JOURNAL OF A VOYAGE &C. 
617 
Bentan, is the only apparent entrance into the wide inland sea which 
lies to the right and behind ns, surrounded on all sides by low bills 
in connected ranges or scattered islet groups. Looking back, the 
sandy beach is continued till the shrubby jungle disappears, and the 
close packed huts and sheds of Tanjong llu take its place. Advan¬ 
cing from behind these, and stretching across the foreground, we see, 
rising over the beach of the harbour, the neat mansions of Kampong 
Glam half concealed by trees, the green and wooded Government 
hill, and on its right the extremity of the Claymore range, a dark accli¬ 
vity bearing darker spice trees, while the depression between them 
is filled by the grey cloud like foliage of the more inland elevations. 
To the left of Government hill, the mass of godowns on the western 
hank of the river, and the smooth green undulations of Pearl’s and 
the adjacent hills, are seen surmounted by the abrupt jungle covered 
heights of the more distant Teloh Blanga range. As the sun frees 
itself from the haze of the horizon, and strikes this scene with its 
level rays, the houses put off their dull morning garniture, and be¬ 
come so many points of beaming white light, while from the dark 
grey of the hills over them, some country seats, hitherto unseen, break 
out. In the foreground, from the undulating and rippled sheet of 
water, rise the hulls and rigging of numerous ships and smaller ves¬ 
sels, and the sail of a boat in motion occasionally sweeps slowly a- 
long, sometimes hidden amongst them, and, as it emerges, concealing 
in its turn the houses before which it passes. To the south of the 
town, the iron stained cliffs of the range terminating at Tanjong Ba- 
tu rise with a dull lusty hue, reminding us, by the dark tinge of 
the more iromnasked rocks, of the far different aspect which the 
scene, now adorned by art and cultivated nature, must have bom 
before there was any human eye to see it,, when, amidst the heaving 
of the region with the throes of the molten plutonic ocean below, 
the massive strata were bent and broken like reeds, and thrust up 
from their horizontal position beneath the bed of the sea, till they 
stood in perpendicular masses above its surface, while lurid ferrugi¬ 
nous exhalations ascended through the rents and fissures, and “ the 
smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.” 
Beyond Tanjong Batu, the bills of Pulo Erani and Bla ang Mari, 
at a distance of about four miles, continue the circuit to the south¬ 
ward, the sea rapidly widening as we follow the crowd of islands 
that seems to occupy all the Strait to the southwest. A little open 
sea, the coast of the crumbling Pulo Sikukor the single barren islet 
