64 Voyage of the Novara. 



frigate, and had shown much confidence. They possessed all 

 the characteristics of the residents of Nangkauri, and they 

 also spoke, with but slight variations, the same idiom. Only 

 for certain objects, and those, singular to say, articles of the 

 very first necessity, such as cocoa-nut trees, palms, screw-pines, 

 and the like, did they employ difi'crent expressions. 



The island of Pulo Milu, with its variety of forest-vegeta- 

 tion, and its charming woodland-scenery, displays all the 

 beauty and all the marvels of the tropics. The screw-pine 

 (of the family of Pandanece)^ that peculiar tree which imparts 

 to the forests of Asia a character so difi'crent from those of 

 America, is seen here in exceptional size and majesty. No- 

 where have we met with this marvellous tree growing in 

 such luxuriance as on Pulo Milu, where it appears in such 

 quantities as to resemble a forest, and leaves an impression 

 of such lonely wildness as makes one almost imagine it a 

 remnant of some earlier period of our earth. Wondering at 

 the capricious vagaries of nature, the traveller contemplates 

 these extraordinary trees, which have leaves arranged in 

 spiral order like the dragon trees, trunks like those of palms, 

 boughs like those trees presenting the ordinary characteristics 

 of foliage, fruit-cones like the co7iiferce, and yet have nothing 

 in common with all these plants, so that they form a family 

 by themselves. On Pulo Milu we saw some of these trees 

 with slim smooth stems 40 or 50 feet in height, which are 

 nourished by and supported upon a pile of roots of 10 to 12 

 feet higli, resembling a neatly-finished conical piece of wicker- 



