The Golden Chersonese and The Way Thither, page 180 by Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
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ts rejoices the eye by its form or color; but things which hurt and sting and may kill, lurk amidst all the beauties. A creeping plant with very beautiful waxy leaves, said by Captain Murray to be vanilla, grows up many of the trees.
When we got up to the top of this, which the Resident calls "Plantation Hill," I was well pleased to find that only the undergrowth had been cleared away, and that "The Sanitarium" consists only of a cabin with a single room divided into two, and elevated on posts like a Malay house. The deep veranda which surrounds it is reached by a stepladder. A smaller house could hardly be, or a more picturesque one, from the steepness and irregularity of its roof. The cook-house is a small attap shed, in a place cut into the hill, and an inclosure of attap screens with a barrel in it under the house is the bath-room. The edge of the hill, from which a few trees have been cleared, is so steep that but for a bamboo rail one might slip over upon the tree-tops below. Some Liberian coffee shrubs, some tea, cinchona, and ipecacuanha, and some heartless English cabbages, are being grown on the hillside, and the Resident hopes that the State will have a great future of coffee.
The view in all directions was beautiful--to the north a sea of densely wooded mountains with indigo shadows in their hollows; to the south the country we had threaded on the Linggi river, forests, and small tapioca clearings, little valleys where rice is growing, and scars where tin- mining is going on; the capital, the little town of Serambang with its larger clearings, and to the west the gleam of the shining sea. In the absence of mosquitoes we were able to sit out till after dark, a rare luxury. There was a gorgeous sunset of the gory, furnace kind, which one only sees in the tropics--waves of violet light rolling up over the mainland, and the low Sumatran coast looking like a purple cloud amidst the fiery haze.
Dinner was well cooked, and served with coffee after it, just as at home. The primitive bath-