All along the beach here, and in the adjacent strip of
sandy lowland, is a remarkable display of Pandanacese or
Screw-pines. Some are like hnge branching candelabra,
iorty or fifty feet high, and bearing at the end of each
branch a tuft of immense sword-shaped leaves, six or eight
inches wide, and as many feet long. Others have a single
unbranched stem, six or seven feet high, the upper part
clothed with the spirally arranged leaves, and bearing a
single terminal fruit as large as a swan’s egg. Others of
intermediate size have irfegulaf clusters of rough red
fruits, and all1 have more 01* less- spiny-edged leaves and
ringed stems. The young plants of the larger species
have smooth1 glossy thick leaves, sometimes ten feet
long and eight inches wide, which are used all over
the Moluccas1 and Hew Guinea, to1 make “ cocoyas ”
or sleeping mats, which are often1 very prettily ornamented
with coloured patterns. Higher up on the hill is
a forest of immense trees, among which those producing
the resin called1 dammar (Dkmmara sp.) are abundant.
The inhabitants of several small villages in Batchian are
entirely engaged in searching for this product,- and making
it into torches by pounding it and filling it into tubes of
palm leaves about a yard long, which are the only lights
used by many of the natives. Sometimes the dammar
accumulates in large masses of ten or twenty pounds
weight, either attached to the trunk, or found buried in the
ground at the foot of the trees. The © most extraordinary
trees of the forest are, however, a kind of fig, the aerial
roots of which form a pyramid near a hundred feet high,
terminating just where the tree branches out above, so that
there is no real trunk. This pyramid or cone is formed of
roots of every size, mostly descending in straight lines, but
more or less obliquely—and so crossing each other, and
connected by cross branches, which grow from one to
another; as to form a dense and complicated network, to
which nothing but a photograph could do justice (see illustration
at Vol. I. page 130). The Kanary is also abundant
in this forest, the nut of which has a very agreeable
flavour, and produces an excellent oil. The fleshy outer
covering of the nut is tbe favourite food of the great green
pigeons of these islands (Garpophaga perspicillata), and
their hoarse cooings and heavy flutterings among the
branches can be almost continually heard.
After ten days at Langundi, finding it impossible to get
the bird I was particularly in search of (the Hicobar
pigeon, or a new species allied to it), and finding no new
birds, and very few insects, I left early on the morning of
April 1st, and in the evening entered a river on the main
island of Batchian (Langundi, like Kasserota, being on a
distinct island), where some Malays and Galela men have a
small village, and have made extensive rice-fields and plantain
grounds. Here we found a good house near the river