264 NOTES WRITTEN ON A VOYAGE 
we had been carried nearly out to sea again, so we got as quickly as we 
could to the bank, and made fast to the Nipa-leaves until daylight. 
On the 27th, at five a.m., it was still raining a little; but while the men 
were cooking their rice, I went ashore among the Nipa, and got a few 
shells,—two species of Neritina and a Cerithium creeping on the mud, 
a pretty little pink Anomia on the stems of the Nipa, and a Bulimus and a 
Pholas, the two latter apparently peculiar to the Nipa; the latter forms 
its burrows in the soft pithy substance of the thick bases of the growing 
leaves. It is far from pleasant to explore a Nipa swamp: independently 
of the difficulty of getting along in the soft black mud, you are always 
half devoured by mosquitoes of the most venomous kind. Just as we 
started, a great blue heron perched on a stump near us ; I put a rifle 
bullet through his neck, and he greatly improved our dinner, after 
several days of rice and salt-fish curry. Though neglected in these days 
in England, I have always found all the heron tribe excellent food. My 
servant took off all the meat from the breast and thighs, and, as he 
said, made beefsteaks of it; it was quite tender, and had in some 
degree the flavour of woodcock. We pulled and sailed all day up the river, 
passing the head of the Delta about noon, and seeing until three P.M. 
hardly any vegetation exeept Nipa and Sonneratia acida, with here and 
there a Rhizophora, or a tuft of the Fern called Peai (I believe, Acrosti- 
chum inequale). The Sonneratia is a most beautiful tree, with very long 
slender pendulous branches; the flowers are handsome, the long sta- 
mens being of a rich dark pink, but they fall an hour or two after sun- 
_ rise; the fruit is very conspicuous, with its great persistent star-shaped 
calyx; it is acid and slightly bitter, and is eaten by the natives as a 
. condiment with their rice and salt fish. The creeping rhizomata of the 
. Nipa look very strange when exposed by the washing away of the mud : 
= each internode is very short, but in order to give room for the attach- 
. ment of the enormous base of the leaf, it is applied so obliquely upon 
the last, that the whole resembles a number of discs laid in a row, and 
Slightly overlapping each other; the upper side of these discs, a foot or 
: eighteen inches in diameter, retains the scars left by the disarticulation 
. of the leaves, and the lower produces a tangled mass of simple fibres, 
about half an inch in diameter. The way in which these fibres run 
into the mud has often forcibly reminded me of the carbonized traces 
: of the fibres of Stigmarie in the underlay of the coals of Europe (here 
we have nothing of the sort). On the stems of the Sonneratia I saw 
