2C0 A NATUBALIST'S WANDERINGS 



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off tbaii at close quarters. Besides tliese, a little way from 

 the town, are the tombs of the Sultans, where many of the 

 devout go to pray ; but perhaps the most interesting and 

 curious to the Western visitor — a spot held in the utmost 

 veneration by the Palembangers — is the grave of SeJcandar 

 Alam, or Alexander the Great, whom the Saltans and most 

 of the chiefs of Palenibang claim as their illustrious fore- 

 father. 



In the neighbourhood of the Grovernment offices stands the 

 market, which — as are many of the houses, especially those of 

 the Chinese shop-keepers — is substantially built of stone, a 

 material which along with iron-wood, was during the reign of 

 the Sultans forbidden to all save members of the Royal house 

 as a building material. 



On Sunday, the 25th December, twelve months from my 

 starting from the moutli of the Semungka River, I sailed for 

 Batavia, and the last pictures of Sumatra that I recall are the 

 heaving and surging in the troubled water of our screw of the 

 floating dwellings on both banks as far as the eye could reach 

 to what seemed their imminent destruction, attended by the 

 overthrow from the gaping and closing of the log platforms 

 of the children at their play (some of them actually into the 

 river), their ineffectual scrambling: to regain their footing, 



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and the attempts of their more unconcerned elders to retain 

 theirs on the unstable foundations of their home— in some 

 aspects a very ludicrous scene; and the interminable stretch 

 of nipa-palms that cover, in a low dense forest, the watery 



uninhabitable mud-flats that extend for fifty miles from the 

 city to the sea. 



After making a short call at 3Iuntok in Banka, between 



which and Sumatra a plateau covered by only three fathoms of 



water exists, I was landed on the 27th of the month in Batavia, 



where I at once set about my preparations for an extended 



journey to the less civilised islands in the Far East of the 

 Archipelago. 



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