MALAY SKETCHES
heat and excessive moisture of this forcing tropical climate. No rocks, no bare hills, no arid plains, everything covered with vegetation: new graves look old in a month, the buildings of a year, for all their seeming, might have stood for half a century.
Only at our feet does the hand of man make any mark on the landscape. There, amid trees and gardens, nestle the red roofs of Taiping. You might cover the place with a tablecloth for all its many inhabitants, its long wide streets, open spaces, and public buildings.
And those pools of water all around the town, what are those?
They are abandoned tin-mines, alluvial workings from which the ore has been removed, and water mercifully covers, in part, this desolation of gaping holes and upturned sand.
The shore, due west and distant some twenty miles from the foot of the range on which we stand, is deeply indented by three great bays, They are the mouths of three rivers, short, shallow and insignificant in themselves ; it is difficult to understand why they should make such an imposing entry on the sea. A mile or two inland from the coast the eye is caught by twenty little lakes, on which the
sun loves to linger, burnishing them to gold when
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