SUMATRA'S WEST COAST 453 



being checked, so the newspapers report, by a suspicious paternal 

 home government, which wishes to hold everything valuable in 

 its own hands. Stretches of low swampy jungle line the track 

 on both sides. Thickets of the Atap palm, with its creeping 

 stem and rigid upright leaves, whose leaflets flutter incessantly 

 in the slightest breeze, rise out of deep weed-overgrown pools, 

 suggestive of all sorts of serpents, leeches, and water insects. 

 Immense plantations of bananas, overgrown with masses of tan- 

 gled morning glories, with their light-blue blossoms, have crowded 

 out the more varied natural vegetation in places and stand as 

 evidences of the cultural skill and indomitable energy of those 

 greatest of all tropical colonizers, the Chinese. 



But soon the train whirled us into the klof or gorge itself, and 

 for several hours our eyes were busy with scenes of the most 

 gorgeous freshness and beaut} 7 . The charm of tropical verdure 

 is largely due, I believe, to the abundance of broad-leaved plants 

 which it contains. Nothing illustrates this more than a com- 

 parison of such plants as the banana or talipot palm with a 

 South African fine-leaved heath or a North woods pine. As in- 

 dividuals all are beautiful, perhaps equally so ; but the water- 

 colors of the tropics are painted in splashes and with a broad, 

 free hand, while the foliage of the temperate regions is painfully 

 etched on copper plate. This gorge is compared by the Dutch 

 with the Gotthard Strasse below Andermatt ; but they belittle 

 it by such comparison, for the Klof van Aneh, with its countless 

 waterfalls, rushing mountain streams, cloud-covered hillsides, 

 and floating mists, added to its endless variety of flowering 

 shrubs, feathery fern fronds, waving palms, and tall, imposing 

 forest trees, makes a composition of the first rank among scenic 

 masterpieces and entitles it to the first place on the line of the 

 world's gallery. 



Padang Pandjang, a village some 700 meters above the sea- 

 level, with a comfortable hotel of brick and thatch, after the 

 Dutch st} 7 le, forms a most delightful stopping place just above 

 the gorge. The natives here, although of the Malay race, are 

 quite distinct from those of the island of Java or the peninsula 

 of Malacca. They are a well-to-do, even wealthy race, and build 

 costly houses of indisputable beauty, making them of teak or 

 other wood, paneling them with great care, carving and paint- 

 ing them after patterns often of considerable taste and beauty. 

 The roof structures, with their gables rising one above the other^ 

 resemble more those of the Siamese temples than any other 



