traveller that has once crossed the desert will ever after remember it with regret, and long for the renewal of its deep emotions. For the life of the Sahara resembles that of the ocean. During a continuance of bad weather or a calm the mariner may vow to forsake the sea for ever, but he has scarcely landed when his affection revives and he longs for the sea again.
In summer when the sun pours his vertical rays over the arid waste the desert is one vast furnace; but in the temperate season, its pleasures well repay the wanderer for many a peril or hardship. In this pure dry atmosphere his health improves, and with his health the tone and vigour of his mind. Though his mouth glows and his skin is parched--yet he feels no languor, the effect of humid heat; his lungs are lightened, his sight brightens, his memory recovers its strength, his spirits become exuberant, his fancy and imagination are powerfully aroused-- and the wildness and sublimity of the scenes around him stir up all the energies of his soul--whether for exertion, danger, or strife. His senses are quickened; they require no stimulant but air and exercise-- in the desert spirituous liquors only excite disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence. The vigorous appetite disposes of the most indigestible food; the sand is softer than a bed of down, and the purity of the air suddenly puts to flight a dire cohort of diseases. Hence it is that both sexes and every age, the most material as well as the most imaginative of minds, all feel their hearts dilate and their pulses beat strong, as they look down from their dromedaries upon the glorious desert.
Nothing can equal the beauty of the night in these arid wilds, doubly grateful after the heat and glare of the day. We, the sons of a colder clime, accustomed to see the starry firmament faintly glimmering through a misty haze, can have no idea of the magnificence of its luminous worlds brightly sparkling through an atmosphere of incomparable clearness. Grazing at these isles of light the soul rises on the wings of adoration to Him who made them. The desert is the image of the Infinite; no place is more apt to awaken religious feelings, and no time is fitter for devotion than its still and solitary night. He, who, in the desert does not hear the voice of God, knows not the Almighty, and ranks far below the wandering Arab, who, after the toil of the sultry day, reverentially bows down his forehead in prayer over the sand of the desert. Falling on his knees he exclaims: ‘Allah hu akbar! God is greater:’ greater than all created things, which only bear witness to His greatness.
But it is not alone the sublime grandeur of the desert which raises the spirit of man to his Maker; its terrors also make him vividly feel the Almighty presence, for when the sense of his helplessness becomes overpoweringly acute, he then instinctively looks for protection above.
As the conflicting air-currents of the ocean occasion water-spouts, the terror of the mariner; so also sandspouts or trombs arise in rotatory eddies from the midst of the desert, and assume the form of mighty columns, sometimes slowly moving along, at others advancing with menacing swiftness.
As they rapidly scud with the wings of the whirlwind over the plain-- huge, yellow shafts with lofty heads horizontally bent backwards in the form of clouds, it requires but little stretch of fancy to enter into the Bedouin’s superstition, and, like the imaginative sons of the desert, suppose them to be the genii of the waste which cannot be caught, a notion arising from the fitful movements of the wind-eddy that raises them. As they advance, the pious Moslem stretches out his finger, exclaiming, ‘Avaunt, O thou ill-omened one!’
Every moment the dread columns change their station, their appearance, their form. Onward they move, with terrible rapidity; the sun tints them with the brilliancy of fire; the storm, whirling in and around them, cuts them into several branches, reunites them, now weakens and now again strengthens them; and when, the whirlwind having spent its force, they suddenly collapse, and relieve the traveller from the fear of immediate danger, he yet must not exult too soon, for generally these sandspouts are followed by the dreaded simoom.
The temperature of the air becomes intolerably oppressive; it is sultry and enervating as before a thunder-storm. The hitherto crystal transparency of the sky is veiled with a hazy dimness, it is the sand of the desert whirling at a distance in the atmosphere, but as yet no wind is felt. The camels, however, are conscious of its approach. They become restless and anxious, and appear overcome by fatigue.
And now a light hot wind arises from the south, or south-west, blowing in intermittent gusts like the laborious breathing of a feverish patient.
Gradually the convulsions of the storm grow more violent and frequent; and although the sun is unable to pierce the thick dust-clouds, and the shadow of the traveller is scarcely visible on the ground, yet so suffocating is the heat that it seems to him as if the fiercest rays of the sun were scorching his brain.
The fiery purple of the atmosphere gradually changes to a leaden blackness; the wind becomes constant; the camels, snorting and groaning, stretch out their necks flat upon the ground, and turn their backs to the raging sand-storm. The Arabs pile up the water-bags, so as to screen them from the wind and diminish the surface exposed to the dry air, and wrapping themselves up as closely as possible in their cloaks, seek protection behind chests or bales of merchandise.
At night darkness is complete, no light or fire burns in the tents, which are hardly able to resist the gusts of the simoom. A deep silence reigns throughout the whole caravan, yet no one sleeps; the bark of the jackal or the howl of the hyæna alone sounds dismally from time to time through the loud roaring of the storm.
A prolonged simoom causes more fatigue to man and beast than all the other hardships of a desert journey, and brings new and as yet unknown sufferings to the traveller. Under the desiccating influence of the dry air, his lips spring open and begin to bleed, his parched tongue vainly longs for a refreshing draught; and, together with a raging thirst, an insupportable itching and burning invade the whole body; for the skin bursts in a hundred places, and the fine irritating dust penetrates into every wound.
Sometimes a raving madness, the symptoms of a fatal inflammation, is the result of these complicated tortures; in other cases the blood circulating with feverish haste through the veins, produces congestion of the brain; and, senseless and motionless, the wretch sinks down upon the ground, never to rise again. And the lot of him who still retains the full consciousness of his misery is not more enviable, for death by thirst awaits him, with slower but more dreadful pangs. His camel drops, his water-bag is nearly empty. He tries to walk; in a short time the glowing sand produces gangrenous sores in his feet, and every step is accompanied by the most excruciating pain. His companions are all too busy with themselves to pay the least attention to the unfortunate sufferer; they have but one thought--self; one aim--that of reaching the next well. Abandoned to his fate, the deserted traveller stands alone, waterless, helpless in the dreadful waste. He tears his beard, he curses his destiny; for him there is no hope.
And now, when earth and heaven begin to reel around him, the ‘Sea of the Devil’ spreads out its delusive phantoms before his weakened vision. He sees all his heart can wish for; palm groves waving over a broad expanse of lake; winding rivers covered with barges, their streamers gaily floating in the breeze; fairy gardens surrounded by rippling waters. The glorious prospect stimulates him to one last exertion; could he but reach that blessed shore the joys of paradise were his, but his paralysed limbs mock the vain effort which exhausts the last remnant of his strength.
The crows, wheeling with dismal cries over the dying wretch, often hack out his eyes before death relieves him of all pain. These corsairs of the air accompany the caravan as sharks accompany a vessel; for they reckon, like the tyrants of the seas, upon the tribute of the journey.
In a short time the dry atmosphere changes the corpse into a natural mummy, which, ‘grinning horribly a ghastly smile,’ seems to defy the desert. Perchance some future caravan passing along throws some pious dust upon the shrivelled body, but the wind soon uncovers it again, for the shifting desert will not even grant a burial to its victims. On every great caravan route such mummies protruding from the sand meet the eye of the traveller, telling him, in their mute but expressive language, ‘Such, stranger, may be thy fate to-morrow.’
The arid desert produces only a few plants and animals, but stamps them all with its own peculiar mark. From the tawny Bedouin to the worm scarcely distinguishable in the sand, it gives all its creatures the same dress, the same colour, which might justly be called the colour of the desert. It is the pale greyish-yellow tint which belongs as well to the gazelle as to the small lark of the sandy wastes. Among the birds there are no doubt many modifications of this general rule, and the deviations increase as the desert gradually merges into the more fertile steppes, but even here its characteristic mark is not to be mistaken.
A wandering desultory life is the lot of the children of the desert. The nourishment afforded them by their sterile home is too scanty for sedentary habits, and cannot be obtained without exertion. But Nature has endowed them with an activity and powers of endurance which distinguish them from many other animals, and enable them to exist where less hardy or less spirited beings would perish. Even such of them as originally did not belong to the desert, but since several generations have learnt to make it their home, such as the noble horse of the Bedouin, acquire the spirit it engenders. The same love of independence, the same attachment to their native haunts, animates all the inhabitants of the desert. Separated from their home they droop and pine away. The richest food affords the captive gazelle no compensation for the meagre herbage of the sandy waste; the widest space seems narrow when compared with its boundless extent.
Nothing can be more elegant than the figure of this beautiful antelope in the full unfettered freedom of its native wilds. Its slender but vigorous limbs are in the highest degree elastic; all its actions are animated and graceful. When the approach of a caravan surprises it in its solitude, it pricks up its ears, stretches forth its neck, and fixes an attentive gaze upon the strangers. Distrusting their intentions, it vaults with a few bounds over large stones or bushes, and then again stops, playfully waving its horns to and fro. When once it has been chased it becomes extremely wary, and on account of its amazing fleetness can only be taken by dint of the utmost perseverance and cunning. It is often seen in large groups, bounding across the desert with such extraordinary swiftness that it seems bird-like to skim over the surface. From time immemorial its elegant form and brilliant eye have played a conspicuous part in Oriental poetry. The Arab loves to compare the eye of his mistress with that of the gazelle--
‘Her eyes’ dark charm ’twere vain to tell, But look on that of the gazelle, It will assist thy fancy well’--
and ‘Thou art as graceful and as beautifully-shaped as a gazelle,’ is the highest compliment that can be paid to an Oriental beauty.
The chase of the gazelle is a favourite amusement of the inhabitants of the Saharian oases. On seeing a herd at a distance, they approach as cautiously as possible; and when about a mile distant, they unleash their greyhounds, who dart off with the rapidity of arrows, and are excited by loud cries to their utmost speed. Yet they only reach the flying herd after a long race; and now the scene acquires the interest of a drama. The best greyhound selects the finest gazelle for his prey, which uses all its cunning to avoid its pursuer, springing to the right, to the left, now forwards, then backwards, sometimes even right over the greyhound’s head; but all these zigzag evolutions fail to save it from its indefatigable enemy. When seized it utters a piteous cry, the signal of the greyhound’s triumph, who kills it with one bite in the neck.
When we consider the scanty vegetation of the Sahara, we cannot wonder that animal life is but sparingly scattered over its surface. The lion, so frequently misnamed ‘the king of the desert,’ only shows himself on its borders; and on asking the nomads of the interior whether it is ever seen in their parts, they gravely answer that in Europe lions may perhaps feed on shrubs or drink the air, but that in Africa they cannot exist without flesh and water, and therefore avoid the sandy desert. In fact, they never leave the wooded mountains of the Atlas, or the fruitful plains of the Soudan, to wander far away into the Sahara, where snakes and scorpions are the only dangerous animals to be met with. The snakes, which belong to the genus Cerastes, which is distinguished by two small horns upon the head, have a deadly bite, and are remarkable for their almost total abstinence from water.
Among the animals which inhabit those parts of the desert which are covered with prickly shrubs, we find hares and rabbits, hyænas and jackals, the hedgehog and the porcupine. Well-beaten paths, and here and there a scattered quill, lead to the hole which this proverbially fretful animal burrows in the sand. The hunters widen the entrance with their poniards or swords, until a hoarse, prolonged growl, and the peculiar noise which the enraged porcupine makes on raising his quills, warn them to be on their guard. Suddenly the creature rushes from its burrow to cast itself into the thicket; but the well-aimed blow of a poniard stretches it upon the sand. A fire being kindled, the animal is buried under the embers; and the quills then easily separate from the roasted and excellently-flavoured meat.
Several lizards inhabit the desert; among others, a large grey monitor, and a small white skink, with very short legs, called Zelgague by the Arabs. Its movements are so rapid that it seems to swim on the sand like a fish in the water, and when one fancies one has caught it, it suddenly dives under the surface. Its traces, however, betray its retreat, and it is easily extracted from its hole,--a trouble which, in spite of the meagre booty, is not considered too great when provisions are scarce.
According to the seasons animal life fluctuates in the Sahara from north to south. In winter and spring, when heavy rains, falling on its northern borders, provide wide districts, thoroughly parched by the summer heat, with the water and pasturage needed for the herds, the nomadic tribes wander farther into the desert with their camels, horses, sheep, and goats, and retreat again to the coast-lands as the sun gains power. At this time of the year the wild animals-- the lion, the gazelle, and the antelope--also wander farther to the south, which at that time provides them, each according to its taste, with the nourishment which the dry summer is unable to bestow; while the ostrich, who during the summer ranged farther to the north, then retreats to the south; for hot and sandy plains are the paradise in which this singular bird delights to roam.
In the southern part of the Sahara the tropical rains, whose limits extend to 19° N. lat., and in some parts still farther to the north, produce similar periodical fluctuations in the animal life of the desert. Under their influence the sandy plains are soon enlivened here and there with grasses, and the parched shrubs clothe themselves with verdure. In the dry season, on the contrary, the green carpet disappears, and the country then changes into a dry waste. Frequently, however, the tropical rains fail to appear on their northern boundaries, and disappoint the hopes of the thirsty desert.
Two nomadic nations, the Tuaregs and the Tibbos wander with their camels and sheep over the immense expanse of the Sahara in quest of scanty forage and thorny shrubbery. The abstinence and hardships they frequently endure, the freedom of a roving life, and their predatory habits, give them an evident superiority over the sedentary Berbers, who inhabit the oases, and repay the haughty demeanour of the nomads with hatred and contempt. Yet, in spite of these feelings of ill-will, the bonds of traffic and of a common interest connect the vagrant and the agricultural tribes. Condemned to perpetual migrations, the nomad is forced to confide all the property he is unable to carry about with him to the inhabitants of the oases; he may even possess a small piece of land, the cultivation of which he entrusts to the latter, who, on his part, as soon as he has saved something, buys a sheep or a goat which he gives in charge to the nomad.
An unmitigated hatred, on the contrary, exists between the various erratic tribes, as here no mediating self-interest softens the antipathies which are almost universally found to exist between neighbouring barbarians, and their robber expeditions not merely attack the richly-laden caravan, but also the oasis which may be connected by the bonds of intercourse with their hereditary enemies.
XI. THE BEDOUINS OF ARABIA
The Deserts of Arabia--Sedentary Arabs and Bedouins--Physical Characteristics of the Bedouins--Remarkable acuteness of their Senses--Their Manners--Their intense Patriotism and Contempt of the dwellers in Cities--The Song of Maysunah--Their Wars--Their Character softened by the Influence of Woman--Their chivalrous Sentiments--The Arab horse--The Camel--Freedom of the Arabs from a Foreign and a Domestic Yoke--The Bedouin Robber--His Hospitality-- Mode of Encamping--Death Feuds--Blood-money--Amusements--Throwing the Jereed--Dances--Poetry--Story-telling--Language--The Bedouin and the North American Indian.
Though Arabia possesses some districts of remarkable fertility which enjoy a succession of almost perpetual verdure, yet the greater part of that vast peninsula consists of burning deserts lying under a sky almost perpetually without clouds, and stretching into immense and boundless plains where the eye meets nothing but the uniform horizon of a wild and dreary waste. These naked deserts are encircled or sometimes intersected by barren mountains, which run in almost continuous ridges and in different directions from the borders of Palestine to the shores of the Indian Ocean. Their summits tower up into rugged and insulated peaks, but their flinty bosoms supply no humidity to nourish the soil; they concentrate no clouds to screen the parched earth from the withering influence of a tropical sky. Instead of the cooling breezes periodically enjoyed in other sultry climates, hot winds frequently diffuse their noxious breath, alike fatal to animal and vegetable life. The steppes of Russia and the wilds of Tartary are decked by the hand of Nature with luxuriant herbage, but in the Arabian deserts vegetation is nearly extinct. The sandy plains give birth to a straggling and hardy brushwood, while the tamarisk and the acacia strike their roots into the clefts of the rocks, and draw a precarious nourishment from the nightly dews.
Were it not for the wadys, or verdant spots lying here and there among the hills, and the various wells or watering stations supplied by periodical rains, the greater portion of Arabia must have remained unpeopled, and for ever impervious to man. In a country like this, where whole years occasionally pass away without a refreshing shower, the possession of a spring is not unfrequently the most valuable property of a tribe. There are large tracts, however, where the luxury of water, as it may well be called, is unknown, and where the desert extends for many a day’s journey without affording the traveller the welcome sight of a single well.
This extraordinary land is inhabited by a no less extraordinary people, divided into two great classes, widely different in their pursuits: the inhabitants of cities and towns, who live by tillage and commerce, and the natives of the desert, who follow a pastoral and predatory life, and consider the former as a separate and inferior race. Through all antiquity this characteristic distinction has remained inviolate, and as it is founded in the nature of the soil is even now as strongly marked as it was in the times of Abraham or Isaac.
In personal appearance, the wandering Arabs or Bedouins are of the middle size, lean and athletic. The legs though fleshless are well made, the arms thin, with muscles like whipcords. Deformity is checked among this nomadic race by the circumstance that no weakly infant can live through the hardships of a Bedouin life. The complexion varies from the deepest Spanish to a chocolate hue, and its varieties are attributed by the people to blood. The black hair is either closely shaved, or hanging down in ragged elf-locks to the breast. Most popular writers describe the Arab eye as large, ardent, and black, but, according to Captain Burton, who, on his adventurous pilgrimage to Meccah, had full opportunity for observing many tribes, it is generally dark brown or green-brown, small, round, restless, deep-set, and fiery, denoting keen inspection, with an ardent temperament and an impassioned character. The habit of pursing up the skin below the orbits, and half-closing the lids to prevent dazzle, plants the outer angles with premature crow’s-feet. Another peculiarity is the sudden way in which the eye opens, especially under excitement. This, combined with its fixity of glance, forms an expression now of lively fierceness, then of exceeding sternness. The look of a chief is dignified and grave even to pensiveness, yet there is not much difference in the expression of the eye between men of the same tribe, who have similar pursuits which engender similar passions. ‘Expression,’ as Captain Burton well remarks, ‘is the grand diversifier of appearance among civilised people; in the desert it knows few varieties.’ The bushy black eyebrows are crooked and bent in sign of thoughtfulness. The forehead is high, broad, and retreating. The temples are deep, the cheek-bones salient, which combined with the lantern-jaw often gives a death’s-head appearance to the face. The nose is pronounced, generally aquiline, the ears small and well-cut, the mouth irregular, the teeth, as usual among Orientals, white, even, short, and broad. According to Chateaubriand, no sign would betray the savage in the Arab’s countenance, if he constantly kept his mouth closed; it is when he shows his teeth, of a dazzling whiteness like those of the jackal, that his wild nature shows itself. In this he differs from the American Indian, whose ferocity appears in the eye, while the mouth has a mild expression. Some tribes trim their moustaches according to the practice derived from the Prophet; others shave them, or allow them to hang, Persian-like, over the lips. The beard is represented by two tangled tufts upon the chin, and where the whiskers should be, the place is either bare or thinly covered with straggling hair. The temperament of the Bedouins is either nervous or bilious, rarely sanguine, never phlegmatic. They are not seldom subject to attacks of melancholy, which make them dislike the sound of the human voice and long for solitude.
From living constantly in the open air, the nomadic Arabs acquire a remarkable acuteness in all their senses. Their powers of vision and of hearing improve by continual exercise, and as their piercing eye sweeps over the desert it distinguishes objects at an incredible distance. Their sense of smelling, too, is extremely nice. The true Bedouin, when in the tainted atmosphere of towns, is always known by bits of cotton in his nostrils, or his kerchief tightly drawn over his nose, a heavy frown marking extreme disgust. Declining the shelter of a house when business calls him to visit crowded cities, he passes the night in a garden or public square, rather than breathe the confined air of an apartment. One of his most singular faculties is the power of distinguishing the footsteps of men and beasts on the sand, in the same manner as the American Indians discover impressions made upon the grass. From inspecting the footsteps, an Arab can tell whether the individual belonged to his own or some neighbouring tribe, and is thus able to judge whether he be a stranger or a friend. He likewise knows from the faintness or depth of the impression whether the person carried a load or not, whether he passed the same day or several days before. From examining the intervals between the steps, he judges whether or not he was fatigued, as the pace becomes then more irregular and the intervals unequal, hence he calculates the chances of overtaking him. Every Arab can distinguish the footmarks of his own camels from those of his neighbours; he knows whether the animal was pasturing or loaded, or mounted by one or more persons; and can often discover from marks in the sand certain defects or peculiarities of formation that serve him as a clue to ascertain the owner. This sagacity, which enables the Arab to read in the sands of the desert as in a printed volume, becomes extremely useful in the pursuit of fugitives, or in searching after stolen cattle. Instances occur of camels being traced by their masters to the residence of the thief at the distance of five or six days’ journey; and, incredible as it may seen, a Bedouin shepherd can track his own camel in a sandy valley, when thousands of other footsteps cross the road in all directions. Thus the proverbially unstable and fugitive sands reveal many a secret to the practised glance of the Arab; and every footstep becomes a witness recording the offender’s guilt.
Of their wonderful acuteness in hearing, some well-attested anecdotes are told of those who act as pilots in the Red Sea. They know very nearly the time when ships from India may be expected, and going down to the water’s edge every night and morning, they lay their ear close to the surface for three or four minutes, and if the ship is not more than 120 miles distant, they can hear the report of the signal gun, or feel the ground shake, upon which they immediately set off in their pilot boat.
The manners of the Bedouins are free and simple; vulgarity and affectation, awkwardness and embarrassment, are weeds of civilised growth, unknown to the people of the desert. Yet their manners are sometimes dashed with a strange ceremoniousness. When two friends meet, they either embrace or both extend the right hands, clapping palm to palm; their foreheads are either pressed together, or their heads are moved from side to side, whilst for minutes together mutual inquiries are made and answered. It is a breach of decorum, even when eating, to turn the back upon a person; and when a Bedouin does it, he intends an insult. When a friend approaches an encampment, those who catch sight of him shout out his name, and gallop up, saluting with their lances or firing matchlocks in the air.
The patriotism of the nomadic Arab is intense. As the Scottish Highlander wherever he roams turns with fond regret to his heath-clad hills, or the exiled Swiss pines for his snow-peaked Alps, thus his sterile sands are dearer to the wandering son of the desert than the fairest regions of the earth. It is in the lonely wilderness that all his attachments centre, for there alone he can enjoy the independence which in all ages has been his cherished possession. The very wildness of this inhospitable scenery constitutes in his eyes its principal charm, and were these features destroyed, the spell would be broken that associates them in his mind with the romantic freedom of his condition. Disdaining the peaceful and mechanical arts, he looks down with contempt upon all those who are fixed in local habitations, or engaged in the pursuits of industry, and proud of being a ‘dweller in tents,’ which he can pitch and transplant at pleasure, stigmatises them as ‘dwellers in houses made of clay.’ His tent he regards as the nursery of every noble quality, and the desert as the only residence worthy of a man who aspires to be the unfettered master of his actions. Vain of his birth and freedom, he divides the world into two great bodies; first, the Arabs, and secondly, ‘Ajemi,’ all that are not Arabs; and boasts of the four precious gifts that Allah has bestowed on his nation: ‘turbans instead of diadems, tents in place of walls and bulwarks, swords instead of intrenchments, and poems instead of written laws.’
The deep attachment of the Arab to his native wilds is well expressed in the celebrated song of Maysunah, the beautiful wife of the Caliph Muawijah. The pomp and splendour of an Imperial court could neither reconcile her to the luxuries of the harem nor make her forget the homely charms of her fatherland. Her solitary hours were consumed in melancholy musings, and her greatest delight was in singing the simple pleasures she had enjoyed in the desert. The following translation gives of course but a faint idea of the beauties of the original song, the recital of which fills the Bedouin with delight:
‘Oh take these purple robes away, Give back my cloak of camel’s hair, And bear me from this towering pile To where the Black Tents flap i’ the air. The camel’s colt with faltering tread, The dog that bays at all but me, Delight me more than ambling mules, Than every art of minstrelsy.’
Tradition reports that Muawijah overhearing the song, and perhaps tired of the singer, sent her back to her beloved wilds; but we are not told whether in the desert she did not after all sometimes regret the magnificence of Damascus.
Among the best traits of the Bedouins’ character, we must cite their gentleness and generosity. Usually they are a mixture of worldly cunning and great simplicity; fond of a jest, yet solemn and dignified; easily managed by a laugh and a soft word, and pliable after passion, though madly revengeful after injury. Though reckless when their passions are thoroughly roused, their valour is tempered by cautiousness. Their wars are a succession of skirmishes, in which 500 men will retreat after losing a dozen of their number. In this partisan fighting the first charge secures a victory, and the vanquished fly till covered by the shades of night. Then passion or shame prompts them to reprisals, which will probably end in the flight of the former victor. Gain and revenge draw the Arab’s sword; yet, unlike the Irishman who fights for the mere fun of fighting, he must have the all-powerful stimulants of honour and fanaticism to become desperate. The habit of danger in raids and blood feuds, the continual uncertainty of existence, the desert, the chase, his hard life, and the practice of martial exercises, habituate him to look death in the face like a man, and powerful motives will make him a hero.
The ferocity of Bedouin life is softened by his intercourse with the ‘dwellers in houses made of clay,’ who frequently visit and entrust their children to the people of the Black Tents, that they may be hardened by the discipline of the desert. This laudable custom is generally followed by the Sherifs or the descendants of the Prophet residing in Meccah, and even the late Pacha of Egypt gave one of his sons in charge of the Anijah tribe near Akhba, that he might receive a Bedouin education and grow up into a man.
The mild influence of the fair sex likewise tends to soften the nomadic Arab’s character, and to inspire him with chivalrous feelings. In pastoral life tribes often meet for a time, live together whilst pasturage lasts, and then separate perhaps for a generation. Under such circumstances youths will become attached to maidens whom possibly by the laws of the clan they may not marry, and then the lovers have recourse to flight. The fugitives must brave every danger; for revenge, at all times the Bedouin’s idol, now becomes the lode-star of his existence. But the Arab lover will dare all consequences, and stake his life on the possession of her he loves.
Women, indeed, are regarded as inferior beings by their lords and masters, and to them exclusively all the labour and menial offices in the tent are assigned; but in troublous times and in the hour of need, they raise themselves to the level of the stronger sex by physical as well as moral courage. In the early days of Islam, if history be credible, Arabia had many heroines, and within the last century Ghalujah, the wife of a Wahabi chief, opposed Mohammed Ali himself in many a bloody field. After a lost battle a retreating tribe has not unfrequently been again led on to victory by the taunts of its women, and Arab poets praise not only female beauty, but also female faith, purity, and affection.
From ancient periods of the Arab’s history, we find him practising knight-errantry, the wildest but most exalted form of chivalry. The fourth Caliph is fabled to have travelled far, redressing the injured, punishing the injurer, preaching to the infidel, and especially protecting women--the chief end and aim of knighthood. The Caliph El Mutasen heard, in the assembly of his courtiers, that a woman of the Sayyid family had been taken prisoner by a ‘Greek barbarian’ of Ammoria. The man on one occasion struck her, when she cried, ‘Help me, O Mutasen!’ and the fellow said derisively, ‘Wait till he cometh upon his pied steed.’ The chivalrous prince arose, sealed up the wine cup which he held in his hand, took oath to do his knightly duty, and on the morrow started for Ammoria with 70,000 men, each mounted on a piebald charger. Having taken the place he entered it, exclaiming, ‘Here am I at thy call!’ He struck off the caitiff’s head, released the lady with his own hands, ordered the cup-bearer to bring the sealed bowl, and drank from it, exclaiming, ‘Now, indeed, wine is good!’ A Knight of the Round Table could have done no better.
It is the existence of this noble spirit which makes the society of Bedouins so delightful to the traveller, who, after enjoying it, laments at finding himself in the ‘loathsome company’ of Persians, or among Arab townpeople, whose ‘filthy and cowardly minds’ he contrasts with the ‘high and chivalrous spirit of the true Sons of the Desert.’
While over the vast continent of America no effort has ever been made by the aboriginal tribes to establish a dominion over the useful animals, with the single exception of the Llama in the Peruvian highlands, we find the Arab shepherd from time immemorial in the absolute possession of the horse and the camel--of a faithful friend, and a laborious slave. Although the high steppes of Central Asia are probably the genuine and original country of the horse, yet in Arabia that generous animal attains the highest degree of spirit and swiftness. Such is the estimation in which it is held, that the honours and the memory of the purest race are preserved with superstitious care, the males are sold at a high price, but the females are seldom alienated, and the birth of a noble foal is esteemed among the tribes as a subject of joy and mutual congratulation. A colt at the moment of birth is never allowed to drop upon the ground; they receive it in their arms, washing and stretching its tender limbs, and caressing it as they would a baby. The tender familiarity with which the horses are treated, trains them in the habits of gentleness and attachment. When not employed in war or travelling they loiter about the tents, often going over heaps of children lying on the ground, and carefully picking their steps lest they should hurt them. They are accustomed only to walk and to gallop; their sensations are not blunted by the incessant abuse of the spur and the whip; their powers are reserved for the movement of flight and pursuit, but no sooner do they feel the touch of the hand and the stirrup, than they dart away with the swiftness of the wind, and if their friend be dismounted in the rapid career they instantly stop till he has recovered his seat.
The noble steed of the desert pines and languishes in the crowded town. Its head droops mournfully, it seems the very image of despondency and sloth. And as the animal, so its master. He also appears, not as the bold energetic nomad, but as a listless apathetic wanderer; and, were it not for the glowing eye which restlessly rolls and flashes under its thick brow, you might be inclined to prefer the servile fellah to the sullen child of the desert. But now the Bedouin mounts his horse, and, as if touched by an electric spark, they both of them raise their heads and stretch their sinewy limbs. Slowly they leave the dusty streets, and reach the confines of the desert. Now at length both are at home; now rider and horse melt into one like the fabled Centaurs of old; now, first, the real Bedouin and the real Arabian horse stand before you. Like an arrow ‘shot by an archer strong’ the steed flies towards his master’s tent, his light hoof scarcely leaves a print on the sand; the white burnous of the rider flies about in the wind; with a firm hand he guides the noble animal, and in a few minutes both are lost to sight in the desert.
Though the Arabs justly boast of their horses, it is a common error to suppose them very abundant in that country. In the sacred writings and down to the time of Mohammed, they are seldom mentioned, camels being mostly used both in their predatory and warlike excursions. The breed is limited to the fertile pasture grounds, and it is there that they thrive, while the Bedouins who occupy arid districts rarely have any.
In the sands of Arabia the camel is a sacred and precious gift. That strong and patient beast of burthen not only supplies the wandering Arab with the greater part of his simple wants: it serves also to secure his immemorial independence by placing the desert between the enemy and himself. Thus the Bedouin has ever been indomitable, and while in other parts of the world we find that the fatal possession of an animal--the sable, the sea-otter--has entailed the curse of slavery upon whole nations, the dromedary in Arabia appears as the instrument of lasting freedom. With temporary or local exceptions, the body of the nation has escaped the yoke of the most powerful monarchies; the arms of Sesostris and Cyrus, of Pompey and Trajan, could never achieve the conquest of Arabia, and while the false glory of the scourges of mankind that have so often thrown the East into bondage has passed away like a fleeting shadow, one century after another bears testimony to the noble independence of the Arab. The manly spirit of this energetic race renders them worthy of the freedom they enjoy under the protection of their arid wastes. Many ages before Mohammed, who, stimulating their valour by fanaticism, made them one of the great conquering nations of the earth, their intrepidity had been severely felt by their neighbours. ‘The patient and active virtues of a soldier,’ says Gibbon, ‘are insensibly nursed in the habits and discipline of pastoral life. The care of the sheep and camels is abandoned to the women of the tribe, but the martial youth, under the banner of the emir, is ever on horseback and in the field, to practise the exercise of the bow, the javelin, and the scymetar. The long memory of their independence is the firmest pledge of its perpetuity, and succeeding generations are animated to prove their descent and to maintain their inheritance. When they advance to battle, the hope of victory is in the front; in the rear, the assurance of a retreat. Their horses and camels, who in eight or ten days can perform a march of 500 miles, disappear before the conqueror; the secret waters of the desert elude his search, and his victorious troops are consumed with thirst, hunger, and fatigue, in the pursuit of an invisible foe, who scorns his efforts, and safely reposes in the heart of the burning solitude.
‘The slaves of a despotic rule may vainly boast of their national independence; but the Arab is as free from a domestic as from a foreign yoke. In every tribe superstition or gratitude or traditional respect has exalted a particular family above the heads of their equals. The dignities of sheik and emir invariably descend in this chosen race; but the order of succession is loose and precarious, and the most worthy or aged of the noble kinsmen are preferred to the simple though important office of composing disputes by their advice and guiding valour by their example. If an emir abuses his power he is quickly punished by the desertion of his subjects. Their independent spirit disdains a base submission to the will of a master, their steps are unconfined, the desert is open and the tribes and families are held together by a mutual and voluntary compact. Accustomed to a life of danger and distress, the breast of the wandering Arab is fortified with the austere virtues of courage, patience, and sobriety; the love of liberty prompts him to exercise the habits of self-command, and the fear of dishonour guards him from the meaner apprehension of pain, of danger, and of death. The self-respect which independence inspires shows itself in the dignity of his outward demeanour: his speech is slow, weighty, and concise; he is seldom provoked to laughter; his only gesture is that of stroking his beard, the venerable symbol of manhood.’
Unfortunately the Bedouin too often tarnishes his liberty by crime, and, accustomed to confound the ideas of stranger and enemy, endeavours to justify by casuistry the base pursuits of a robber. He pretends that in the division of the earth the rich and fertile climates were assigned to the other branches of the human family, and that the posterity of the outlaw Ismael is entitled to recover by fraud or force the portion of inheritance of which he has been unjustly deprived. Equally addicted to theft and merchandise, he ransoms or pillages the caravans that traverse his native desert, and armed against mankind, makes the inoffensive traveller the victim of his rapacious spirit. And yet by one of those strange contradictions, belonging to the mysterious nature of man, this same Arab, the terror of the desert, embraces without enquiry or hesitation, the stranger who dares to confide in his honour and enter his tent. His treatment is kind and respectful, he shares the wealth or the poverty of his host, and, after a needful repose, he is dismissed on his way with thanks, with blessings, and perhaps with gifts.
Now here, now there, the Bedouin’s home is as wide as the desert, and as movable as its drifting sands. The mode of encamping differs according to circumstances. When the tents are but few, they are pitched in a circle; if the number is considerable they extend in a straight line, in rows three or four deep. The sheik’s is always on the side where danger is apprehended, or where travellers are expected;-- it being his particular business to oppose the former and to honour the latter. Every chief sticks his lance into the ground in front of his tent, to which he ties his horse or camel; the pack-saddles forming the couch on which he and his guests recline. When wandering in search of water or pasture, they move in parties, slowly over the sandy plain. The armed horsemen ride foremost, the flocks with their young follow, and behind come the beasts of burden, loaded with the women and children, tents, baggage and provisions.
Among pastoral tribes the possession of a well, of a few date-palms, or of a piece of pasture ground, easily leads to quarrels, and, as rude nations generally prefer settling their disputes by the right of the stronger, to sanguinary feuds and wars. Besides the causes of hostility arising from disputed property, the natural jealousy and fiery temperament of the Arab have always proved a source of the most implacable enmity among themselves. They betray the quickest sensibility to any affront or injury, and instances might be multiplied where a contemptuous word, an indecent action, or even the most trifling violation of etiquette can only be expiated by the blood of the offender. If one sheik say to another, ‘Thy bonnet is dirty,’ or ‘The wrong side of thy turban is out,’ it is considered a mortal offence. To spit on the beard of another, even accidentally, is an insult scarcely to be forgiven, and such is their patient inveteracy that they expect whole months and years the opportunity of revenge. A fine or compensation for murder is familiar to the barbarians of every age, but in Arabia the kinsmen of the dead are at liberty to accept the atonement, or to exercise with their own hands the law of retaliation. If the offer is deemed unsatisfactory, the homicide and all his kin comprised within the law of vengeance, make their escape to some friendly tribe. A sacred custom allows the fugitives three days and four hours during which their enemies abstain from the pursuit; the exiles are permitted to return as soon as a reconciliation can be effected. The fine for a murdered man varies among the different tribes. Among the Beni-Harb in Hedjaz the price of blood is rated at 800 dollars, or rather that sum imperfectly expressed by live stock. All the blood relations of the slayer assist to make up the required amount, rating each animal at three or four times its proper value. On such occasions violent scenes arise from the conflict of the Arab’s two darling passions, avarice and revenge. He longs to cut the foe’s throat, but on the other hand he is equally desirous to increase his own possessions. He has always a project of buying a new dromedary, or of investing capital in some promising colt. The consequence is that he is insatiable. Still he receives blood money with a feeling of shame, as a man who has made some sacrifice of duty or fine feeling for the sake of filthy lucre. Hence this mode of arrangement is not common among the more wealthy tribes, and most of the great sheiks would deem themselves dishonoured by compromising in any degree for the slaughter of their relations. The matter being finally settled, a she camel is brought to the tent of the adversary and there killed that blood may be expiated by blood. The parties now reconciled feed upon the flesh of the animal, and at parting the homicide flourishes a white handkerchief on his lance as a public notification that he is free from blood.
The simple unvaried life of the Bedouin must often cause time to hang heavy on his hands. To relieve this weariness and want of novelty he has recourse to various amusements which serve to fill up his vacant hours. A rover or a warrior, his favourite sports are those that imitate war. Throwing the jereed is a kind of rude tournament, which he frequently practises. This is a blunt spear, made of heavy wood, and about a yard long. The object of the game, in which the players evince the most astonishing dexterity, is for one party to pursue, and the other to fly, and try to elude being struck by the weapon. Sometimes they amuse themselves with sham fights; and nothing can be more picturesque, than to see a group of these wild men huddled together in the greatest apparent confusion, with drawn swords and couched lances.
The more domestic pastimes are chess, draughts, dancing, singing, the reciting of poetry and story-telling, for which they have a singular passion. Captain Burton, who witnessed one of their war dances, describes it as wild in the extreme, resembling rather the hopping of bears than the inspirations of Terpsichore. The dancers raised both arms high above their heads, brandishing a dagger or some other small weapon. They followed each other by hops on one or both feet; sometimes indulging in the most demented leaps, whilst the by-standers accompanied them with clapping of hands and various motions of the body. There is a species of song, common all over the desert, in which the youths of both sexes join in the chorus. It is called the mesamer, and is the only opportunity which the lover has of serenading his mistress; the verses are often composed extempore, and relate, of course, to the beauty and qualities of the beloved object, who is sometimes apostrophized in epithets that sound rather oddly to European ears: ‘O Ghalia! if my father were a jackass, I would sell him to purchase Ghalia.’
During their long marches through the desert, the Bedouins likewise have recourse to singing, both to enliven their camels, for it is well known that that animal never moves with so much ease as when he hears his master sing, and to while away the tediousness of the road. Monotonous and droning as it is, their song has yet an artless plaintiveness which admirably suits the singer and the scenery. If you listen to the words you will surely hear allusions to bright verdure, cool shades, bubbling rills, or something which the son of the desert hath not, and yet which his soul desires. A common entertainment among the Bedouins, is the reciting of tales after the manner of the ‘Arabian Nights,’ those enchanting fictions which rival even ‘Robinson Crusoe’ in the affections of childhood. Assembled after a tedious march round the blazing fire which cooks their simple meal of dhourra or sour camel’s milk and flour, and quaffing the soothing fumes of tobacco, they learn to forget their own hardships and fatigue in the captivating narrative of ideal adventures, and become for a time the happiest of men.
Next to the practice of hospitality and expertness in the use of arms, the Arabs value no accomplishments more highly than eloquence and poetry, and in these the roving hordes of the desert, living amidst the solitary grandeur of nature, excel their more civilized brethren. Metrical orations are particularly esteemed, for it is an old Arab saying that fine sentiments delivered in prose are like gems scattered at random; but when confined in verse they resemble strings of pearls.
In former times the poet ranked with the warrior among the noblest possessions a tribe could boast of, and assemblies of different kinds were held where rival bards and orators disputed the palm of victory. In loud and impassioned strains the contending poets addressed the multitude by turns, extolling the superior glory of their own tribe, recounting the names of their eminent warriors, and challenging their opponents to produce their equals. As from the fierce spirit of the Bedouins, and the well-known influence of songs over the martial virtues of a barbarous people, these intellectual tournaments frequently ended in good earnest battles, they were expressly abolished by the Koran; but the old spirit of poetry is still as alive as ever among the Bedouins, who, though no longer equalling them, are passionately fond of their ancient bards. Thus when Burckhardt read portions of the famous romance of Antar to a Bedouin auditory they were in ecstasies of delight, but at the same time so enraged at his bad pronunciation, that they tore the book out of his hands.
To the advantages of a genius for poetry, and a lively fancy, the Bedouins add the possession of a rich and harmonious language capable of expressing every shade of meaning and every variety in the aspects of nature. Its copiousness[10] may be inferred from the fact that it can boast of no less than eighty expressions for honey, two hundred for a serpent, five hundred for a lion, and, characteristic of a warlike race, above a thousand for a sword. Fastidious critics have admitted the remarkable delicacy of the Arabic tongue, and its energetic sublimity, equally adapted to the simple pathos of love and elegy, the piquancy of satire or the loftiest efforts of popular oratory.
In casting a retrospective view over the manners and habits of the Bedouins we are struck with the strange contradictions they exhibit both in their social and moral character. The spirit of patriotism among them is strong and universal, yet they have no home but the pathless waste and wretched tent. They are a nation of brothers, yet live continually at war, jealous of their honour and yet stooping to the meanness of theft; fierce and sanguinary in their temper, and yet alive to the virtues of pity and gratitude; covetous and by no means of good faith in pecuniary transactions, yet true to their pledged word and charitable to the needy.
Their religious character is marked by the same irreconcilable extremes. Their fanaticism is coupled with a lax observance of the precepts and ceremonies of Islam. In a pleasant indifference about the precepts of the Koran, they remark that the religion of Mohammed never could have been intended for them. ‘In the desert,’ say they, ‘we have no water; how, then, can we make the prescribed ablutions? We have no money, and how can we bestow alms? Why should we fast in the Rhamadan since the whole year with us is one continual abstinence; and if the world is the house of Allah why should we go to Meccah to adore him?’
The almost absolute independence of the Arabs and of that noble race, the North American Indians of a former generation, has produced many similarities between them. ‘Both,’ says Captain Burton, ‘have the same wild chivalry, the same fiery sense of honour, and the same boundless hospitality; love elopements from tribe to tribe, the blood feud and the vendetta. Both are grave and cautious in demeanour, and formal in manner--princes in rags or paint. The Arabs plunder pilgrims, the Indians backwood settlers; both glory in forays, raids, and cattle-lifting, and both rob according to certain rules. Both are alternately brave to desperation and shy of danger. Both are remarkable for nervous and powerful oratory, and for the use of figurative language. Both, addicted to war and to the chase, despise all sedentary occupations. But the Bedouin claims the superiority over the red Indian by his treatment of women, his greater development of intellect, and the grand page of history which he has filled.’
XII. GIANT TREES AND CHARACTERISTIC FORMS OF TROPICAL VEGETATION
General Remarks--The Baobab--Used as a Vegetable Cistern-- Arborescent Euphorbias--The Dracæna of Orotava--The Sycamore-- The Banyan--The sacred Bo-Tree of Anarajapoora--The Teak Tree-- The Saul--The Sandal Tree--The Satinwood Tree--The Ceiba-- The Mahogany Tree--The Mora--Bamboos--The Guadua--Beauty and multifarious Uses of these colossal Grasses--Firing the Jungle-- The Aloes--The Agave americana--The Bromelias--The Cactuses--The Mimosas--Bush-ropes--Climbing Trees--Emblems of Ingratitude-- Marriage of the Fig Tree and the Palm--Epiphytes--Water Plants-- Singularly-shaped Trees--The Barrigudo--The Bottle Tree--Trees with Buttresses and fantastical Roots--The Mangroves--Their Importance in Furthering the Growth of Land-Animal Life among the Mangroves--‘Jumping Johnny’--Insalubrity of the Mangrove Swamps-- The Lum Trees with formidable Spines.
Wherever in the tropical regions periodical rains saturate the earth, vegetable life expands in a wonderful variety of forms. In the higher latitudes of the frozen north, a rapidly evanescent summer produces but few and rare flowers in sheltered situations, soon again to disappear under the winter’s snow; in the temperate zones, the number, beauty, and variety of plants increases with the warmth of a genial sky; but it is only where the vertical rays of an equatorial sun awaken and foster life on humid grounds that ever-youthful Flora appears in the full exuberance of her creative power. It is only there we find the majestic palms, the elegant mimosas, the large-leafed bananas, and so many other beautiful forms of vegetation alien to our cold and variable clime. While our trees are but sparingly clad with scanty lichens and mosses, they are there covered with stately bromelias and wondrous orchids. Sweet-smelling vanillas and passifloras wind round the giants of the forest, and large flowers break forth from their rough bark, or even from their very roots.
The number of known plants is estimated at about 200,000, and the greater part of this vast multitude of species belongs to the torrid zone. But if we consider how very imperfectly these sunny regions have as yet been explored--that in South America enormous forest lands and river basins have never yet been visited by a naturalist--that the vegetation of the greater part of Central Africa is still completely hidden in mystery--that no botanist has ever yet penetrated into the interior of Madagascar, Borneo, New Guinea, South-Western China, and Ultra-Gangetic India--and that, moreover, many of the countries visited by travellers have been but very superficially examined--we may well doubt whether even one fourth part of the tropical plants is actually known to science.
After these general remarks on the variety and exuberance of tropical vegetation, I shall now briefly notice those plants which, by their enormous size, their singularity of form, or their frequency in the landscape, chiefly characterise the various regions of the torrid zone.
The African Baobab, or monkey-bread tree (Adansonia digitata), may justly be called the elephant of the vegetable world. Near the village Gumer, in Fassokl, Russegger saw a baobab thirty feet in diameter and ninety-five in circumference; the horizontally outstretched branches were so large that the negroes could comfortably sleep upon them. The Venetian traveller Cadamosto (1454) found, near the mouths of the Senegal, baobabs measuring more than a hundred feet in circumference. As these vegetable giants are generally hollow, like our ancient willows, they are frequently made use of as dwellings or stables; and Dr. Livingstone mentions one in which twenty or thirty men could lie down and sleep, as in a hut. In the village of Grand Galarques, in Senegambia, the negroes have decorated the entrance into the cavity of a monstrous baobab with rude sculptures cut into the living wood, and make use of the interior as a kind of assembly room, where they meet to deliberate on the interests of their small community, ‘reminding one,’ says Humboldt, ‘of the celebrated plantain in Lycia, in whose hollow trunk the Roman consul, Lucinius Mutianus, once dined with a party of twenty-one.’ As the baobab begins to decay in the part where the trunk divides into the larger branches, and the process of destruction thence continues downwards, the hollow space fills, during the rainy season, with water, which keeps a long time, from its being protected against the rays of the sun. The baobab thus forms a vegetable cistern, whose water the neighbouring villagers sell to travellers. In Kordofan the Arabs climb upon the tree, fill the water in leathern buckets, and let it down from above; but the people in Congo more ingeniously bore a hole in the trunk, which they stop, after having tapped as much as they require.[11]
The height of the baobab does not correspond to its amazing bulk, as it seldom exceeds sixty feet. As it is of very rapid growth, it acquires a diameter of three or four feet and its full altitude in about thirty years, and then continues to grow in circumference. The larger beam-like branches, almost as thick at their extremity as at their origin, are abruptly rounded, and then send forth smaller branches, with large, light green, palmated leaves. The bark is smooth and greyish. The oval fruits, which are of the size of large cucumbers, and brownish-yellow when ripe, hang from long twisted spongy stalks, and contain a white farinaceous substance, of an agreeable acidulated taste, enveloping the dark brown seeds. They are a favourite food of the monkeys, whence the tree has derived one of its names.
From the depth of the incrustations formed on the marks which the Portuguese navigators of the fifteenth century used to cut in the large baobabs which they found growing on the African coast, and by comparing the relative dimensions of several trunks of a known age, Adanson concluded that a baobab of thirty feet in diameter must have lived at least 5,000 years; but a more careful investigation of the rapid growth of the spongy wood has reduced the age of the giant tree to more moderate limits, and proved that, even in comparative youth, it attains the hoary aspect of extreme senility.
The baobab, which belongs to the same family as the mallow or the hollyhock, and is, like them, emollient and mucilaginous in all its parts, ranges over a wide extent of Africa, particularly in the parts where the summer rains fall in abundance, as in Senegambia, in Soudan, and in Nubia. Dr. Livingstone admired its colossal proportions on the banks of the Zouga and the Zambesi. It forms a conspicuous feature in the landscape at Manaar in Ceylon, where it has most likely been introduced by early mariners, perhaps even by the Phœnicians, as the prodigious dimensions of the trees are altogether inconsistent with the popular conjecture of a Portuguese origin.
Another tree very characteristic of Africa, and frequently seen along with the baobab, is the large arborescent Euphorbia (E. arborescens), surmounted at the top with stiff leaves, branching out like the arms of a huge candelabra. It adds greatly to the strange wildness of the landscape, and seems quite in character with the aspect of the unwieldy rhinoceros and the long-necked giraffe.
Dracænas, or dragon-trees, are found growing on the west coast of Africa and in the Cape Colony, in Bourbon and in China; but it is only in the Canary Islands, in Madeira, and Porto Santo, that they attain such gigantic dimensions as to entitle them to rank among the vegetable wonders of the world.
Unfortunately, the venerable dragon-tree of Orotava, in Teneriffe, which was already reverenced for its age by the extirpated nation of the Guanches, and which the adventurous Bethencourts, the conquerors of the Canaries, found hardly less colossal and cavernous in 1402 than Humboldt, who visited it in 1799, was destroyed by a storm in 1871. Above the roots the illustrious traveller measured a circumference of forty-five feet; and according to Sir George Staunton, the trunk had still a diameter of four yards, at an elevation of ten feet above the ground. The whole height of the tree was not much above sixty-five feet. The trunk divided in numerous upright branches, terminating in tufts of evergreen leaves, resembling those of the pine-apple.
Next to the baobab and the dracæna, the Sycamore (Ficus Sycomorus) holds a conspicuous rank among the giant trees of Africa. It attains a height of only forty or fifty feet, but in the course of many centuries its trunk swells to a colossal size, and its vast crown covers a large space of ground with an impenetrable shade. Its leaves are about four inches long and as many broad, and its figs have an excellent flavour. In Egypt it is almost the only grove-forming tree; and most of the mummy coffins are made of its incorruptible wood.
No baobab rears its monstrous trunk on the banks of the Ganges; no dragon-tree of patriarchal age here reminds the wanderer of centuries long past; but the beautiful and stately Banyan (Ficus indica) gives him but little reason to regret their absence. Each tree is in itself a grove, and some of them are of an astonishing size, as they are continually increasing, and, contrary to most other animal and vegetable productions, seem to be exempted from decay; for every branch from the main body throws out its own roots, at first in small tender fibres, several yards from the ground, which continually grow thicker, until, by a gradual descent, they reach its surface, where, striking in, they increase to a large trunk and become a parent-tree, throwing out new branches from the top. These in time suspend their roots, and, receiving nourishment from the earth, swell into trunks and send forth other branches, thus continuing in a state of progression so long as the first parent of them all supplies her sustenance.
The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow About the mother-tree; a pillar’d shade High overarch’d, and echoing walks between. There oft the Indian herdsman, shunning heat, Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds At loopholes cut through thickest shade.
These beautiful lines of Milton are by no means overdrawn; as a banyan tree, with many trunks, forms the most beautiful walks and cool recesses that can be imagined. The leaves are large, soft, and of a lively green; the fruit is a small fig (when ripe of a bright scarlet), affording sustenance to monkeys, squirrels, peacocks, and birds of various kinds, which dwell among the branches.
The Hindoos are peculiarly fond of this tree; they consider its long duration, its outstretching arms and overshadowing beneficence, as emblems of the Deity; they plant it near their dewals or temples; and in those villages where there is no structure for public worship they place an image under a banyan, and there perform a morning and evening sacrifice.
Many of these beautiful trees have acquired an historic celebrity; and the famous Cubbeer-burr, on the banks of the Nerbuddah, thus called by the Hindoos in memory of a favourite saint, is supposed to be the same as that described by Nearchus, the Admiral of Alexander the Great, as being able to shelter an army under its far-spreading shade. ‘High floods have at various times swept away a considerable part of this extraordinary tree, but what still remains is near 2,000 feet in circumference, measured round the principal stems; the overhanging branches not yet struck down cover a much larger space; and under it grow a number of custard-apple and other fruit trees. The large trunks of this single colossus amount to a greater number than the days of the year, and the smaller ones exceed 3,000, each constantly sending forth branches and hanging roots to form other trunks and become the parents of a future progeny.
‘About a century ago a neighbouring rajah, who was extremely fond of field diversions, used to encamp under it in a magnificent style, having a saloon, drawing-room, dining-room, bed-chamber, bath, kitchen, and every other accommodation, all in separate tents; yet the noble tree not only covered the whole, together with his carriages, horses, camels, guards, and attendants, but also afforded with its spreading branches shady spots for the tents of his friends, with their servants and cattle. And in the march of an army it has been known to shelter 7,000 men.’[12] Such is the banyan--more wonderful than all the temples and palaces which the pride of the Moguls has ever reared!
The nearly related Pippul of India, or Bo-tree (Ficus religiosa), which differs from the banyan (F. indica) by sending down no roots from its branches, is reverenced by the Buddhists as the sacred plant, under whose shade Gautma, the founder of their religion, reclined when he underwent his divine transfiguration. Its heart-shaped leaves, which, like those of the aspen, appear in the profoundest calm to be ever in motion, are supposed to tremble in recollection of that mysterious scene.
The sacred Pippul at Anarajapoora, the fallen capital of the ancient kings of Ceylon, is probably the oldest historical tree in the world; as it was planted 288 years before Christ, and hence is now 2,150 years old. The enormous age of the baobabs of Senegal, and of the wondrous Wellingtonias of California, can only be conjectured; but the antiquity of the Bo-tree is matter of record, as its preservation has been an object of solicitude to successive dynasties; and the story of its fortunes has been preserved in a series of continuous chronicles amongst the most authentic that have been handed down by mankind.
‘Compared with it, the Oak of Ellerslie is but a sapling, and the Conqueror’s Oak in Windsor Forest barely numbers half its years. The yew trees of Fountains Abbey are believed to have flourished there 1,200 years ago; the olives in the Garden of Gethsemane were full-grown when the Saracens were expelled from Jerusalem, and the cypress of Somma in Lombardy is said to have been a tree in the time of Julius Cæsar. Yet the Bo-tree is older than the oldest of these by a century, and would almost seem to verify the prophecy pronounced when it was planted, that it would ‘flourish and be green for ever.’[13]
Although far inferior to these wonders of the vegetable world in amplitude of growth, yet the Teak tree, or Indian oak (Tectona grandis), far surpasses them in value, as the ship-worm in the water, and the termite on land, equally refrain from attacking its close-grained strongly scented wood; and no timber equals it for ship-building purposes.
It grows wild over a great part of British India; in the mountainous districts along the Malabar coast, in Guzerat, the valley of the Nerbuddah, in Tenasserim and Pegu. Unlike the oak and fir forests of Europe, where large spaces of ground are covered by a single species, the teak forests of India are composed of a great variety of trees, among which the teak itself does not even predominate. After a long neglect, which, in some parts, had almost caused its total extirpation, Government has at length taken steps for its more effectual protection, and appointed experienced foresters to watch over this invaluable tree. Since 1843, millions of young plants have been raised from seeds, but unfortunately the teak is of as slow growth as our oak, and many years will still be necessary to repair the ruinous improvidence of the past.
On turning our attention to America we find that Nature, delighting in infinite varieties of development, and disdaining a servile copy of what she had elsewhere formed, covers the earth with new and no less remarkable forms of vegetation. Thus, while in Africa the baobab attracts the traveller’s attention by its colossal size and peculiarity of growth, the gigantic Ceiba (Bombax Ceiba), belonging to the same family of plants, raises his astonishment in the forests of Yucatan. Like the baobab, this noble tree rises only to a moderate height of sixty feet, but its trunk swells to such dimensions that fifteen men are hardly able to span it, while a thousand may easily screen themselves under its canopy from the scorching sun. The leaves fall off in January; and then at the end of every branch bunches of large, glossy, purple-red flowers make their appearance, affording, as one may well imagine, a magnificent sight.
In British Honduras the Mahogany-tree (Swietenia Mahagoni) is found scattered in the forests, attracting the woodman’s attention from a distance by its light-coloured foliage, and its magnificent growth. Such are its dimensions, and such is the value of peculiarly fine specimens, that in October 1823 a tree was felled which weighed more than seven tons, and at Liverpool was sold for 525_l._ The expense of sawing amounted to 750_l._ more: so that the wood of this single tree, before passing into the hands of the cabinet-maker, was worth as much as a moderately sized farm.
‘Heedless and bankrupt in all curiosity must he be,’ says Waterton,[14] ‘who can journey through the forests of Guiana without stopping to take a view of the towering Mora (Mora excelsa). Its topmast branch, when naked with age, or dried by accident, is the favourite resort of the toucan. Many a time has this singular bird felt the shot faintly strike him from the gun of the fowler beneath, and owed his life to the distance betwixt them. The wild fig tree, as large as a common English apple-tree, often rears itself from one of the thick branches at the top of the mora; and when its fruit is ripe, to it the birds resort for nourishment. It was to an indigested seed passing through the body of this bird, which had perched on the mora, that the fig tree first owed its elevated station there. The sap of the mora raised it into full bearing; but now, in its turn, it is doomed to contribute a portion of its own sap and juices towards the growth of different species of vines, the seeds of which also the birds deposited on its branches. These soon vegetate and bear fruit in great quantities; so, what with their usurpation of the resources of the fig-tree, and the fig-tree of the mora, the mora, unable to support a charge which Nature never intended it should, languishes and dies under its burden; and then the fig-tree and its usurping progeny of vines, receiving no more succour from their late foster-parent, droop and perish in their turn.’
Our stateliest oaks would look like pygmies near this chieftain of the forests,’ who raises his dark green cupola over all the neighbouring trees, and deceives the traveller, who fancies that a verdant hill is rising before him. Its wood is much firmer than that of the fir, and is, or will be, of great importance to the ship-builder. On the Upper Barima alone, a river of Guiana hardly even known by name in Europe, Schomburgk found the giant tree growing in such profusion that it could easily afford sufficient timber for the proudest fleet that ever rode the ocean.
The graceful tapering form of the Gramineæ, or grasses, belongs to every zone; but it is only in the warmer regions of the globe that we find the colossal Bambusaceæ, rivalling in grandeur the loftiest trees of the primeval forest.
In New Grenada and Quito the Guadua, one of these giant grasses, ranks next to the sugar-cane and maize as the plant most indispensable to man. It forms dense jungles, not only in the lower regions of the country, but in the valleys of the Andes, 5,000 feet above the level of the sea. The culms attain a thickness of six inches, the single joints are twenty inches long, and the leaves are of indescribable beauty. A whole hut can be built and thatched with the guadua, while the single joints are extensively used as water-vessels and drinking-cups.
India, South China, and the Eastern Archipelago are the seats of the real bamboos, which grow in a variety of genera and species, as well on the banks of lakes and rivers in low marshy grounds, as in the more elevated mountainous regions. They chiefly form the impenetrable jungles, the seat of the tiger and the python. Sometimes a hundred culms spring from a single root, not seldom as thick as a man, and towering to a height of eighty or a hundred feet. Fancy the grace of our meadow grasses, united with the lordly growth of the Italian poplar, and you will have a faint idea of the beauty of a clump of bamboos.
The variety of purposes to which these colossal reeds can be applied almost rivals the multifarious uses of the cocoa-nut palm itself. Splitting the culm in its whole length into very thin pieces, the industrious Chinese then twist them together into strong ropes, for tracking their vessels on their numerous rivers and canals. The sails of their junks, as well as their cables and rigging, are made of bamboo; and in the southern province of Sechuen, not only nearly every house is built solely of this strong cane, but almost every article of furniture which it contains--mats, screens, chairs, tables, bedsteads, bedding--is of the same material. From the young shoots they also fabricate their fine writing-paper, which is so superior to the produce of our own manufactories. Although the bamboo grows spontaneously and most profusely in nearly all the southern portion of their vast empire, they do not entirely rely on the beneficence of Nature, but cultivate it with the greatest care. They have treatises devoted solely to this subject, laying down rules derived from experience, and showing the proper soils, the best kinds of water, and the seasons for planting and transplanting the bamboos, whose use is scarcely less extensive throughout the whole East Indian world.
At one season of the year the bamboos are easily destroyed by fire; and as the great stem-joints burst from the expansion of the air confined within, the report almost rivals the roar of cannon. In Sikkim firing the jungle is a frequent practice, and Dr. Hooker, who often witnessed the spectacle, describes the effect by night as exceedingly grand. ‘Heavy clouds canopy the mountains above, and, stretching across the valleys, shut out the sky; the air is a dead calm, as usual in the deep gorges; and the fires, invisible by day, are seen raging all around, appearing to an inexperienced eye in all but dangerous proximity. The voices of birds and insects being hushed, nothing is audible but the harsh roar of the rivers, and occasionally rising far above it, that of the forest fires. At night we were literally surrounded by them; some smouldering like the shale-heaps at a colliery, others fitfully bursting forth, whilst others again stalked along with a steadily increasing and enlarging flame, shooting out great tongues of fire, which spared nothing as they advanced with irresistible might. At Darjiling the blaze is visible, and the deadened reports of the bamboos bursting is heard throughout the night; but in the valley, and within a mile of the scene of destruction, the effect is the most grand, being heightened by the glare reflected from the masses of mist which hover above.’[15]
The aloes form the strongest contrast to the airy lightness of the grasses, by the stately repose and strength of their thick, fleshy, and inflexible leaves. They generally stand solitary in the parched plains, and impart a peculiarly austere or melancholy character to the landscape. The real aloes are chiefly African, but the American yuccas and agaves have a similar physiognomical character. The Agave americana, the usual ornament of our hot-houses, bears on a short and massive stem a tuft of fleshy leaves, sometimes no less than ten feet long, fifteen inches wide, and eight inches thick! After many years a flower-stalk twenty feet high shoots forth in a few weeks from the heart of the plant, expanding like a rich candelabrum, and clustered with several thousands of greenish-yellow aromatic flowers. But a rapid decline succeeds this brilliant efflorescence, for it is soon followed by the death of the exhausted plant.
In Mexico, where the agave is indigenous, and whence it has found its way to Spain and Italy, it is reckoned one of the most valuable productions of Nature. At the time when the flower-stalk is beginning to sprout, the heart of the plant is cut out, and the juice, which otherwise would have nourished the blossom, collects in the hollow. About three pounds exude daily, during a period of two or three months. After standing for a short time, the sweet juice undergoes a vinous fermentation, and the stranger, when once accustomed to its disagreeable odour, prefers the pulque to all other wines, and joins in the enthusiastic praises of the Mexican.
The American bromelias likewise resemble the aloes of torrid Africa by the form and arrangement of their leaves. To this useful family belongs the pine-apple (Bromelia Ananas), which grows best and largest in Brazil, where it is so common that the pigs fatten on the fruit. Formerly confined in our country to the tables of the wealthier classes as long as it was only supplied by our hot-houses, it can now be enjoyed at a very moderate expense, since thousands are imported by every West Indian steamer.
The leaves of several species of bromelia furnish excellent twine for ropes. The inhabitants of the banks of the river San Francisco, in Brazil, weave their fishing-nets with the fibres of the Caroa (B. variegata), and the filaments of the Crauata de rede (B. sagenaria) furnish a cordage of amazing strength and durability.
The foliage of the screw-pines, so widely extended over the East Indian and South Sea Isles, where they form a prominent feature in the landscape, closely resembles that of the bromelias, while the stem (round which the serrated leaves ascend in spiral convolutions, till they terminate in a pendulous crown); the aërial roots, and the fruit, remind one of the palms, the mangroves, and the coniferæ.
The Pandanus odoratissimus, or sweet-smelling screw-pine, whose fruits, when perfectly mature, resemble large rich-coloured pine-apples, plays an important part in the household economy of the coral-islanders of the South Sea. The inhabitants of the Mulgrave Archipelago, where the cocoa-nut is rare, live almost exclusively on the juicy pulp and the pleasant kernels of the fruit. The dried leaves serve to thatch their cottages, or are made use of as a material for mats and raiment. The wood is hard and durable. They string together the beautiful red and yellow-coloured nuts for ornaments, and wear the flowers as garlands. When the tree is in full blossom, the air around is impregnated with a delicious odour.
The grotesque forms of the Cactuses possess the stiff rigidity of the aloes. Their fleshy stems, covered with a gray-green coriaceous rind, generally exhibit bunches of hair and thorns instead of leaves. The angular columns of the Cerei, or torch-cactuses, rise to the height of sixty feet,--generally branchless, sometimes strangely ramified, as candelabras, while others creep like ropes upon the ground, or hang, snake-like, from the trees, on which they are parasitically rooted. The opuntias are unsymmetrically constructed of thick flat joints springing one from the other, while the melon-shaped Echinocacti and Mammillariæ, longitudinally ribbed or covered with warts, remain attached to the soil. The dimensions of these monstrous plants are exceedingly variable. One of the Mexican echinocacti (E. Visnaga) measures four feet in height, three in diameter, and weighs about two hundred pounds; while the dwarf cactus (E. nana) is so small that, loosely rooted in the sand, it frequently remains sticking between the toes of the dogs that pass over it. The splendidly coloured flowers of the cactuses form a strange contrast to the deformity of their stems, and the spectator stands astonished at the glowing life that springs forth from so unpromising a stock. These strange compounds of ugliness and beauty are in many respects useful to man. The pulp of the melocacti, which remains juicy during the driest season of the year, is one of the vegetable sources of the wilderness, and refreshes the traveller after he has carefully removed the thorns. Almost all of them bear an agreeable acid fruit, which, under the name of the Indian fig, is consumed in large quantities in the West Indies and Mexico. The light and incorruptible wood is admirably adapted for the construction of oars and many other implements. The farmer fences his garden with the prickly opuntias; but the services which they render, as the plants on which the valuable cochineal insect feeds and multiplies, are far more important.
The cactuses prefer the most arid situation, naked plains, or slopes, where they are fully exposed to the burning rays of the sun, and impart a peculiar physiognomy to a great part of tropical America.
None of the plants belonging to this family existed in the Old World previously to the discovery of America; but some species have since then rapidly spread over the warmer regions of our hemisphere. The Nopal (Cactus Opuntia) skirts the Mediterranean along with the American agave, and from the coasts has even penetrated far into the interior of Africa, everywhere maintaining its ground, and conspicuously figuring along with the primitive vegetation of the land.
Although chiefly tropical, the cactuses have a perpendicular range, which but few other families enjoy. From the low sand-coasts of Peru and Bolivia they ascend through vales and ravines to the highest ridges of the Andes. Magnificent dark-brown Peireskias (the only cactus genus bearing leaves instead of prickles) bloom on the banks of the Lake of Titicaca, 12,700 feet above the level of the sea; and in the bleak Puna,[16] even at the very limits of vegetation, the traveller is astonished at meeting with low bushes of cactuses thickly beset with yellow prickles.
What a contrast between these deformities and the delicately feathered mimosas, unrivalled among the loveliest children of Flora in the matchless elegance of their foliage! Our common acacias give but a faint idea of the beauty which these plants attain under the fostering rays of a tropical sun. In most species the branches extend horizontally, or umbrella-shaped, somewhat like those of the Italian pine, and the deep-blue sky shining through the light green foliage, whose delicacy rivals the finest embroidery, has an extremely picturesque effect. Endowed with a wonderful sensibility, many of the mimosas seem, as it were, to have outstepped the bounds of vegetable life, and to rival in acuteness of feeling the coral polyps and the sea anemones of the submarine gardens.
Large tracts of country in Brazil are almost entirely covered with sensitive plants. The tramp of a horse sets the nearest ones in motion, and, as if by magic, the contraction of the small grey-green leaflets spreads in quivering circles over the field, making one almost believe, with Darwin and Dutrochet, that plants have feeling, or tempting one to exclaim with Wordsworth--
‘It is my faith, that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes.’
Among the most remarkable forms of tropical vegetation, the creeping plants, bush-ropes, or lianas (cissus, bauhinia, bignonia, banisteria, passiflora), that contribute so largely to the impenetrability of the forests, hold a conspicuous rank. Often three or four bush-ropes, like strands in a cable, join tree to tree, and branch to branch; others, descending from on high, take root as soon as their extremity touches the ground, and appear like shrouds and stays supporting the mainmast of a line-of-battle ship; while others send out parallel, oblique, horizontal, and perpendicular shoots in all directions.
No European is able to penetrate the intricate network of a forest thus matted together: astonished and despairing, he stands before the dense cordage that impedes his path, and, should he attempt to force his way through the maze, the strong thorns and hooks with which the tropical creepers are generally armed would soon make him repent of his boldness. The Brazilian planter never thinks of entering the forest without a large knife, or without being accompanied by slaves, who with heavy scythe-like axes attached to long poles, clear the way by severing the otherwise impenetrable cordage.
The enormous climbing trees, that stifle the life of the mightiest giants of the forest, offer a no less wonderful spectacle. At first, these emblems of ingratitude grow straight upwards like any feeble shrub, but as soon as they have found a support in other trees, they begin to extend over their surface; for, while the stems of other plants generally assume a cylindrical form, these climbers have the peculiarity of divesting themselves of their rind when brought into contact with an extraneous body, and of spreading over it, until they at length enclose it in a tubular mass. When, during this process, the powers of the original root are weakened, the trunk sends forth new props to restore the equilibrium; and thus the tough and hardy race continually acquires fresh strength for the ruin of its neighbours.
Several species of the fig-tree are peculiarly remarkable for this distinctive property, and, from the facility with which their seeds take root where there is a sufficiency of moisture to permit of germination, are formidable assailants of ancient monuments. Sir Emerson Tennent mentions one which had fixed itself on the walls of a ruined edifice at Polanarrua, and formed one of the most remarkable objects of the place, its roots streaming downwards over the walls as if their wood had once been fluid, and following every sinuosity of the building and terraces till they reached the earth.
On the borders of the Rio Guama, Von Martius saw whole groups of Macauba palms encased in fig-trees that formed thick tubes round the shafts of the palms, whose noble crowns rose high above them; and a similar spectacle occurs in India and Ceylon, where the Tamils look with increased veneration on their sacred pippul thus united in marriage with the palmyra. After the incarcerated trunk has been stifled and destroyed, the grotesque form of the parasite, tubular, cork-screw-like, or otherwise fantastically contorted, and frequently admitting the light through interstices like loopholes in a turret, continues to maintain an independent existence among the straight-stemmed trees of the forest--the image of an eccentric genius in the midst of a group of sedate citizens.
Like the mosses and lichens of our woods, parasites of endless variety and almost inconceivable size and luxuriance (ferns, bromelias, tillandsias, orchids, and pothos) cover in the tropical zone the trunks and branches of the forest trees, forming hanging gardens, far more splendid than those of ancient Babylon. While the orchids are distinguished by the eccentric forms and splendid colouring of their flowers, sometimes resembling winged insects or birds, the pothos family (caladium, calla, arum, dracontium, pothos) attract attention by the beauty of their large, thick-veined, generally arrow-shaped, digitated, or elongated leaves, and form a beautiful contrast to the stiff bromelias or the hairy tillandsias that conjointly adorn the knotty stems and branches of the ancient trees.
In size of leaf, the Pothos family is surpassed by the large tropical water-plants, the Nymphæas and Nelumbias, among which the Victoria regia, discovered in 1837 by Robert Schomburgk in the river Berbice, enjoys the greatest celebrity. The round light-green leaves of this queen of water-plants measure no less than six feet in diameter, and are surrounded by an elevated rim several inches high, and exhibiting the pale, carmine red of the under surface. The odorous white blossoms, deepening into roseate hues, are composed of several hundred petals; and, measuring no less than fourteen inches in diameter, rival the colossal proportions of the leaves. The Victoria is found all over the Amazon district, but rarely or never in the river itself. It seems to delight in still waters, growing in inlets, lakes, or very quiet branches of the river fully exposed to the sun.
The trunk of several tropical trees offers the remarkable peculiarity of bulging out in the middle like a barrel. In the Brazilian forests, the Pao Barrigudo (Chorisia ventricosa) arrests the attention of every traveller by its odd ventricose shape, nearly half as broad in the centre as long, and gradually tapering towards the bottom and the top, whence spring a few thin and scanty branches. It is only by seeing great numbers of these trees all with their character more or less palpable, that one can believe it is not an accidental circumstance in the individual tree, instead of being truly characteristic of the species.
The Delabechea, or bottle-tree, discovered by Mr. Mitchell in tropical Australia, has the same lumpish mode of growth. Its wood is of so loose a texture that, when boiling water is poured over its shavings, a clear jelly is formed, and becomes a thick viscid mass.
In other trees which, struggling upwards to air and light, attain a prodigious altitude, or from their enormous girth and the colossal expansion of their branches require steadying from beneath, we find buttresses projecting like rays from all sides of the trunk. They are frequently from six to twelve inches thick, and project from five to fifteen feet, and, as they ascend, gradually sink into the bole and disappear at the height of from ten to twenty feet from the ground. By the firm resistance which they offer below, the trees are effectually protected from the leverage of the crown, by which they would otherwise be uprooted. Some of these buttresses are so smooth and flat as almost to resemble sawn planks; as, for instance, in the Bombax Ceiba, one of the most remarkable examples of this wonderful device of Nature.
In other cases we find the roots fantastically spreading and revelling in a variety of grotesque shapes, such as we nowhere find in the less exuberant vegetation of Europe. Thus, in the india-rubber tree (Ficus elastica), masses of the roots appear above ground, extending on all sides from the base, and writhing over the surface in serpentine undulations, so that the Indian villagers give it the name of the snake-tree. Sir Emerson Tennent mentions an avenue of these trees leading to the botanical garden of Peradenia, in Ceylon, the roots of which meet from either side of the road, and have so covered the surface as to form a wooden framework, the interstices of which retain the materials that form the roadway. These tangled roots sometimes trail to such an extent that they have been found upwards of 140 feet in length, whilst the tree itself was not thirty feet high.
The roots of the Mangroves, which in the tropical zone are found fringing the shores of the sea, or the mouths of rivers, wherever the reflux of the tide exposes a broad belt of alluvial soil, are admirably adapted for securing a footing on the unstable brink of the ocean.
The growth of these salt-water-loving trees (Rhizophora gymnorrhiza, R. Mangle) is equally peculiar and picturesque. The seeds germinate on the branches, and, increasing to a considerable length, finally fall down into the mud, where they stick, with their sharp point buried, and soon take root.
As the young mangrove grows upwards, pendulous roots issue from the trunk and low branches, and ultimately strike into the muddy ground, where they increase to the thickness of a man’s leg; so that the whole has the appearance of a complicated series of loops and arches, from five to ten feet high, supporting the body of the tree like so many artificial stakes.
It may easily be imagined what dense and inextricable thickets, what incomparable breakwaters, plants like these--through whose mazes even the light-footed Indian can only penetrate by stepping from root to root--are capable of forming.
Their influence in promoting the growth of land is very great, and in course of time they advance over the shallow borders of the ocean. Their matted roots stem the flow of the waters, and, retaining the earthy particles that sink to the bottom between them, gradually raise the level of the soil. As the new formation progresses, thousands of seeds begin to germinate upon its muddy foundation, thousands of cables descend, still farther to consolidate it; and thus foot by foot, year after year, the mangroves extend their empire and encroach upon the maritime domains.
The enormous deltas of many tropical rivers partly owe their immense development to the unceasing expansion of these littoral woods; and their influence should by no means be overlooked by the geologist when describing the ancient and eternal strife between land and ocean.
When the waters retire from under the tangled arcades of the mangroves, the black mud, which forms the congenial soil of these plants, appears teeming with a boundless variety of life. It absolutely swarms with the lower marine animals, with myriads of holothurias, annelides, sea-urchins, entomostraca, paguri, and crabs, whose often brilliantly coloured carapaces form a strong contrast to the black ooze in which they are seen to crawl about. Life clings even to the roots and branches bathed by the rising floods; for they are found covered with muscles, barnacles, and oysters, which thus have the appearance of growing upon trees, and pass one-half of their existence under water, the other in the sultry atmosphere of a tropical shore.
The close-eyed Gudgeon (Periophthalmus), or ‘Jumping Johnny,’ as he is more familiarly named by the sailors, plays a conspicuous part in the animal world of the mangrove swamps, where the uncouth form of this strange amphibious fish may be seen jumping about in the mud like a frog, or sliding awkwardly along on its belly with a gliding motion. By means of its pectoral fins, it is even enabled to climb with great facility among the roots of the mangroves, where it finds a goodly harvest of minute crustaceans. It must, however, not be supposed that ‘Johnny’ has all the swamp to himself; for though he manages to swallow many a victim, he is not seldom doomed to become the prey of creatures more wily or stronger than himself. A large and powerful crab of the Grapsus family may often be observed stealing, with an almost imperceptible motion, and in a cautious, sidelong manner, towards a gudgeon basking on the shore, and, before the fish has time to plunge into the sea, the pincer of the crab secures it in a vice-like gripe, from which it is perfectly hopeless to escape.
‘Johnny’ is a pugnacious little fellow, and rather prolonged fights may be observed between him and his brethren. At the mouth of the Zambesi, Dr. Livingstone saw one which, in fleeing from an apparent danger, jumped into a pool a foot square, which another evidently regarded as his by prior discovery. In a twinkling the owner, with eyes flashing fury, and with dorsal fin bristling up in a rage, dashed at the intruding foe. The fight waxed furious. No tempest in a teapot ever equalled the storm of that miniature sea. The warriors were now in the water and anon out of it, for the battle raged on sea and shore. They struck hard, they bit each other, until becoming exhausted, they seized each other by the jaws like two bull-dogs. They paused for breath, and were at it again as fiercely as before, until the combat ended by the precipitate retreat of the invader.
The vast multitude of marine animals which peoples the mangrove swamps naturally attracts a great number of strand, lacustrine, and sea birds; for it would be strange, indeed, if guests were wanting where the table is so prodigally supplied. The red ibis, the snow-white egrette, the rosy spoonbill, the tall flamingo, and an abundance of herons and other water-fowl, love to frequent the mangrove thickets, enhancing by their magnificent plumage the beauty of the scene. For, however repulsive may be the swampy ground on which these strange trees delight, yet their bright green foliage, growing in radiated tufts at the ends of the branches, and frequently bespangled with large gaily-coloured flowers, affords a most pleasing spectacle. Many an interesting discovery would here, no doubt, reward the naturalist’s attention; but the mangroves know well how to keep their secrets, and to repel the curiosity of man. Should he attempt to invade their domains, clouds of bloodthirsty insects would instantly make him repent of his temerity; for the plague of the mosquitoes is nowhere more dreadful than in the thickets of the semi-aquatic Rhizophoræ. And supposing his scientific zeal intense enough to bid defiance to the torture of their stings, and to scorn the attacks of every other visible foe--insect or serpent, crocodile or beast of prey--that may be lurking among the mangroves, yet the reflection may well bid him pause, that poisonous vapours, pregnant with cholera or yellow fever, are constantly rising from that muddy soil. Even in the temperate regions of Europe the emanations from marshy grounds are pregnant with disease, but the malaria ascending from the sultry morasses of the torrid zone is absolutely deadly.
Thus there cannot possibly be a better natural bulwark for a land than to be belted with mangroves; and if Borneo, Madagascar, Celebes, and many other tropical islands and coasts, have to the present day remained free from the European yoke, they are principally indebted for their independence to the miasms and tangles of a Rhizophora girdle, bidding defiance alike to the sharp edge of the axe or the destructive agency of fire.
As the mangroves are found in places suited to their growth throughout the whole torrid zone, it is not surprising that there are many species, some rising to the height of stately trees, while others are content with a shrub-like growth. Some are peculiar to America, others to the Old World; some grow near the sea, others prefer a brackish water and the low swampy banks of rivers.
The Jriarteas and Screw-pines are as singular as the mangroves in the formation of their roots; but those of the Lum, a large tree which Kittlitz found growing on the island of Ualan, are perhaps without a parallel in the vegetable world. Each of the roots, running above-ground for a considerable distance, is surmounted by a perfectly vertical crest, gradually diminishing in size as the root recedes from the trunk, but often three, or even four, feet high near its base. These crests, which are very thin but perfectly smooth, regularly follow all the sinuosities of the root, and thus form, for a considerable distance round the tree, a labyrinth of the strangest appearance. Large spaces of swampy ground are often covered with their windings, and it is no easy matter to walk on the sharp edges of these vertical bands, whose interstices are generally filled with deep mud. On being struck, the larger crests emit a deep sonorous sound, like that of a kettledrum.
The thorns and spines with which many European plants are armed, give but a faint idea of the size which these defensive weapons attain in the tropical zone. The cactuses, the acacias, and many of the palm-trees, bristle with sharp-pointed shafts, affording ample protection against the attacks of hungry animals, and might appropriately be called vegetable hedge-hogs, or porcupines. The Toddalia aculeata, a climbing plant, very common in the hill-jungles of Ceylon, is thickly studded with knobs, about half an inch high, and from the extremity of each a thorn protrudes, as large and sharp as the bill of a sparrow-hawk.
The black twigs of the buffalo-thorn (Acacia latronùm), a low shrub abounding in northern Ceylon, are beset at every joint by a pair of thorns set opposite each other, like the horns of an ox, as sharp as a needle, from two to three inches in length, and thicker at the base than the stem they grow on; and the Acacia tomentosa, another member of the same numerous genus, has thorns so large as to be called the jungle-nail by Europeans, and the elephant-thorn by the natives. In some of these thorny plants, the spines grow, not singly, but in branching clusters, each point presenting a spike as sharp as a lancet; and where these shrubs abound, they render the forest absolutely impassable, even to animals of the greatest size and strength.
The formidable thorny plants of the torrid zone, which are often made use of by man to protect his fields and plantations against wild beasts and robbers, have sometimes even been made to serve as a bulwark against hostile invasions. Thus Sir Emerson Tennent informs us, that, during the existence of the Kandyan kingdom, before its conquest by the British, the frontier forests were so thickened and defended by dense plantations of thorny plants as to form a natural fortification impregnable to the feeble tribes on the other side; and at each pass which led to the level country, movable gates, formed of the same thorny beams, were suspended as an ample security against the incursions of the naked and timid lowlanders.
Poets and moralists, judging by what they see in England, have concluded that fruits of a small size, whose fall cannot be dangerous to man, invariably grow on high trees, while large fruits, such as the pumpkin, are only found trailing on the ground. But a visit to the tropics would soon convince them of their error, for two of the largest and heaviest fruits known, the Brazilian nut (Bertholletia) and the Durian of the Indian Archipelago, grow on high forest trees, from which they fall down when ripe, and frequently wound or kill the natives. ‘From this,’ says Mr. Wallace, ‘we can learn two things--in the first place, not to draw general conclusions from a locally very limited knowledge of nature, and, secondly, that trees and fruits, as well as the manifold productions of the animal kingdom, have not been exclusively organised with a reference to man.’
XIII. PALMS AND FERNS
The Cocoa-nut Tree--Its hundred Uses--Cocoa-nut Oil--Coir-- Porcupine Wood--Enemies of the Cocoa Palm--The Sago Palm--The Saguer--The Gumatty--The Areca Palm--The Palmyra Palm--The Talipot--The Cocoa de Mer--Ratans--A Ratan bridge in Ceylon-- The Date Tree--The Oil Palms of Africa--The Oil Trade at Bonny-- Its vast and growing Importance--American Palms--The Carnauba-- The Ceroxylon andicola--The Cabbage Palm--The Gulielma speciosa-- The Piaçava--Difficulties of the Botanist in ascertaining the various species of Palms--Their wide geographical range--Different Physiognomy of the Palms according to their height--The Position and Form of their Fronds--Their Fruits--Their Trunk--The Yriartea ventricosa--Arborescent Ferns.
The graceful acanthus gave the imaginative Greeks the first idea of the Corinthian capital; but the shady canopy of the cocoa-nut tree would no doubt form a still more beautiful ornament of architecture, were it possible for art to imitate its feathery fronds and carve their delicate tracery in stone.
Essentially littoral, this noble palm requires an atmosphere damp with the spray and moisture of the sea to acquire its full stateliness of growth, and while along the bleak shores of the Northern Ocean the trees are generally bent landward by the rough sea breeze, and send forth no branches to face its violence, the cocoa, on the contrary, loves to bend over the rolling surf, and to drop its fruits into the tidal wave. Wafted by the winds and currents over the sea, the nuts float along without losing their germinating power, like other seeds which migrate through the air; and thus, during the lapse of centuries, the cocoa-palm has spread its wide domain from coast to coast throughout the whole extent of the tropical zone. It waves its graceful fronds over the emerald islands of the Pacific, fringes the West Indian shores, and from the Philippines to Madagascar crowns the atolls, or girds the sea-border of the Indian Ocean.
But nowhere is it met with in such abundance as on the coasts of Ceylon, where for miles and miles one continuous grove of palms, pre-eminent for beauty, encircles the ‘Eden of the eastern wave.’ Multiplied by plantations and fostered with assiduous care, the total number in the island cannot be less than twenty millions of full-grown trees; and such is its luxuriance in those favoured districts, where it meets with a rare combination of every advantage essential to its growth--a sandy and pervious soil, a free and genial air, unobstructed solar heat, and abundance of water--that, when in full bearing, it will annually yield as much as a ton weight of nuts--an example of fruitfulness almost unrivalled even in the torrid zone.
No other tree in the world, no other plant cultivated by man, contributes in so many ways to his wants and comfort as this inestimable palm; and it is a curious illustration of its innumerable uses, that some years ago a ship from the Maldive Islands touched at Galle, which was entirely built, rigged, provisioned, and laden with the produce of the cocoa-tree. Besides furnishing their chief food to many tribes on the coast within the torrid zone, the nut contains a valuable oil, which burns without smoke or smell, and serves, when fresh, for culinary purposes. Consisting of a mixture of solid (stearine) and fluid (elain) fat, it congeals at a temperature of 72°; but both its component substances acquire additional value after having been separated by means of the hydraulic press; for while the liquid part furnishes an excellent lamp-oil, the solid fat is manufactured into candles rivalling wax, and at the same time not much dearer than tallow.
This important product first became known in the European markets at the beginning of the present century, and is now a considerable article of commerce, so that, to meet the constantly increasing demand, new plantations are continually forming on the coasts of Ceylon, Java, and other islands of the Indian Ocean.
The fibrous rind or husk of the nut furnishes coir, a scarcely less important article of trade than the oil itself. It is prepared by being soaked for some months in water, for the purpose of decomposing the interstitial pith, after which it is beaten to pieces until the fibres have completely separated, and ultimately dried in the sun. Ropes made of coir, though not so neat in appearance as hempen cords, are superior in lightness, and exceed them in durability, particularly if wetted frequently by salt water. From their elasticity and strength they are exceedingly valuable for cables. Besides cordage of every calibre, beds, cushions, carpets, brushes, and nets are manufactured from the filaments of the cocoa-nut husk, while the hard shell is fashioned into drinking-cups, spoons, beads, bottles, and knife-handles. From the spathes of the unopened flowers a delicious ‘toddy’ is drawn, which, drunk at sunrise before fermentation has taken place, acts as a cooling gentle aperient, but in a few hours changes into an intoxicating wine, and may either be distilled into arrack--the only pernicious purpose to which the gifts of the bounteous tree are perverted--or soured into vinegar, or inspissated by boiling into sugar.
The strong tough foot-stalks of the fronds, which attain a length of from eighteen to twenty feet, are used for fences, for yokes, for carrying burthens on the shoulders, for fishing-rods; the leaflets serve for roofing, for mats, for baskets, for cattle-fodder; and their midribs form good brooms for the decks of ships. Cooked or stewed, the cabbage or cluster of unexpanded leaves is an excellent vegetable, though rarely used, as it necessarily involves the destruction of the tree; and even the tough web or network, which sustains the foot-stalks of the leaves, may be stripped off in large pieces and used for straining.
After the cocoa-nut tree has ceased to bear, its wood serves for many valuable purposes--for the building of ships, bungalows, and huts, for furniture and farming implements of every description.
When we consider the numerous gifts conferred upon mankind by this inestimable tree, we cannot wonder at the animation with which the islander of the Indian Ocean recounts its ‘hundred uses,’ or at the superstition which makes him believe that, by some mysterious sympathy, it pines when beyond the reach of the human voice. But man is not the only being that profits by its gifts, for wherever it grows, its sweet and nutritious nuts are eagerly sought for by many animals. The small black long-clawed cocoa-nut bear (Ursus malayanus), which inhabits Sumatra and Borneo, and surpasses all other members of the Ursine family by its surprising agility in climbing, though far from despising other fruit, yet shows by its name to which side its inclinations chiefly lean. The East Indian Palm-martin (Paradoxurus typus or Pougouni) and the sprightly Palm-squirrel (Sciurus palmarum) likewise climb the cocoa-palms, and, perforating the soft and unripe nuts, eagerly sip their juice. The ubiquitous Rat bites holes into the cocoa-nuts close to their stalk, taking good care not to gnaw the shell where the juice would run out and defraud it of its meal.
Even the birds diminish the produce of the cocoa-nut grove. The Noddy (Sterna stolida) builds his nest between the foot-stalks, and picks so busily at the blossom, when stormy weather prevents him making any long excursions, that on many islands he is considered as a chief cause of the sterility of numerous palms.
In every zone we find nations in a low degree of civilisation living almost exclusively upon a single animal or plant. The Laplander has his reindeer, the Esquimaux his seal, the Sandwich Islander his taro-root; and thus also we find the natives of a great part of the Indian Archipelago depending for their subsistence upon the pith of the Sago palm (Sagus fariniferus). This tree, which is of such great importance to the indolent Malay, as it almost entirely relieves him of the necessity of labour, grows at first very slowly, and is covered with thorns. As soon, however, as the stem is once formed, it shoots upwards with such rapidity that it speedily attains its full height of ten yards, with a girth of five or six feet, losing in this stage its thorny accompaniments. The crown is larger and thicker than that of the cocoa-nut tree; the efflorescence colossal, forming an immense bunch, the branches of which spread out like the arms of a gigantic candelabrum. The tree must, however, be felled before the fruit begins to form, as otherwise the farina would be exhausted, which man destines for his food. When the trunk has been cut and split into convenient pieces, the pith is scooped out, kneaded with water, and strained, to separate the meal from the fibres. One tree will produce from two to four hundredweight of flour, which is mostly consumed on the spot. The Sago palm serves to feed several millions of men, and a great quantity of its produce is exported to Europe.
The Sago palm forms large forests, particularly on swampy ground in Borneo and Sumatra, in the Moluccas and New Guinea. Mushrooms of an excellent flavour frequently cover the mouldering trunks, and in the pith the fat grubs of the Cossus saguarius, a large lamellicorn beetle, are found, which the natives consider a great delicacy when roasted.
The Gomuti (Gomutus vulgaris), which almost rivals the cocoa by the multiplicity of its uses, is likewise a native of the Indian Archipelago. On seeing its rough and swarthy rind, and the dull dark-green colour of its fronds, the stranger wonders how the unsightly tree is allowed to grow, but when he has tasted its delicious wine he is astonished not to see it cultivated in greater numbers. Although the outer covering of the fruits has venomous qualities, and is used by the Malays to poison springs, the nuts have a delicate flavour, and the wounded spathe yields an excellent toddy, which, like that of the cocoa and palmyra palms changes by fermentation into an intoxicating wine, and on being thickened by boiling furnishes a kind of black sugar, much used by the natives of Java and the adjacent isles. The reticulum or fibrous net at the base of the petioles of the leaves constitutes the gumatty, a substance admirably adapted to the manufacture of cables, and extensively used for cordage of every description. The small hard twigs found mixed up with this material are employed as pens, besides forming the shafts of the sumpits or poisoned arrows of the Malays, and underneath the reticulum is a soft silky material, used as tinder by the Chinese, and applied as oakum in caulking the seams of ships, while from the interior of the trunk a kind of sago is prepared.
The Areca palm (Areca Catechu) bears a great resemblance to the cocoa-nut tree, but is of a still more graceful form, rising to the height of forty or fifty feet, without any inequality on its thin polished stem, which is dark green towards the top, and sustains a crown of feathery foliage, in the midst of which are clustered the astringent nuts, for whose sake it is carefully tended. In the gardens of Ceylon the areca palm is invariably planted near the wells and watercourses, and the betel plant, which immemorial custom has associated to its use, is frequently seen twining round its trunk.
The Palmyra palm (Borassus flabelliformis) celebrated in verse and prose for the numerous benefits it confers upon mankind, extends from the confines of Arabia to the Moluccas, and is found in every region of Hindostan from the Indus to Siam, the cocoa and the date tree being probably the only palms that enjoy a still wider geographical range. In northern Ceylon, and particularly in the peninsula of Jaffna, it forms extensive forests; and such is its importance in the Southern Dekkan, and along the Coromandel coast, that its fruits afford a compensating resource to seven millions of Hindoos on every occasion of famine or failure of the rice crop. Unlike the cocoa, which gracefully bends under its ponderous crown, the palmyra rises vertically to its full height of seventy or eighty feet, and presents a truly majestic sight when laden with its huge clusters of fruits, each the size of an ostrich’s egg, and of a rich brown tint, fading into bright golden at its base. It is not till the tree has attained a mature age that its broad fan-like leaves begin to detach themselves from the stem; they climb from the ground to its summit in spiral convolutions, forming a dense cover for many animals--ichneumons, squirrels, and monkeys, that resort to it for concealment. In these hiding-places the latter might easily defy the sportsman; but they frequently fall victims to a silly curiosity, for when he is accompanied by his dog, they cannot resist the temptation of watching the animal’s movements, and, coming forth to peep, expose themselves to a fatal shot.
The stalks of the decayed leaves remain partly attached to the trunk, affording supports to a profusion of climbing and epiphytic plants, which hide the stem under a brilliant tapestry of flower and verdure.
When the spathes of the fruit-bearing trees exhibit themselves, the toddy-drawer forthwith commences his operations, climbing by the assistance of a loop of flexible jungle-vine, sufficiently wide to admit both his ancles and leave a space between them, thus enabling him to grasp the trunk of the tree with his feet and support himself as he ascends. Having pruned off the stalks of fallen leaves, and cleansed the crown from old fruit-stalks and other superfluous matter, he binds the spathes tightly with thongs to prevent them from farther expansion, and descends, after having thoroughly bruised the embryo flowers within to facilitate the exit of the juice. For several succeeding mornings the operation of crushing is repeated, and each day a thin slice is taken off the end of the racemes, to facilitate the exit of the sap and prevent its bursting the spathe. About the eighth morning the sap begins to exude, an event which is notified by the immediate appearance of birds, especially of the ‘toddy bird,’ a species of shrike, (Artamus fuscus), attracted by the flies and other insects which come to feed on the luscious juice of the palm. The crows, ever on the alert when any unusual movement is in progress, keep up a constant chattering and wrangling; and about this time the palmyra becomes the resort of the palm-martin and the graceful genet, which frequent the trees in quest of birds. On ascertaining that the first flow of the sap has taken place, the toddy-drawer again trims the wounded spathe, and inserts its extremity in an earthen chatty to collect the juice. Morning and evening these vessels are emptied, and for four or five months the palmyra will continue to pour forth its sap at the rate of three quarts a day. But once in every three years the operation is omitted, and the fruit is allowed to form, without which the natives assert that the tree would pine and die.[17] The hard and durable wood of the palmyra, which, consisting like the other palms of straight horny fibres, can easily be split into lengths, is said to resist the attacks of the termites, and is used universally in Ceylon and India for roofing and similar purposes. The leaves, finally, are employed for roofs, fences, mats, baskets, fans, and paper.
The Talpot or Talipot of the Singalese (Corypha umbraculifera) rises to the height of one hundred feet, and expands into a crown of enormous fan-like leaves, each of which when laid upon the ground will form a semicircle of sixteen feet in diameter, and cover an area of nearly two hundred superficial feet. These gigantic foliaceous expansions are employed by the Singalese for many purposes. They form excellent fans, umbrellas, or portable tents, one leaf being sufficient to shelter seven or eight persons; but their most interesting use is for the manufacture of a kind of paper, so durable as to resist for many ages the ravages of time. The leaves are taken, whilst still tender, cut into strips, boiled in spring water, dried, and finally smoothed and polished, so as to enable them to be written on with a style, the furrow made by the pressure of the sharp point being rendered visible by the application of charcoal ground with a fragrant oil. The leaves of the palmyra similarly prepared are used for ordinary purposes; but the valuable documents are written to-day, as they have been for ages past, on strips of the talipot.
The currents of the sea sometimes drift to the shores of the Maldives, and even to the south and west coasts of Java and Sumatra, a nut, exceeding the ordinary cocoa-nut many times in size, with the additional peculiarity of presenting a double, or sometimes even a triple form, as if two separate fruits had grown together. These mysterious gifts of the ocean, the product of an unknown tree were believed to be of submarine origin, and to have the wonderful power of neutralising poisons. On the Maldive Islands they were the exclusive property of the king, who either sold them at an exorbitant price, or made presents of them to other potentates. At length, about a hundred years ago, the French traveller Sonnerat discovered in the uninhabited Seychelles the home of the Lodoicea Sechellarum, which, like the cocoa, grows on the strand of that small and secluded group, and drops its large nuts into the sea, which then carries them along to the east. The trunk of the Lodoicea rises to the height of forty or fifty feet, and bears a crown of immense fan-like leaves, upwards of twenty feet long and fifteen broad, with foot-stalks seven feet long. As soon as the real origin of the wonderful drift nuts became known, they of course immediately lost their imaginary value, to the great vexation, no doubt, of the Maldive potentate, who thus found himself deprived of the best part of his scanty revenues.
The Ratans, a most singular genus of creeping plants, luxuriate in the forests of tropical Asia. Sometimes their slender stems, armed with dreadful spines at every joint, climb to the summit of the highest tree; sometimes they trail along the ground; and while it is impossible to find out their roots among the intricate tangles of the matted underwood, their palm-like tops expand in the sunshine, the emblems of successful parasitism. They frequently render the forest so impervious, that the distinguished naturalist Junghuhn, while exploring the woods of Java, was obliged to be accompanied by a vanguard of eight men, one-half of whom were busy cutting the ratans with their hatchets, while the others removed the stems. These rope-like plants frequently grow to the incredible length of four or even six hundred feet, often consisting of a couple of hundred joints two or three feet long, and bearing at every knot a feathery leaf, armed with thorns on its lower surface. Though often extremely disagreeable to the traveller, yet they are far from being useless. The natives of Java and the other islands of the Eastern Archipelago cut the cane into fine slips, which they plait into beautiful mats, manufacture into strong and neat baskets, or twist into cordage of such strength and durability that it is even used with success in the formation of bridges across the watercourses and ravines.
On turning from the Indian Ocean to Arabia and Africa, we enter upon a new world of palms, several of which are no less valuable than the cocoa-nut or the palmyra.
The date-tree (Phœnix dactylifera), sung from time immemorial by the poets of the East, is as indispensable as the camel to the inhabitants of the wastes of North Africa and Arabia, and, next to the ‘ship of the desert,’ the devout Mussulman esteems it the chief gift of Allah. Few palms have a wider range, for it extends from the Persian Gulf to the borders of the Atlantic, and flourishes from the twelfth to the thirty-seventh degree of northern latitude. Groves of dates adorn the coasts of Valencia in Spain; near Genoa its plantations afford leaves for the celebration of Palm Sunday; and in the gardens of southern France a date-tree is sometimes seen growing among the oranges and olives. But it never bears fruit on these northern limits of its empire, and thrives best in the oases on the borders of the sandy desert.
The date-palm is propagated by shoots, and the female tree bears its first fruits after four or five years. It is said to attain to an age of two centuries, but is rarely left standing longer than eighty years, when the trunk is tapped in spring, producing a kind of toddy, which is consumed in great quantities in ‘Biledulgerid,’ or the long line of oases situated to the south of the Atlas, and pre-eminently called the ‘land of dates.’
It is not to be wondered at that the tribes of the desert so highly value a tree which, when in full growth, bears as much as two hundredweight of dates, and by enabling a family to live on the produce of a small spot of ground, extends as it were the bounds of the green islands of the desert. It is considered criminal to fell it while still in its vigour, and both the Bible and the Koran forbid the warriors of the true God to apply the axe to the date-trees of an enemy.
In Arabia the date palms of El Medinah are celebrated above all others for the excellence of their fruit, which were the favourite food of the Prophet--a circumstance investing them in the eyes of all true believers with a certain degree of sanctity. Their stately columnar stems here seem higher than in other lands, and their lower fronds, which in Egypt are lopped off about Christmas time to increase the flavour of the fruit, are allowed to remain unmutilated. One of the reasons for the excellence of Medinah dates is the quantity of water they obtain. Each garden or field has its well; and, even in the hottest weather, the water-wheel floods the soil every third day. The date-tree can live in dry and barren spots; but it loves the beds of streams, and places where moisture is procurable. Books enumerate 139 varieties of date trees. Of these between sixty and seventy are well known, and each is distinguished as usual, among Arabs, by its peculiar name.
The best kind, El Shelebi, is packed in skins or in flat round boxes covered with paper, and sent as gifts to the remotest parts of the Moslem world, for the pilgrim to the Holy Cities would be badly received by the women of his family if he did not present them on his return with a few boxes of this fruit. Imagination has also done its best to invest the better kinds of dates with a legendary interest. Thus, the Ajwah is eaten but not sold, because a tradition of the Prophet declares that whoso breaketh his fast every day with six or seven of the Ajwah date need fear neither poison nor magic. The third kind, El Hilwah, also a large date, derives its name from its exceeding sweetness. Of this tree the Moslems relate that the Prophet planted a stone, which in a few minutes grew up and bore fruit. The Wahski on one occasion bent its head and salaamed to Mahomet as he ate its fruit, for which reason even now its lofty tuft turns earthwards. The Sayhani is so called because, when the founder of El Islam, holding Ali’s hand, happened to pass beneath it, it cried, ‘This is Mahomet the Prince of the Prophets, and this is Ali the Prince of the Pious.’ Of course the descendants of this intelligent tree hold a high rank in the kingdom of palms.
The citizens of Medinah delight in speaking of dates as an Irishman does of potatoes--with a kind of familiar fondness: they eat them for medicine as well as food. The fruit is ripe about the middle of May, and the gathering of it forms the Arab’s vintage. The people make merry the more readily because their favourite fruit is liable to a variety of accidents; droughts injure the tree, locusts destroy the produce, and thus the date crop, like most productions which men are imprudent enough to adopt singly as the staff of life, is subject to failure.
Towards the equator the date-tree disappears, while the Doum (Hyphæne thebaica), distinguished from most other palms by its branching trunk, each branch being surmounted by a tuft of large stiff flabelliform leaves, assumes a conspicuous place in the landscape. Its fruits, which are of the size of a small apple, and covered with a tough yellow lustrous rind, have a sugary taste, and serve for the preparation of sherbet. The old leaf-stalks with their thorns and sheathes, which remain attached to the trunk, render the task of climbing it next to impossible. The chief seat of this beautiful palm are the banks of the Nile, in the region of the cataracts. In Kordofan the Delebl palms form large clumps with tamarinds, cassias, adansonias, and various mimosas. Straight as an arrow and perfectly smooth-rinded, this magnificent tree rises to the height of a hundred feet, bearing large fan-like leaves, attached to foot-stalks ten feet long, and armed with mighty thorns. From ten to twenty large bunches of nuts, as big as a man’s head, hang beneath the fronds, but unfortunately these fine-looking fruits disappoint the taste.
Thus various forms of palms flourish along the banks of the Nile, but in general Africa has a smaller variety of these trees to boast of than either Asia or America. On the other hand, the forests of Brazil have no palms at all comparable in commercial importance to the Cocos butyracea and the Elæis gumeensis, the oil-teeming fruit trees of tropical West Africa. The productiveness of the Elæis may be inferred from its bearing clusters of from 600 to 800 nuts, larger than a pigeon’s egg, and so full of oil that it may be pressed out with the fingers. As long as the slave trade reigned along the coast of Guinea, these vegetable treasures remained unnoticed; but since England began to raise her voice against this infamous traffic, they have become the object of an immense and constantly increasing commerce.
The American palms are pre-eminent in beauty, and many of them rank highly in the list of useful plants.
The leaves of the Carnauba (Corypha cerifera) furnish an abundance of wax. The lowlands of Guiana, between 3° and 7° N. lat., are frequently covered with this social fan-palm, whose full-grown fronds, when cut and dried in the shade, cover themselves with light-coloured scales. These melt in a warmth of 206° F., and then form a straw-coloured liquid, which again concretes on cooling. It burns with as clear and bright a flame as the best bees’-wax, and will no doubt become a considerable article of trade, when once the spirit of industry awakens in those rich but thinly-populated regions. Like many other palms, the Carnauba does not confine her gifts to one single product. The boiled fruit is edible, and the pith of the young stems affords a nutritious fecula. Roofs thatched with its leaves resist for many years the effects of the weather, and its wood may be used for a variety of purposes.
A kind of wax, exuding from the rings of its trunk, is also produced by the beautiful Ceroxylon andicola, which grows on the slopes of the Andes, up to an elevation of eight thousand feet. Even the lofty vault of the Crystal Palace would be unable to span this majestic palm, which, according to Humboldt’s accurate measurement, towers one hundred and eighty feet above the ground, and bears a tuft of fronds each twenty-four feet long.
The cabbage-palm of the Antilles (Oreodoxa oleracea) almost rivals the mountain Ceroxylon in magnificence of growth, as its stem, which near to its base is about seven feet in circumference, ascends straight and tapering to the height of 130 feet. Its lofty fronds, moved by the gentlest breeze, are an object of beauty which can hardly be conceived by those who are unused to the magnificent vegetation of a tropical sun. Within the leaves which surround the top of the trunk, the cabbage, composed of longitudinal flakes, like ribands, but so compact as to form a crisp and solid body, lies concealed. It is white, about two or three feet long, as thick as a man’s arm, and perfectly cylindrical. When eaten raw, it resembles the almond in flavour, but is more tender and delicious. It is usually cut into pieces, boiled, and served as an auxiliary vegetable with meat. To obtain this small portion, borne on the pinnacle of the tree, and hidden from the eye of man, the axe is applied to the stately trunk, and its towering pride laid low.
Besides its cabbage, the Oreodoxa furnishes another great delicacy to the table. After the removal of the heart, a kind of black-beetle deposits its egg in the cavity, from which fat grubs are developed, growing to the size and thickness of a man’s thumb. These, though disgusting in appearance, when fried in a pan, with a very little butter and salt, have a taste which savours of all the spices of India.
Both the Oreodoxa and the Ceroxylon are far surpassed in height by the Californian firs and the Eucalypti of Australia, but no other trees rise so proudly in the air on shafts comparatively so slender. While the enormous trunks of the Sequoias and Wellingtonias remind one of the massy pillars of our old gothic churches, the graceful palms recall to our memory the slender Ionic or Corinthian columns which adorn the masterpieces of Grecian architecture.
The oil of the Corozo (Elæis oleifera) is usually burnt in the houses and churches of Carthagena and New Granada; and the Oenocarpus disticha is cultivated in Brazil, as it furnishes an excellent oil for culinary purposes. The Pirijao (Gulielma speciosa) is planted round the huts of the Indians, and replaces in some districts the Mauritia as the tree of life. The Piaçava (Attalia funifera), whose stone-hard dark-brown nuts are manufactured into rosaries by the inhabitants of Villa Nova de Olivenza, is far more important, on account of its fibres, which, unknown a few years ago, are now imported into England in large quantities, where they serve for making brooms; and the amazingly hard nuts of the Cabeza di Negro (Phytelephas), rivalling ivory in whiteness, solidity, and beauty, are extensively used by our turners for similar purposes.
Though no trees are more characteristic of the tropics than the palms, yet specimens are found far within the temperate regions. Along with the date-tree the Chamærops humilis graces the environs of Nizza, and the Areca sapida flourishes in the mild insular climate of New Zealand (38° S. lat). In Africa, the Hyphæne coriacea grows at Port Natal (30° S. lat.), and in America the palms extend to 35° S. lat., both in the Pampas of Buenos Ayres, and in Chili, where the Choco indicates the extreme limits of the family.
As these species are able to exist under a mean annual temperature of 58°, they might possibly be made to adorn the gardens of Penzance; most palms, however, require a mean temperature of from 70° to 72°, and on advancing towards the equator increase in beauty, stateliness of growth, and variety of form. Their chief seats are the lower regions of the torrid zone; but as some species range far to the north or south, thus others ascend the mountain-slopes, almost to the limits of perpetual snow.
In South America, the Ceroxylon andicola and the Kunthia montana are found growing at an altitude of 6,000 and 9,000 feet, and in the Paramo de Guanacos, Humboldt even saw palms 13,000 feet above the level of the sea.
Besides the height of the shaft, the position of the leaves serves chiefly to impart a more or less majestic character to the palms: those with drooping leaves being far less stately than those whose fronds shoot more or less upwards to the skies. Nothing can exceed the elegance of the Jagua palm, which along with the splendid Cucurito adorns the granite rocks in the rapids of the Orinoco at Atures. The fronds, which are but few in number, rise almost perpendicularly sixteen feet high, from the top of the lofty columnar shaft, and their feathery leaflets of a thin and grass-like texture play lightly round the tall leaf-stalks, slowly bending in the breeze. In the palms with a feathery foliage, the leaf-stalks rise either immediately from a brown ligneous trunk (cocoa-nut, date), or, as in the beautiful Palma Real of the Havana, from a smooth, slender, and grass-green shaft, placed like an additional column upon the dark-coloured trunk. In the fan-palms, the crown frequently rests upon a layer of dried leaves, which impart a severe character to the tree.
The form of the trunk also varies greatly; sometimes it is extremely short, as in Chamæropshumilis; and sometimes, as in the ratans, assumes a bush-rope appearance. In some species it is smooth and unarmed, in others rugged or bristling with spines. In the American Yriarteas it rests upon a number of roots rising above the ground. Thus the Y. exorrhiza, frequently stands upon a dozen or more supports, embracing a circumference of twenty feet; and the Y. ventricosa is still more curious, as the spindle-shaped trunk, which at both ends is scarce a foot thick, swells in the middle to a threefold diameter, and, from its convenient form, is frequently used by the Indians for the construction of their canoes.
The form and colour of the fruits is also extremely various. What a difference between the large double nuts of the Lodoicea and the date-- between the egg-shaped fruits of the Mauritia, whose scaly rind gives them the appearance of fir-cones, and the gold and purple peaches of the Pirijao, hanging in colossal clusters of sixty or eighty from the summit of the majestic trunk.
The family of the ferns is spread over the whole earth, but chiefly abounds in the vicinity of the tropics. Most of these plants love the shady and damp ground of the primitive forest, others attach themselves with their roots to rocks or trees. In the equatorial regions several of their species attain arboreal dimensions, with stems from twelve to thirty feet high and extensive crowns of large fronds, imitating the stately tufts of palms. But they do not possess the noble elegance of these kings of the vegetable world; and their stems, of a sombre brown colour, are rather an image of decrepid old age than of the youthful vigour which we admire in the growth of the palms. They do not seem to love the highest temperature of the equator, but rather the milder climate of the mountainous regions near the tropics. Here they frequently stand singly in the thicket, particularly where a waterfall impregnates the air with moisture, or on the borders of sources and ponds. No parasites settle upon them, no bird constructs its nest among their fronds, no quadruped burrows in the mouldy ground where they take root, even the ants disdain to build on their sapless stems, and thus they make the impression of friendless aliens in a convivial group.
XIV. THE CHIEF ESCULENT PLANTS OF THE TORRID ZONE
Rice--Various Aspect of the Rice-fields at different Seasons--The Rice-Bird--Maize--First imported from America by Columbus--Its enormous Productiveness--Its wide zone of Cultivation--Millet, Dhourra--The Bread-Fruit Tree--The Bananas--Their ancient Cultivation--Avaca or Manilla Hemp--Humboldt’s Remarks on the Banana--The Traveller’s Tree of Madagascar--The Cassava Root-- Tapioca--Yams--Batatas--Arrowroot--Taro--Tropical Fruit Trees-- The Chirimoya--The Litchi--The Mangosteen--The Mango.
Of all the cereals there is none that affords food to so vast a multitude as the rice-plant (Oryza sativa), on whose grains from time immemorial the countless millions of south-eastern Asia chiefly subsist. From its primitive seat, on the Ganges or the Sikiang, its cultivation has gradually spread not only over the whole tropical zone, but even far beyond its bounds, as it thrives both in the swamps of South Carolina and in the rich alluvial plains of the Danube and the Po.
Along the low river banks, in the delta-lands which the rains of the tropics annually change into a boundless lake, or where, by artificial embankments, the waters of the mountain streams have been collected into tanks for irrigation, the rice-plant attains its utmost luxuriance of growth, and but rarely deceives the hopes of the husbandmen.
The aspect of the lowland rice-fields of India and its isles is very different at various seasons of the year. Where, in Java, for instance, you see to-day long-legged herons gravely stalking over the inundated plain partitioned by small dykes, or a yoke of indolent buffaloes slowly wading through the mud, you will three or four months later be charmed by the view of a gracefully undulating corn-field, bearing a great resemblance to our indigenous barley. Cords, to which scare-crows are attached traverse the field in every direction, and converge, to a small watch-house, erected on high poles. Here the attentive villager sits, like a spider in the centre of its web, and by pulling the cords, puts them from time to time into motion, whenever the wind is unwilling to undertake the office. Then the grotesque and noisy figures begin to rustle and to caper, and whole flocks of the neat little rice-bird or Java sparrow (Loxia oryzivora), rise on the wing, and hurry off with all the haste of guilty fright. After another month has elapsed, and the waters have long since evaporated or been withdrawn, the harvest takes place, and the rice-fields are enlivened by a motley crowd, for all the villagers, old and young, are busy reaping the golden ears.
The rice-fields offer a peculiarly charming picture when, as in the mountain valleys of Ceylon, they rise in terraces along the slopes. ‘Selecting an angular recess where two hills converge, the Kandyans construct a series of terraces, raised stage above stage, and retiring as they ascend along the slope of the acclivity, up which they are carried as high as the soil extends. Each terrace is furnished with a low ledge in front, behind which the requisite depth of water is retained during the germination of the seed, and what is superfluous is permitted to trickle down to the one below it. In order to carry on this peculiar cultivation the streams are led along the level of the hills, often from a distance of many miles, with a skill and perseverance for which the natives of these mountains have attained a great renown.’
Maize is no less important to the rapidly-growing nations of America than the rice-plant to the followers of Buddh or of Brama. The time when the cereals of the old world were first transplanted from their unknown Asiatic homes is, and ever will be, hidden in legendary obscurity; but the epoch when maize was for the first time seen and tasted by Europeans lies before us in the broad daylight of authentic history. For, when Columbus discovered Cuba, in the year 1492, he found maize cultivated by the Indians, and was equally pleased with the taste of the roasted grains and astonished at their size. In the following year, when he made his triumphant entry into Barcelona, and presented his royal patrons--Ferdinand and Isabella--with specimens of the various productions of the New World, the maize-spikes he laid down before their throne, though but little noticed, were in reality of far greater importance than the heaps of gold which were so falsely deemed to be the richest prizes of his grand discovery. In this manner maize was first conveyed from the New World to Spain, whence its cultivation gradually extended over the tropical and temperate zones of the eastern hemisphere. Round the whole basin of the Mediterranean, maize has found a new home, and its grain now nourishes the Lombard and the Hungarian, as it does the Egyptian fellah or the Syrian peasant.
While our northern cereals only produce a pleasing effect when covering extensive fields, but are individually too insignificant to claim attention, the maize-plant almost reminds the spectator of the lofty Bambusaceæ of the tropical world. Even in our gardens it rises above a man’s height, and in warmer countries not seldom attains the gigantic stature of fourteen feet. Ensiform, dark green, lustrous leaves, somewhat resembling those of the large oarweeds of the northern seas, spring alternately from every joint of this cereal, streaming like pennants and sharply rustling in the wind. The top produces a bunch of male flowers of various colours, which is called the tassel. Each plant likewise bears three or more spikes or ears, proceeding from the stem, at various distances from the ground, and closely enveloped by several thin leaves, forming a sheath, or husk. They consist of a cylindrical substance of the nature of pith, which is called the cobb, and over the entire surface of which the seeds are ranged and fixed, in eight or more straight rows. Each of these has generally as many as thirty or more seeds, and each seed weighs at least as much as five or six grains of wheat or barley. Surely a cereal like this deserves beyond all others to symbolise abundance, and, had it been known to the Greeks, it would beyond all doubt have figured conspicuously in the teeming horn of Amalthea.
In light sandy soils, under the scorching rays of the sun, and in situations where sufficient moisture cannot be obtained for the production of rice, numerous varieties of millet (Sorghum vulgare) are successfully cultivated in many tropical countries--in India, Arabia, the West Indies, in Central Africa, and in Nubia, where it is grown almost to the exclusion of every other esculent plant. Though the seeds are by much the smallest of any of the cereal plants, the number borne upon each stalk is so great as to counterbalance this disadvantage, and to render the cultivation of millet as productive as that of any other grain.
The bread-fruit tree is the great gift of Providence to the fairest isles of Polynesia. No fruit or forest tree in the north of Europe, with the exception of the oak or linden, is its equal in regularity of growth and comeliness of shape; it far surpasses the wild chestnut, which somewhat resembles it in appearance. Its large oblong leaves are deeply lobed like those of the fig-tree, which they resemble not only in colour and consistence, but also in exuding a milky juice when broken. About the time when the sun, advancing towards the Tropic of Capricorn, announces to the Tahitians that summer is approaching, it begins to produce new leaves and young fruits, which commence ripening in October, and may be plucked about eight months long in luxuriant succession. The fruit is about the size and shape of a new-born infant’s head, with a thin skin, and a core about as big as the handle of a small knife. The edible part, which lies between the skin and the core, and is as white as snow, must be roasted before it is eaten; its taste is insipid, with a slight sweetness, somewhat resembling that of the crumb of wheaten bread mixed with boiled potatoes. When the season draws to an end, the last fruits are laid in heaps, and closely covered with leaves. In this state they undergo a fermentation and become disagreeably sweet; the core is then taken out entire, which is done by gently pulling out the stalk, and the rest of the fruit is thrown into a hole, where it undergoes a second fermentation, and becomes sour, after which it will suffer no change for many months. It is taken out of the hole as it is wanted for use, and, being made into balls, it is wrapped up in leaves and baked.
To procure this principal article of their food costs the fortunate South Sea Islanders no more trouble than plucking and preparing it in the manner above described; for, though the tree which produces it does not grow spontaneously, yet, if a man plants but ten of them in his lifetime, which he may do in about an hour, he will, as Cook remarks, ‘as completely fulfil his duty to his own and future generations, as the native of our less genial climate by ploughing in the cold of winter and reaping in the summer’s heat as often as the seasons return.’
Dampier (1688) is the first English writer that mentions the bread-fruit tree, which he found growing in the Ladrones, and a few years later Lord Anson enjoyed its fruits at Tinian, where they contributed to save the lives of his emaciated and scurvy-stricken followers. It continued, however, to remain unnoticed in Europe, until the voyages of Wallis and Cook attracted the attention of the whole civilized world to the fortunate islands, whose inhabitants, instead of gaining their bread by the sweat of their brow, plucked it ready formed from the teeming branches of their groves.
But the wonderful luxuriance of tropical vegetation is perhaps nowhere more conspicuous and surprising than in the magnificent Musaceæ, the banana (Musa sapientum), and the plantain (Musa paradisiaca), whose fruits most probably nourished mankind long before the gifts of Ceres became known. A succulent shaft or stem, rising to the height of fifteen or twenty feet, and frequently two feet in diameter, is formed of the sheath-like leaf-stalks rolled one over the other, and terminating in enormous light-green and glossy blades, ten feet long and two feet broad, of so delicate a tissue that the slightest wind suffices to tear them transversely as far as the middle rib. A stout foot-stalk arising from the centre of the leaves, and reclining over one side of the trunk, supports numerous clusters of flowers, and subsequently a great weight of several hundred fruits about the size and shape of full-grown cucumbers. On seeing the stately plant, one might suppose that many years had been required for its growth; and yet only eight or ten months were necessary for its full development.
Each shaft produces its fruit but once, when it withers and dies; but new shoots spring forth from the root, and, before the year has elapsed, unfold themselves with the same luxuriance. Thus, without any other labour than now and then weeding the field, fruit follows upon fruit, and harvest upon harvest. A single bunch of bananas often weighs from sixty to seventy pounds, and Humboldt has calculated that thirty-three pounds of wheat and ninety-nine pounds of potatoes, require the same space of ground to grow upon as will produce 4,000 pounds of bananas.
This prodigality of Nature, seemingly so favourable to the human race, is however attended with great disadvantages; for where the life of man is rendered too easy, his best powers remain dormant, and he almost sinks to the level of the plant which affords him subsistence without labour. Exertion awakens our faculties as it increases our enjoyments, and well may we rejoice that wheat and not the banana ripens in our fields.
As the seeds of the cultivated plantain and banana never or very rarely come to maturity, they can only be propagated by suckers. ‘In both hemispheres,’ says Humboldt, ‘as far as tradition or history reaches, we find plantains cultivated in the tropical zone. It is as certain that African slaves have introduced, in the course of centuries, varieties of the banana into America, as that before the discovery of Columbus the plantain was cultivated by the aboriginal Indians.
‘These plants are the ornaments of humid countries. Like the farinaceous cereals of the north, they accompany man from the first infancy of his civilisation. Semitical traditions place their original home on the banks of the Euphrates; others, with greater probability, at the foot of the Himalayas. According to the Greek mythology, the plains of Enna were the fortunate birthplace of the cereals; but while the monotonous fields of the latter add but little to the beauty of the northern regions, the tropical husbandman multiplies in the banana one of the noblest forms of vegetable life.’
The Musaceæ are not only useful to man by their mealy, wholesome, and agreeable fruits, but also by the fibres of their long leaf-stalks. Some species furnish filaments for the finest muslin, and the coarse fibres of the Musa textilis, known in trade under the name of Manilla hemp, serve for the preparation of very durable cordage.
To the same family of plants belongs also the traveller-tree of Madagascar (Ravenala speciosa), one of those wonderful sources of refreshment which Nature has provided for the thirsty wanderer in the wilderness. The foot-stalks of the elliptical, alternate leaves embrace the trunk with broad sheathes, in which the dew trickling from their surface is collected. Thus the ravenala, the hollow baobab, the pitcher-plant, and the juicy cactuses, all answer a similar purpose, and it is impossible to say which of them is most to be admired.
Life and death are strangely blended in the Cassava or Mandioca root (Jatropha Manihot); the juice a rapidly destructive poison, the meal a nutritious and agreeable food, which, in tropical America, and chiefly in Brazil, forms a great part of the people’s sustenance. The height to which the cassava attains varies from four to six feet: it rises by a slender, woody, knotted stalk, furnished with alternate palmated leaves, and springs from a woody root, the slender collateral fibres of which swell into those farinaceous parsnip-like masses, for which alone the plant is cultivated. It requires a dry soil, and is not found at a greater elevation than 2,000 feet above the level of the sea. It is propagated by cuttings, which very quickly take root, and in about eight months from the time of their being planted, the tubers will generally be in a fit state to be collected; they may, however, be left in the ground for many months without sustaining any injury. The usual mode of preparing the cassava is to grind the roots after peeling off the dark-coloured rind, to draw out the poisonous juice, and finally to bake the meal into thin cakes on a hot iron hearth. Fortunately the deleterious principle is so volatile as to be entirely dissipated by exposure to heat; for when the root has been cut into small pieces, and exposed during some hours to the direct rays of the sun, cattle may be fed on it with perfect safety. If the recently extracted juice be drunk by cattle or poultry, the animals soon die in convulsions; but if this same liquid is boiled with meat and seasoned, it forms a wholesome and nutritious soup. The Jatropha Janipha, or Sweet Cassava, though very similar to the Manihot or bitter variety, and wholly innocuous, is far less extensively cultivated.
The yam-roots, so frequently mentioned in narratives of travel through the tropical regions, are the produce of two climbing plants--the Dioscorea sativa and alata--with tender stems of from eighteen to twenty feet in length, and smooth sharp-pointed leaves on long foot-stalks, from the base of which arise spikes of small flowers. The roots of the D. sativa are flat and palmated, about a foot in breadth, white within and externally of a dark brown colour, those of the D. alata, are still larger, being frequently about three feet long, and weighing about thirty pounds. Both kinds are cultivated like the common potato, which they resemble in taste, though of a closer texture.
The Dioscoreæ are natives of South Asia, and are supposed to have been thence transplanted to the West Indies, as they have never been found growing wild in any part of America; while in the island of Ceylon, and on the coast of Malabar, they flourish in the woods with spontaneous and luxurious growth.
The Spanish or Sweet Potato (Convolvulus Batatas), commonly cultivated in the tropical climates both of the eastern and the western hemispheres, is an herbaceous perennial, which sends out many trailing stalks, extending six or eight feet every way, and putting forth at each joint roots which in a genial climate grow to be very large tubers, so that from a single plant forty or fifty large roots are produced. The leaves are angular and stand on long petioles, the flowers are purple. The batata is propagated by laying down the young shoots in the spring; indeed in its native climate it multiplies almost spontaneously, for if the branches of roots that have been pulled up are suffered to remain on the ground, and a shower of rain falls soon after, their vegetation will recommence.
Arrowroot is chiefly obtained from two different plants--the Marantha arundinacea and the Tacca pinnatifida. The former a native of South America, is an herbaceous perennial and is propagated by parting the roots. It rises to the height of two or three feet, has broad pointed leaves, and is crowned by a spike of small white flowers. It is much cultivated, both for domestic use and for exportation in the West Indies, and in some parts of Hindostan. The arrowroot is obtained by first pounding the long stalky roots in a large wooden mortar, and pouring a quantity of water over them. After the whole has been agitated for some time, the starch, separated from the fibres, collects at the bottom of the vessel, and, having been cleansed by repeated washing, is dried in the sun.
The Tacca pinnatifida, likewise an herbaceous plant with pinnated leaves, an umbelliform blossom, and large potato-like roots, is scattered over most of the South Sea Islands. It is not cultivated in the Hawaiian group, but found growing wild in abundance in the more elevated districts, where it is satisfied with the most meagre soil, and sprouts forth among the lava blocks of those volcanic islands. Arrowroot is prepared from this plant in the same manner as from the West Indian Marantha, but, as the improvident Polynesians only think of digging it out of the earth, and never give themselves the trouble of replanting the small and useless tubers, its quantity has very much diminished.
The Caladium esculentum, an aquatic plant, furnishes the large Taro roots which, boiled to a thick paste, form the chief food of the Sandwich Islanders, and are extensively cultivated in many other groups of the South Seas. It grows like rice on a marshy ground, the large sagittated leaves rise on high foot-stalks, immediately springing from the root, and are likewise very agreeable to the taste, but are more seldom eaten, as they are used for propagation. Severed from the root, they merely require to be planted in the mud to produce after six months a new harvest of roots. The growth is so abundant that 1,500 persons can live upon the produce of a single square mile, so that supposing the United Kingdom to be one vast taro-field, its surface would be able to nourish about two thousand millions of souls.
As there is a mountain-rice which thrives without artificial irrigation, there is also a mountain-taro (Caladium cristatum), which resembles the former in general appearance, but prefers a more dry and elevated soil. Although the plant grows wild both in the Society and Marquesas Islands, yet Pitcairn’s Island was the only spot where Mr. Bennett saw it cultivated.
But the possession of a plant which furnishes so much food with so little labour, can hardly be considered as a benefit for the Sandwich Islanders, whose natural indolence is too much encouraged by the abundance it creates. The Hawaiian constantly sees before his eyes the coffee-groves and sugar-plantations, the cotton and indigo fields, which, cultivated by Chinese coolies, amply reward the enterprise of the European and American settlers in his native land, and yet he saunters by, too indolent even to stretch out his hand and gather the berries from the trees.
It may easily be imagined that the tropical sun, which distils so many costly juices and fiery spices in indescribable multiplicity and abundance, must also produce a variety of fruits. But man has as yet done but little to improve by care and art these gifts of Nature, and, with rare exceptions, the delicious flavour for which our native fruits are indebted to centuries of cultivation, is found wanting in those of the torrid zone. In our gardens Pomona appears in the refined garb of civilisation, while in the tropics she still shows herself as a savage beauty, requiring the aid of culture for the full development of her attractions.
Yet there are exceptions to the rule, and among others the Peruvian Chirimoya (Anona tripetala) is vaunted by travellers in such terms of admiration that it can hardly be inferior to and probably surpasses, the most exquisite fruits of European growth. Hänke calls it, in one of his letters, a masterpiece of Nature, and Tschudi says that its taste is quite incomparable. It grows to perfection at Huanuco, where it attains a weight of from fourteen to sixteen pounds. The fruit is generally heart-shaped, with the broad base attached to the branch. The rind is green, covered with small tubercles and scales, and encloses a snow-white, juicy pulp, with many black kernels. Both the fruit and the blossoms exhale a delightful odour. The tree is about twenty feet high, and has a broad dull green crown.
In the eastern hemisphere, the litchi, the mangosteen, and the mango enjoy the highest reputation.
The Litchi (Nephelium Litchi), a small insignificant tree, with lanceolate leaves, and small greenish-white flowers, is a native of China and Cochin-China, but its cultivation has spread over the East and the West Indies. The plum-like scarlet fruit is generally eaten by the Chinese to their tea, but it is also dried in ovens and exported. In order to obtain the fruit in perfection, for the use of the Imperial Court, the trees, as soon as they blossom, are conveyed from Canton to Pekin on rafts, at a very great trouble and expense, so that the plums may just be ripe on their arrival in the northern capital.
The beautiful Mangosteen (Garcinia Mangostana), a native of the Moluccas, and thence transplanted to Java, Siam, the Philippines, and Ceylon, resembles at a distance the citron-tree, and bears large flowers like roses. The dark brown capsular fruit, about the size of a small apple, is described as of unequalled flavour--juicy and aromatic, like a mixture of strawberries, raspberries, grapes, and oranges. It is said that the patient who has lost an appetite for everything else still relishes the mangosteen, and that the case is perfectly hopeless when he refuses even this.
The stately Mango (Mangifera indica) bears beautiful girandoles of flowers, followed by large plum-like fruits, of which, however, but four or five ripen on each branch. More than forty varieties are grown at Kew, the finest of which are reserved for the Queen’s table. From Ceylon, its original seat, the mango has been transplanted far and wide over the torrid zone.
XV. SUGAR, COFFEE, CACAO, COCA
Progress of the Sugar Cane throughout the Tropical Zone--The Tahitian Sugar Cane--The enemies of the Sugar Cane--The Sugar-harvest--The Coffee Tree--Its cultivation and enemies--The Cacao Tree and the Vanilla--The Coca Plant--Wonderful strengthening Effects of Coca, and fatal consequences of its Abuse.
Sugar is undoubtedly one of the most valuable products of the vegetable world, and may be said with truth to be only surpassed in importance by the nourishing meal of the cereals, or the textile fibres of the cotton-plant. Our garden fruit owes its agreeable taste to the sugar which the ripening sun developes in its juices. The sap of many a plant--the palm, the birch, the maple, the American agave--is rendered useful to man by the sugar it contains. It is this substance which imparts sweetness to the honey gathered by bees from flowers, and, after undergoing fermentation, changes the juice of the grape into delicious wine.
But although sugar is of almost universal occurrence throughout the vegetable world, yet few plants contain it in such abundance as to render its extraction profitable; and even the beet-root requires high protective duties to be able to compete with the tropical sugar-cane, a member of the extensive family of the grasses. The original home of this plant--for which, doubtless, the lively fancy of the ancient Greeks, had they been better acquainted with it, would have invented a peculiar god, as for the vine or the cereals--was most probably south-eastern Asia, where the Chinese seem to have been the first people that learnt the art to multiply it by culture.
From China its cultivation spread westwards to India and Arabia, and the conquests of Alexander the Great, first made Europe acquainted with the sweet-juiced cane, while sugar itself had long before been imported by the Phœnicians as a rare production of the Eastern world.
During the dark ages which followed the fall of the Roman Empire, all previous knowledge of the Oriental sugar-plant became lost, until the Crusades, and, still more, the revival of commerce in Venice and Genoa re-opened the ancient intercourse between the Eastern and the Western world. From Egypt, where the cultivation of the sugar-cane had meanwhile been introduced, it now extended to the Morea, to Rhodes, and Malta; and at the beginning of the twelfth century we find it growing in Italy, on the sultry plains at the foot of Mount Etna.
After the discovery of Madeira by the Portuguese, in the year 1419, the first colonists added the vine of Cyprus and the Sicilian sugar-cane to the indigenous productions of that lovely island; and both succeeded so well as to become, after a few years, the objects of a lively trade with the mother country.
Yet, in spite of this extension of its culture, the importance of sugar as an article of international trade continued to be very limited, until the discovery of tropical America[18] by Columbus opened a new world to commerce. As early as the year 1506 the sugar-cane was transplanted from the Canary Islands to Hispaniola, where its culture, favoured by the fertility of a virgin soil and the heat of a tropical sun, was soon found to be so profitable that it became the chief occupation of the European settlers. The Portuguese, in their turn, conveyed the cane to Brazil; from Hispaniola it spread over the other West Indian Islands; thence wandered to the Spanish main, and followed Pedrarias and Pizarro to the shores of the Pacific. Unfortunately, a dark shade obscures its triumphal march, as its cultivation was the chief cause which entailed the curse of negro slavery on some of the fairest regions of the globe.
Towards the middle of the last century, the Chinese or Oriental sugar-cane had thus multiplied to an amazing extent over both hemispheres, when the introduction of the Tahitian variety, which was found to attain a statelier growth, to contain more sugar, and to ripen in a shorter time, began to dispossess it of its old domains. This new and superior plant is now universally cultivated in all the sugar-growing European colonies; and if Cook’s voyages had produced no other benefit than making the world acquainted with the Tahitian sugar-cane, they would for this alone deserve to be reckoned by the political economist among the most successful and important ever performed by man.
The sugar-cane bears a great resemblance to the common reed, but the blossom is different. It has a knotty stalk, frequently rising to the height of fourteen feet, and produces at each joint a long, pointed, and sharply serrated leaf or blade. The joints in one stalk are from forty to sixty in number, and the stalks rising from one root are sometimes very numerous. A field of canes, when agitated by a light breeze, affords one of the most pleasing sights, particularly when, towards the period of their maturity, the golden plants appear crowned with plumes of silvery feathers, delicately fringed with a lilac dye.
The sugar-cane is liable to be destroyed by many enemies. Sometimes herds of monkeys come down from the mountains by night, and having posted sentinels to give the alarm if anything approaches, destroy incredible quantities of the cane by their gambols as well as their greediness. It is in vain to set traps for these creatures, however baited; and the only way to protect a plantation and destroy them, is to set a numerous watch, well armed with fowling-pieces, and furnished with dogs.
The rat, which the extension of commerce has gradually spread over the world, is still more destructive to the sugar-cane, and great pains are taken to keep it in check by poison or by its arch-enemy the cat.
The sugar-cane is also subject to the blast--a disease which no foresight can obviate, and for which human wisdom has hitherto in vain attempted to find a remedy. When this happens, the fine broad green blades become sickly, dry, and withered; soon after they appear stained in spots, and if these are carefully examined, they will be found to contain countless eggs of an insect like a bug, which are soon quickened, and cover the plants with vermin; the juice of the canes thus affected becomes sour, and no future shoot issues from the joints. The ravages of the ants concur with those of the bugs in ruining the prospects of many a sugar-field, and often a long continued drought or the fury of the tornado will destroy the hopes of the planter.
The land crabs are also very injurious to the sugar-fields, some of the species being particularly fond of the cane, the juice of which they suck and chiefly subsist on. They are of course narrowly watched, and no opportunity of catching them is lost sight of; but such is their activity in running, that they are almost always enabled to escape. They seldom go far from their burrows in day-time; and their watchfulness is such that they regain them in a moment, and disappear as soon as a man or dog comes near enough to be seen.
Harvest-time in the sugar-plantations is no less a season of gladness than in the corn-fields of England. So palatable, wholesome, and nourishing is the fresh juice of the cane, that every animal drinking freely of it derives health and vigour from its use. The meagre and sickly among the negroes exhibit a surprising alteration in a few weeks after the mill is set in action. The labouring oxen, horses, and mules, though almost constantly at work during this season, yet being indulged with plenty of the green tops and some of the scummings from the boiling-house, improve more than at any other period of the year. Even the pigs and poultry fatten on the refuse, and enjoy their share of the banquet. The wholesome effects of the juice of the sugar-cane has not escaped the attention of English physicians, and many a weak-breasted patient, instead of coughing and freezing at home over what is ironically termed a comfortable fireside, now spends his winter in the West Indian Islands, chewing the sweet cane and enjoying in January a genial warmth of seventy-two degrees in the shade.
The mountain regions of Enarea and Caffa, which the reader, on consulting a map of Africa, will find situated to the south of Abyssinia, are most probably the countries where the coffee-tree was first planted by Nature, as it has here not only been cultivated from time immemorial, but is everywhere found growing wild in the forests.
Here also the art of preparing a beverage from its berries seems to have been first discovered. Arabic authors inform us that about four hundred years ago, a learned mufti of Aden, having become acquainted with its virtues on a journey to the opposite shore of Africa, recommended it on his return to the dervises of his convent as an excellent means for keeping awake during their devotional exercises. The example of these holy men brought coffee into vogue, and its use spreading from tribe to tribe, and from town to town, finally reached Meccah about the end of the fifteenth century. There fanaticism endeavoured to oppose its progress, and in 1511 a council of theologians condemned it as being contrary to the law of Mahomet, on account of its intoxicating like wine, and sentenced the culprit who should be found indulging in his cup of coffee to be led about the town on the back of an ass. The sultan of Egypt, however, who happened to be a great coffee-drinker himself, convoked a new assembly of the learned, who declared its use to be not only innocent but healthy; and thus coffee advanced rapidly from the Red Sea and the Nile to Syria, and from Asia Minor to Constantinople, where the first coffee-house was opened in 1554, and soon called forth a number of rival establishments. But here also the zealots began to murmur at the mosques being neglected for the attractions of the ungodly coffee divans, and declaimed against it from the Koran, which positively says that coal is not of the number of things created by God for good. Accordingly the mufti ordered the coffee-houses to be closed; but his successor declaring coffee not to be coal, unless when over-roasted, they were allowed to re-open, and ever since the most pious mussulman drinks his coffee without any scruples of conscience. The commercial intercourse with the Levant could not fail to make Europe acquainted with this new source of enjoyment. In 1652, Pasquia, a Greek, opened the first coffee-house in London, and twenty years later the first French cafés were established in Paris and Marseilles.
As the demand for coffee continually increased, the small province of Yemen, the only country which at that time supplied the market, could no longer produce a sufficient quantity, and the high price of the article naturally prompted the European governments to introduce the cultivation of so valuable a plant into their colonies. The islands of Mauritius and Bourbon took the lead in 1718, and Batavia followed in 1723. Some years before, a few plants had been sent to Amsterdam, one of which found its way to Marly, where it was multiplied by seeds. Captain Descleux, a French naval officer, took some of these young coffee-plants with him to Martinique, desirous of adding a new source of wealth to the resources of the colony. The passage was very tedious and stormy; water began to fail, and all the gods seemed to conspire against the introduction of the coffee-tree into the New World. But Descleux patiently endured the extremity of thirst that his tender shoots might not droop for want of water, and succeeded in safely bringing over one single plant, the parent stock whence all the vast coffee-plantations of America are said to have derived their origin.
On examining the present state of coffee-production throughout the world, we find that the European markets obtain their chief supplies from Brazil, Java, Ceylon, and the West Indies; but with regard to quality, Mocha coffee, though comparatively insignificant in point of quantity, is still prominent in flavour and aroma.
When left to the free growth of nature, the coffee-tree attains a height of from fifteen to twenty feet; in the plantations, however, the tops are generally cut off in order to promote the growth of the lower branches, and to facilitate the gathering of the crop. Its leaves are opposite, evergreen, and not unlike those of the bay-tree; its blossoms are white, sitting on short foot-stalks, and resembling the flower of the jasmine. The fruit which succeeds is a green berry, ripening into red, of the size and form of a large cherry, and having a pale, insipid, and somewhat glutinous pulp, enclosing two hard and oval seeds or beans, which are too well known to require any further description.
The seeds are known to be ripe when the berries assume a dark red colour, and if not then gathered, will drop from the trees.
To be cultivated to advantage, the coffee-tree requires a climate where the mean temperature of the year amounts to 68°, and where the thermometer never falls below 55°. It is by nature a forest tree requiring shade and moisture, and thus it is necessary to screen it from the scorching rays of the sun by planting rows of umbrageous trees at certain intervals throughout the field. These also serve to protect it from the sharp winds which would injure the blossoms. It cannot bear either excessive heat or a long-continued drought, and where rain does not fall in sufficient quantity, artificial irrigation must supply it with the necessary moisture.
In Java the zone of the coffee-plantations extends between 3,000 and 4,000 feet above the level of the sea; and the primitive forest is constantly receding before them. Frequently, on felling the woods, a part of the original trees is left standing to shade the tender coffee-plants; but oftener the rows are made to alternate with those of the sheltering dadab. Thus a new and luxuriant grove replaces the old thicket of nature’s planting. Straight paths, kept carefully clean, lead through the dense, dark green shrubbery, under whose thick cover the wild cock hastily retreats when surprised by the wanderer. When the trees are in flower, the branches seem to bend under a weight of snow, from the number of dazzling white blossoms, which form a pleasing contrast to the dark and lustrous foliage, while high above, the dadabs extend their airy crowns, whose light green leaves are agreeably interspersed with flowers of a brilliant red. A few months later, when the fruits are ripening into carmine a scene of the most bustling animation ensues, for old and young are busily employed in plucking the swelling berries, and hurrying with filled baskets to the nearest pulping mill.
In Ceylon the native woodmen are singularly expert in felling forest trees preparatory to the cultivation of coffee. Turning to advantage the luxuriance of tropical vegetation, which lashes together whole forests by a maze of interlacing climbers as firm and massy as the cables of a line-of-battle ship, their practice in steep and mountainous places is to cut half-way through each stem in succession, till an area of some acres in extent is prepared for the final overthrow. They then sever some tall group on the eminence, and allow it in its decent to precipitate itself on those below, when the whole expanse is in one moment brought headlong to the ground, the falling timber forcing down those beneath it by its weight, and dragging those behind to which it is harnessed. The crash occasioned by this startling operation is so loud that it is audible for two or three miles in the clear and still atmosphere of the hills.
Like the sugar-cane, or indeed any other plant cultivated by man, the coffee-tree is exposed to the ravages of many enemies. Wild cats, monkeys, and squirrels prey upon the ripening berries, and hosts of caterpillars feed upon the leaves. Since 1847 the Ceylon plantations have been several times invaded by swarms of the Golunda, a species of rat which inhabits the forests, making its nest among the roots of the trees, and, like the lemmings of Lapland, migrating in vast numbers when the seeds of the nillo-shrub (Strobilanthes), its ordinary food, are exhausted. ‘In order to reach the buds and blossoms of the coffee, the Golunda eats such slender branches as would not sustain its weight, and feeds as they fall to the ground; and so delicate and sharp are its incisors, that the twigs thus destroyed are detached by as clean a cut as if severed with a knife.’[19]
Another great enemy of the Ceylon planters is the Lecanium Coffeæ, a species of coccus, which establishes itself on young shoots and buds, covering them with a noisome incrustation of scales, from the influence of which the fruit shrivels and drops off. A great part of the crop is sometimes lost, and on many trees not a single berry forms from the invasion of this insect plague.
Theobroma,--food for gods,--the Greek name given by Linnæus to the cacao or chocolate tree, sufficiently proves how highly he valued the flavour of its seeds.
Indigenous in Mexico, it had long been in extensive cultivation before the arrival of the Spaniards, who found the beverage which the Indians prepared from its beans so agreeable that they reckoned it among the most pleasing fruits of their conquest, and lost no time in making their European friends acquainted with its use. From Mexico they transplanted it into their other dependencies, so that in America its present range of cultivation extends from 20° N. lat. to Guayaquil and Bahia. It has even been introduced into Africa and Asia, in return for the many useful trees that have been imported from the Old into the New World. The cacao-tree seldom rises above the height of twenty feet; its leaves are large, oblong, and pointed. The flowers, which are of a pale red colour, grow on the stem and larger branches, and spring even from the roots. ‘Never,’ says Humboldt, ‘shall I forget the deep impression made upon me by the luxuriance of tropical vegetation on first, seeing a cacao-plantation. After a damp night, large blossoms of the theobroma issue from the root at a considerable distance from the trunk, emerging from the deep black mould. A more striking example of the expansive powers of life can hardly be met with in organic nature.’ The fruits are large, oval, pointed pods, about five or six inches long, and containing in five compartments from twenty to forty beans.
The trees are raised from seed, generally in places screened from the wind. As they are incapable of bearing the scorching rays of the sun, particularly when young, bananas, maize, manioc, and other broad-leaved plants are sown between their rows, under whose shade they enjoy the damp and sultry heat which is indispensable to their growth, for the Theobroma Cacao is essentially tropical, and requires a warmer climate than the coffee-tree or the sugar-cane.
Two years after having been sown, the plant attains a height of three feet, and sends forth many branches, of which however but four or five are allowed to remain. The first fruits appear in the third year, but the tree does not come into full bearing before it is six or seven years old, and from that time forward it continues to yield abundant crops of beans during more than twenty years. When an Indian can get a few thousand cacao-trees planted, he passes an idle, quiet, contented life; all he has to do is to weed under the trees two or three times in the year, and to gather and dry the seeds in the sun.
Cacao is chiefly used under the form of chocolate. The beans are roasted, finely ground, so as to convert them into a perfectly smooth paste, and improved in flavour by the addition of spices, such as the sweet-scented vanilla, a short notice of which will not be out of place.
Like our parasitical ivy, the Vanilla aromatica, a native of torrid America, climbs the summits of the highest forest-trees, or creeps along the moist rock crevices on the banks of rivulets.
The stalk, which is about as thick as a finger, bears at each joint a lanceolate and ribbed leaf, twelve inches long and three inches broad. The large flowers which fill the forest with their delicious odours, are white intermixed with stripes of red and yellow, and are succeeded by long and slender pods containing many seeds imbedded in a thick oily and balsamic pulp. These pods seldom ripen in the wild state, for the dainty monkey knows no greater delicacy, and his agility in climbing almost always enables him to anticipate man.
At present the vanilla is cultivated not only in Mexico, but in Java, where the industrious Dutch have acclimatised it since 1819. It is planted under shady trees on a damp ground, and grows luxuriantly; but as a thousand blossoms on an average produce but one pod, it must always remain a rare and costly spice.
Although but little known beyond the confines of its native country, Coca is beyond all doubt one of the most remarkable productions of the tropical zone.
The sultry valleys on the eastern slopes of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes are the seat of the Erythroxylon Coca, which, like the coffee-tree, bears a lustrous green foliage, and white blossoms ripening into small scarlet berries. The leaves when brittle enough to break on being bent, are stripped from the plant, dried in the sun, and closely packed in sacks. The naked shrub soon gets covered with new foliage, and after three or four months its leaves are ready for a second plucking, though in some of the higher mountain-valleys it can only be stripped once a year. Like the coffee-tree, the coca-shrub thrives only in a damp situation, under shelter from the sun; and for this reason maize, which rapidly shoots up, is generally sown between the rows of the young plants.
The local consumption of coca is immense, as the Peruvian Indian reckons its habitual use among the prime necessaries of life, and is never seen without a leathern pouch filled with a provision of the leaves, and containing besides a small box of powdered unslaked lime. At least three times a day he rests from his work to chew his indispensable coca. Carefully taking a few leaves out of the bag, and removing their midribs, he first masticates them in the shape of a small ball, which is called an acullico; then repeatedly inserting a thin piece of moistened wood like a toothpick into the box of unslaked lime, he introduces the powder which remains attached to it into the acullico until the latter has acquired the requisite flavour. The saliva, which is abundantly secreted while chewing the pungent mixture, is mostly swallowed along with the green juice of the plant.
When the acullico is exhausted, another is immediately prepared, for one seldom suffices. The corrosive sharpness of the unslaked lime requires some caution, and an unskilled coca-chewer runs the risk of burning his lips, as, for instance, the celebrated traveller Tschudi, who, by the advice of his muleteer, while crossing the high mountain-passes of the Andes, attempted to make an acullico, and instead of strengthening himself as he expected, merely added excruciating pain to the fatigues of the journey.
The taste of coca is slightly bitter and aromatic, like that of bad green tea, but the addition of lime, or of the sharp ashes of the quinoa, renders it less disagreeable to the European palate.
It is a remarkable fact that the Indians who regularly use coca require but little food, and when the dose is augmented are able to undergo the greatest fatigues without tasting almost anything else. Professor Pöppig ascribes this astonishing increase of endurance to a momentary excitement, which must necessarily be succeeded by a corresponding collapse, and therefore considers the use of coca absolutely hurtful. Tschudi, however, is of opinion that its moderate consumption, far from being injurious, is, on the contrary, extremely wholesome, and cites the examples of several Indians who, never allowing a day to pass without chewing their coca, attained the truly patriarchal age of one hundred and thirty years. The ordinary food of these people consists almost exclusively of roasted maize or barley, which is eaten dry without any other addition: and the obstinate obstructions caused by these mealy aliments are obviated by the tonic effects of the coca, which thus removes the cause of many maladies.
Tschudi often found coca the best preservative against the asthmatic symptoms which are produced by the rapid ascension of high mountains. While hunting in the Puna, 14,000 feet above the level of the sea, he always drank a strong infusion of coca before starting, and was then able to climb among the rocks, and to pursue his game, without any greater difficulty in breathing than would have been the case upon the coast.
If the moderate use of coca is thus beneficial in many respects, its abuse is attended with the same deplorable consequences as those which are observed in the oriental opium-eaters and smokers, or in our own incorrigible drunkards.
The confirmed coca-chewer, or coquero, is known at once by his uncertain step, his sallow complexion, his hollow, lack-lustre black-rimmed eyes, deeply sunk in the head, his trembling lips, his incoherent speech, and his stolid apathy. His character is irresolute, suspicious, and false; in the prime of life, he has all the appearances of senility, and in later years sinks into complete idiocy. Avoiding the society of man, he seeks the dark forest, or some solitary ruin, and there, for days together, indulges in his pernicious habit. While under the influence of coca, his excited fancy riots in the strangest visions, now revelling in pictures of ideal beauty, and then haunted by dreadful apparitions. Secure from intrusion, he crouches in an obscure corner, his eyes immovably fixed upon one spot; and the almost automatic motion of the hand raising the coca to the mouth, and its mechanical chewing, are the only signs of consciousness which he exhibits. Sometimes a deep groan escapes from his breast, most likely when the dismal solitude around him inspires his imagination with some terrific vision, which he is as little able to banish as voluntarily to dismiss his dreams of ideal felicity. How the coquero finally awakens from his trance, Tschudi was never able to ascertain, though most likely the complete exhaustion of his supply at length forces him to return to his miserable hut.
No historical record informs us when the use of the coca was introduced, or who first discovered the hidden virtues of its leaves. When Pizarro destroyed the empire of Atahualpa he found that it played an important part in the religious rites of the Incas, and that it was used in all public ceremonies, either for fumigation or as an offering to the gods. The priests chewed coca while performing their rites, and the favour of the invisible powers was only to be obtained by a present of these highly valued leaves. No work begun without coca could come to a happy termination, and divine honours were paid to the shrub itself.
After a period of more than three centuries, Christianity has not yet been able to eradicate these deeply-rooted superstitious feelings, and everywhere the traveller still meets with traces of the ancient belief in its mysterious powers. To the present day, the miners of Cerro de Pasco throw chewed coca against the hard veins of the ore, and affirm that they can then be more easily worked,--a custom transmitted to them from their forefathers, who were fully persuaded that the Coyas or subterranean divinities rendered the mountains impenetrable unless previously propitiated by an offering of coca. Even now the Indians put coca into the mouths of their dead, to insure them a welcome on their passage to another world; and whenever they find one of their ancestral mummies, they never fail to offer it some of the leaves.
During the first period after the conquest of Peru, the Spaniards endeavoured to extirpate by all possible means the use of coca, from its being so closely interwoven with the Indian superstitions; but the proprietors of the mines soon became aware how necessary it was for the successful prosecution of their undertakings; the planters also found after a time that the Indians would not work without it; private interest prevailed, as it always does in the long run, over religious zeal and despotic interdictions, and in the last century we even find a Jesuit, Don Antonio Julian, regretting that the use of coca had not been introduced into Europe as well as that of tea and coffee.
When we consider its remarkable properties, it is indeed astonishing that it has so long remained unnoticed. Were it concealed in the interior of Africa, or extremely difficult to procure, this neglect could be more easily accounted for; but hundreds of our vessels annually frequent the harbours of Peru and Bolivia, where it may be obtained in large quantities, and yet its tonic and stimulating powers are but just beginning to attract the attention of the medical world.