TIIK INDIAN ARCHIPELAGO. 
5 
new world. Land and ocean are strangely intermingled. Great 
islands are disjoined by narrow straits, which, in the case of 
those of Sunda, lead at once into the smooth waters and green 
level shores of the interior from the rugged and turbulent outer 
coast, which would otherwise have opposed to us an unbroken 
wall more than two thousand miles in length. We pass from 
one mediterranean sea to another, now through groups of islets 
so small that we encounter many in an hour, and presently 
along the coasts of those so large that we might be months in 
circumnavigating them. Even in crossing the widest of the 
eastern seas, when the last green speck has sunk beneath the 
horizon, the mariner knows that a circle drawn with a radius of two 
days sail would touch more land than water, ,and even that, if 
the eye were raised to a sufficient height, while the islands he 
had left would reappear on the one side, new shores would be 
seen on almost every other. But it is the wonderful freshness 
and greenness in which, go where he will, each new island is 
enveloped, that impresses itself on his senses as the great dis¬ 
tinctive character of the region. The equinoctial warmth of 
the air, tempered and moistened by a constant evaporation, and 
purified by periodical winds, seems to be imbued with pene¬ 
trating life-giving virtue, under the influence of which even the 
most barren rock becomes fertile. Hence those groups of small 
islands which sometimes environ the larger ones like clusters of 
satellites, or mark where their ranges pursue their course be¬ 
neath the sea, often appear, in particular slates of the atmos¬ 
phere when a zone of while quivering light surrounds them and 
obliterates their coasts, to be dark umbrageous gardens floating 
on a wide lake, whose gleaming surface would be too dazzling 
were it not traversed by the shadows of the clouds, and cover¬ 
ed by the breeze with an incessant play of light and shade. 
Far different from the placid beauty of such scenes is the 
effect of the mountain domes and peaks which elsewhere rise 
against the sky. In these the voyager sees the grandeur of 
European mountains repeated, but all that is austere or sa¬ 
vage transformed into softness and beauty. The snow and 
glaciers are replaced by a mighty forest, which fills every 
ravine with dark shade, and arrays every peak and ridge in 
