THE OPIUM FIEND.
VIZETELLY & CO., 16 HENRIETTA STREET,
COVENT GARDEN.
1888.
[3]
BABOE DALIMA;
OR, THE OPIUM FIEND.
CHAPTER I.
AT MOEARA TJATJING.
It was a terrible night in February 188–.
A violent storm from the north-west was raging along the northern coast of Java. Thewind howled and roared as though a legion of fiends were holding Sabbath in the blackmass of clouds which were driving along.
The waves of the Java sea were running mountain high, and came curling into the beachin monstrous billows topped with mighty crests of dazzling foam. These crests werebrightly phosphorescent, and each breaker, as it came rolling in, for an instant sheda pale fantastic shower of sparks upon the black seething waters, leaving, the nextinstant, the blackness darker than before. The sea-coast on which our story opensformed here, as in so many other places in Java, an extensive marsh, the slimy clayof which the influence of the tropical sun had clothed with a most curious kind ofvegetation.
Had it been day, the eye, as far as it could reach, would have rested upon thousands upon thousandsof tree-tops, closely packed together, and rising about thirty feet from the soil.The stems of these trees did not reach the ground, but rested on knotty roots, which,like arches, grew out of the earth. These roots were divided, branching out in alldirections, so that the trees might be likened to many-footed creatures, the supportsor legs of each of which crossed and recrossed with those of its neighbour. Thus lookingalong the ground might be seen a kind of tangled network under a thick canopy of green,and that network again was entwined with gigantic creepers, hanging in [4]festoons from the singular archways and climbing upwards into the tops of