352 The Tresent Condition of the Indian Archipelago. 



not only the bursten lakes and the rushing avalanches of the Alps, 

 but the most devastating explosions of Vesuvius or Etna, cease to 

 terrify the imagination. When we look upon the ordinary aspects 

 of these mountains, it is almost impossible to believe the geological 

 story of their origin, and if our senses yield to science, they tacitly 

 revenge themselves by placing, in the remotest past, the era of such 

 convulsions as it relates. But the nether powers, though imprisoned, 

 are not subdued. The same telluric energy which piled the mountain 

 from the ocean to the clouds, even while we gaze in silent worship 

 on its glorious form, is silently gathering in its dark womb, and time 

 speeds on to the day, whose coming science can neither foretell nor 

 prevent, when the mountain is I'ent ; the solid foundations of the 

 whole region are shaken ; the earth is opened to vomit forth destroy- 

 ing fires upon the living beings who dwell upon its surface, or closed 

 to engulph them ; the forests are deluged by lava, or withered by 

 sulphurous vapours ; the sun sets at noonday behind the black 

 smoke which thickens over the sky, and spreads far and wide, rain- 

 inof ashes throughout a circuit hundreds of miles in diameter ; till 

 it seems to the superstitious native that the fiery abodes of tho 

 volcanic dewas arc disembowelling themselves, possessing the earth, 

 and blotting out the heavens. The living remnants of the genera- 

 tion whose doom it was to inhabit Sumbawa in 1815, could tell us 

 that this picture is but a faint transcript of the reality, and that our 

 imagination can never conceive the dreadful spectacle which still ap- 

 pals their memories. Fortunately, these awful explosions of tho 

 earth, which to man convert nature into the supernatural, occur at 

 rare intervals ; and, though scarcely a year elapses without some vol- 

 cano bursting into action, tbe greater portion of the Archipelago be- 

 ing more than once shaken, and even the ancient granitic floor of the 

 Peninsula trembling beneath us, this terrestrial instability has ordi- 

 narily no worse effect than to dispel the illusion that we tread upon 

 a solid globe, to convert the physical romance of geological history 

 into the familiar associations of our own lives, and to unite the events 

 of the passing hour with those which first fitted the world for the ha- 

 bitation of man. 



We have spoken of the impression which the exterior beauty of 

 the Archipelago makes upon the voyager, and the fearful change 

 which sometimes comes over it, when the sea around him is hidden 

 beneath floating asbes mingled with the charred wrecks of the noble 

 forests which had clothed the mountain sides ; but, hurried though 

 we are from one part of our slight sketch to another, we cannot 

 leave the vegetation of this great region without looking upon it 

 more closely. To recall the full charms, however, of the forests of 

 the Archipelago — which is to speak of the Archipelago itself, for the 

 greater portion of it is at this moment, as the whole of it once wasp 

 clothed to the water's edge with trees — we must animate their soli- 

 tudes with the tribes which dwell there in freedom, ranging through 



