The Malay archipelago : the land of the orang-utan ... - Wallace Online

62 THE MALAY ARCHIPELAGO. [chat-.(EuplecteUa), which has now become so common ; others are broadand short. Their colours are green, variously tinted and mottledwith red or purple. The finest yet known were obtained on thesummit of Kini-balou, in North-west Borneo. One of the broadsort, Nepenthes rajah, will hold two quarts of water in itspitcher. Another, Nepenthes Edwardsiania, has a narrowpitcher twenty inches long ; while the plant itself grows to alength of twenty feet.Fei'ns are abundant, but are not so varied as on the volcanicmountains of Java ; and Tree-ferns are neither so plentiful norso large as in that island Tliey grow, however, quite down tothe level of the sea, and are generally slender and gracefulplants from eight to fifteen feet high. Without devoting muchtime to the search I collected fifty species of Ferns in Borneo,and I have no doubt a good botanist would have obtained twicethe number. The interesting group of Orchids is very abundant,but, as is generally the case, nine-tenths of the species havesmall and inconspicuous flowers. Among the exceptions arethe fine Ccelogynes, whose large clusters of yellow flowers ornamentthe gloomiest forests, and that most extraordinary plant,Vanda Lowii, which last is jDarticularly abundant near some hotsprings at the foot of the Peninjauh Mountain. It grows onthe lower branches of trees, and its strange pendant flowerspikesoften hang down so as almost to i-each the gi'ound.These are generally six or eight feet long, bearing large andhandsome flowers three inches across, and varying in colourfrom orange to red, with deep purple-red spots. I measuredone spike, which reached the extraordinary lengtli of nine feeteight inches, and bore thirty-six flowers, spirally arranged upona slender thread-like stalk. Specimens grown in our Englishhot-houses have produced flower-spikes of equal length, andwith a much larger number of blossoms.Flowers were scarce, as is usual in equatorial forests, and itwas only at rare intervals that I met with anything striking.A few fine climbers were sometimes seen, especially a handsomecrimson and yellow ^schynanthus, and a fine leguminous plantwith clusters of large Cassia-like flowers of a rich purple colour.Once I found a number of small Anonaceous trees of the genusPolyalthea, producing a most striking eflect in the gloomy forestshades. They were about thirty feet high, and their slendertrunks were covered with large star-like crimson flowers, whichclustered over them like garlands, and resembled some artificialdecoration more than a natural product.The forests abound with gigantic trees with cylindrical, buttressed,or furrowed stems, while occasionally the travellercomes upon a wonderful fig-tree, whose trunk is itself a forestof stems and aerial roots. Still more rarely are found treeswhich appear to have begun growing in mid-air, and from tliesame point send out wide-spreading branches above and a complicatedpyramid of roots descending for seventy or eighty feet