206 ON THE MILK-SAP 



forests, especially if the gradual ascent of the mountains is 

 commenced where the woods clothe their feet. The 

 highest peaks are the fearful volcanoes, the terrors of which 

 have long been known. To these succeed the remarkable 

 mud-volcanoes, which, without fire or light, often break 

 out suddenly, and without the slightest warning. The 

 mountain Galungung thus discharged itself on the 8th and 

 12th of October, 1822, turning forty English square miles 

 into a desert, filled up valleys forty to fifty feet deep, 

 dammed rivers, and buried in its filthy flood 11,000 men, 

 countless draught oxen, 3,000 acres of Rice fields, and 

 800,000 Coffee trees. Lower down, at the foot of the 

 mountains, appear springs of all kinds, many of them sour 

 from the great amount of free sulphuric acid present, 

 others petrifying the neighbouring trees with the silex 

 dissolved in them, or displaying a milky whiteness, from 

 the quantity of fine powder of sulphur diffused through 

 their waters. In other places are found crowded groups of 

 cones of gypsum, three to five feet high, from the points 

 of which hot or cold water unceasingly bubbles, ever in- 

 creasing the size of the cones by its deposits. Large tracts 

 are desolated by the action of the great volcanic phe- 

 nomena. But new, fresh life springs up everywhere, side 

 by side with destruction, and clothes once more the naked 

 earth. Only particular regions make exceptions to this 

 rule. Leaving the thickets of the old forest and climbing 

 a moderate hill, suddenly, in a narrow flat valley, a horrible 

 wilderness, a true palace of death, spreads itself out before 

 the eyes of the shuddering wanderer. No trace of thriving 

 vegetation screens the naked sun-scorched earth. Skeletons 

 of all kinds of animals bestrew the ground. There is it 

 often seen how the terrible tiger, in the moment when he 



