Page 301 - Malay sketches

EVENING

the setting in which these jewels lie has turned to
purple. They are fragments of estuaries, deep
waveless the
lagoons winding through mangroves,
and showing to the distant spectator only broken
reaches, glimpses of bay and headland.
The shore-line is a ribbon of glistening light,

bordering the wide expanse of forest trees, whose
roots stand deep in water when the tide is high.
The mangrove cannot live beyond the reach of the
brine from which it seems to draw the sap of life,
and these mud flats, in their gradual accretion, are
as yet scarcely above the level of the sea.
Turning to the north-east, a deep valley lies
the source of a
beneath us, long river, the Kurau.
Miles and miles beyond rise range after range of
lofty mountains, Biong and Inas and Bintang,
running into the heart of the Peninsula. Further
eastward is the near the sources of the
country
Perak River, and across the narrow
valley, through
which its upper waters dance in a succession of
rapids, may be discerned peaks of the mam range
which look down on the China Sea.
Now we are facing the south-east and the valley
of the Perak River. The ridge on which we stand
divides it from the Province of Larut, and surely
there are few fairer sights in the East than this
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