On the Indian Archipelago. 161 
to the clouds, even while we gaze in silent worship on its glori- 
ous form, is silently gathering in its dark womb, and time speeds 
on to the day, whose coming science can neither foretell nor pre- 
vent, when the mountain is rent; the solid foundations of the 
whole region are shaken ; the earth is opened to vomit forth de- 
stroying fires upon the living beings who dwell upon its surface, 
or closed to engulf them; the forests are deluged by lava, or 
withered by sulphureous vapors ; the sun sets at noonday behind 
the black smoke which thickens over the sky, and spreads far 
and wide, raining ashes throughout a circuit hundreds of miles 
in diameter ; till it seems to the superstitious native that the fiery 
abodes of the voleanic dewas are disemboweling themselves, pos- 
sessing the earth, and blotting out the heavens. 'The living 
remnants of the generation whose doom it was to inhabit Sum- 
bawa in 1815 could tell us that this picture is but a faint tran- 
seript of the reality, and that our imagination can never conceive 
the dreadful spectacle which still appalls their memories. Fortu- 
nately these awful explosions of the earth, which to man convert 
nature into thé supernatural, occur at.rare intervals; and though 
scarcely a year elapse without some volcano bursting into action, 
the greater portion of the Archi hipelago being more than once 
shaken, and even the ancient granitic floor of the Peninsula trem- 
bling beneath us, this terrestrial instability has ordinarily no 
worse effect than to dispel the illusion that we tread upon a solid 
globe, to convert the physical romance of geological history inte 
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 habitation of man. 
e 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 ashes mingled with the charred 
a of the noble forests which had clothed the mountain 
; but, hurried though we are from one part of our slight 
skbecks to another, we cannot leave the vegetation of this great 
region without looking upon it more closely. he 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 was, clothed to the 
water’s edge with trees,—we must animate their solitudes 
with the tribes which dwell there in freedom, ranging through 
their boundless shade as unconscious of the presence of man, 
and as unwitting of his dominion, as they were thousands 
years ago, when he did not dream that the er held 
—— creatures - 
en we pass from the open sea of the Arc Sa 
- shade of its mountain ja we have val ad. the 
