obtained an insect which I had hoped hut hardly expected
to meet with—the magnificent Papilio androcles,
one of the largest and rarest known swallow-tailed
butterflies. During my four days’ stay at the falls I was
so fortunate as to obtain six good specimens. As this
beautiful creature flies,-the long white tails flicker like
streamers, and when settled on the beach it carries them
raised upwards, as if to preserve them from injury. It is
scarce even here, as I did not see more than a dozen
specimens in all, and had to follow many of them up and
down the river’s bank repeatedly before I succeeded in
their capture. When the sun shone hottest about noon,
the moist beach of the pool below the upper fall presented
a beautiful sight, being dotted with groups of gay butterflies,—
orange, yellow, white, blue, and green,—which on
being disturbed rose into the air by hundreds, forming
clouds of variegated colours.
Such gorges, chasms, and precipices as here abound, I
have nowhere seen in the Archipelago. A sloping surface
is scarcely anywhere to be found, huge walls and rugged
masses of rock terminating all the mountains and inclosing
the valleys. In many parts there are vertical or even
overhanging precipices five or six hundred feet high, yet
■completely clothed with a tapestry of vegetation. Ferns,
Pandanaceae, shrubs, creepers, and even forest trees, are
mingled in an evergreen network/through the interstices
of which appéars the white limestone rock or the dark
holes and chasms with which it abounds. These precipices
are enabled to sustain such an amount of vegetation by
their peculiar structure. Their surfaces are very irregular,
broken into holes and fissures, with ledges overhanging
the mouths of gloomy caverns; but from each projecting
part have descended stalactites, often forming a wild gothic
tracery over the caves and receding hollows, and affording
an admirable support to the roots of the shrubs, trees, and
creepers, which luxuriate in the warm pure atmosphere
and the gentle moisture which constantly exudes from the
rocks. In places where the precipice offers smooth surfaces
of solid rock, it remains quite bare, or only stained
with lichens and dotted with clumps of ferns that grow
on the small ledges and in the minutest crevices.
The reader who is familiar with tropical nature only
through the medium of books and botanical gardens, will
picture to himself in such a spot many other natural
beauties! He will think that I have unaccountably forgotten
to mention the brilliant flowers^ which, in gorgeous
masses of crimson gold or azure, must spangle these
verdant precipices, hang over the cascade, and adorn the
margin of the mountain stream. But what is the reality ?
In vain did I gaze over these vast walls of verdure, among
the pendant creepers and bushy shrubs, all around the
cascade, on the river’s'bank, or in the deep caverns and
B B 2