All the rich-flavored, colored fruits of the tropics… 

…fruits whose generous juices are drawn from the moist and heated earth, and whose flavors are the imprisoned rays of the fierce sun… 

…cartloads and piles of bananas and pine-apples… 

…a wealth of gold and green giving off fragrance! 

…treasures of the heated, crystal seas—things that one has dreamed of after reading Jules Verne’s romances. Big canoes… poised on the clear depths of aquamarine water, with fairy freights—forests of coral white as snow, or red, pink, violet, in massive branches or fern-like sprays, fresh from their warm homes beneath the clear warm waves, where fish as bright-tinted as themselves flash through them like “living light.”

…displays of wonderful shells, too, of pale rose-pink, and others with rainbow tints which, like rainbows, came and went…

…a drive of two miles from the pier to Singapore… a world of wonders opens at every step.

…intensely tropical…

…mangrove swamps, and fringes of cocoa-palms, and banana-groves, date, sago, and travelers’ palms, tree-ferns, india-rubber, mango, custard-apple, jack-fruit, durion, lime, pomegranate, pine-apples, and orchids…

…Vegetation rich, profuse, endless, rapid, smothering, in all shades of vivid green, from the pea-green of spring and the dark velvety green of endless summer to the yellow-green of the plumage of the palm, riots in a heavy shower every night and the heat of a perennial sun-blaze every day… 

…bright-winged birds skip and flit through the jungle shades. 

…a perpetual battle between man and the jungle…

…equatorial heat …neither as exhausting or depressing as the damp summer heat of Japan, though one does long “to take off one’s flesh and sit in one’s bones.”

…at half-past ten under heavens which were one blaze of stars amidst a dust of nebulae, like the inlaid gold spots amidst a dust of gold on old Japanese lacquer, and through a moist, warm atmosphere laden with the heavy fragrance of innumerable night-blossoming flowers.

…

…It is all fascinating. 

…It is the “Asian mystery”…