.■1 NATURALIST'S WANDERINGS 



bathed in sunlight, its little villages with their olive groves 

 and vineyards slumbering at the mouth of chasm-like gorges, 

 winding away up amongst the mountains which ruggedly 

 overshadow them. 



In crossing the Mediterranean, we gave a lift to tired wag- 

 tails and swallows, to a goat-sucker and a fly-catcher, and 

 carried them into Port Said. The squalor of that town, the 

 barrenness of the canal shores and the arid bareness of Aden 

 were a splendid offset to the verdure just ahead of us. In the 

 Indian Ocean our friendly yard-arms gave a rest to several 

 bee-eaters {Merops philippinus), to a chat and to little flocks of 

 swallows before we sighted the Maldive and Laccadive coral 

 Archipelagoes. Ear ahead on the horizon their islets looked 

 like a group of bouquets set in marble-rimmed vases ; but as 

 we approached, the vase rims changed into the surf of the sea 

 breaking on the reef to feed its builders, and the bouqiiets 

 into clumps of cocoa-palms, iron-wood, and other trees which 

 the currents of the sea have washed together, and the passing 

 winds and wandering birds have carried thither to deck these 

 lone homes of the ocean fowl, which came fighting in out 

 wake for the scraps that fell from our floating table. 



Holding on east by southward for a few days more, a hazy 

 streak appeared on our horizon, and my eyes rested on the 

 first of the Malayan islands — on the distant peaks of Sumatra. 

 We anchored at Padang for a day, and, in sailing southward 

 along its coast, I could not admire sufiiciently the magnificence 

 of that island — its great mountain chain running parallel 

 to the coast, and rising into smoking peaks, clad with forest to 

 the very crater rims, — which later I found to be all that I had 

 pictured it from the sea, and more. 



On the morning of the second day, we entered the Sunda 

 Straits, that narrow water-pass by the opening of which between 

 Java and Sumatra, Nature has laid under grateful tribute all 

 Cape-coming and -going mariners through the Java Sea to and 

 from the Archipelago or Chinese ports. Dotted about in this 

 narrow channel, were low picturesque islands and solitary cones 

 of burnt-out craters, towering sheer up to a height of from two 

 to three thousand feet, all clothed in vegetation. Prominent 

 among tlie latter stood out the sharp cone of Krakatoa, Avhose 

 name will scarcely be forgotten by our generation at least, and 



