THE VILLAGE ON FIRE.

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with a smart gust, and almost simultaneously the deserted village burst into flames in two or three places. We went immediately to quarters, and prepared for an attack, fancying, from the sudden way in which the fire commenced, that it was the act of some of the banditti of whom the chieftainess had warned me.

The flames spread with awful rapidity: everything was well calculated to promote ignition-houses, grass, leaves were as dry as three months of a broiling sun could make them; in fifteen minutes, one broad wave of fire had enveloped the whole village, and being to windward of the gun-boat, we had to get the night awnings down, and drop the vessel very expeditiously out of the way. This done, I landed two parties of men, ten in number each; one party to try and stay the fire, the other, armed, to resist any of the "Orang-jahat," if they were about.

Sad as the scene was at first, it became truly terrible when the flames extended themselves to the tops of the cocoa-nut trees!— the felt-like substance between the roots of the leaves, as well as the leaves themselves, catching fire, and communicating from one to the other, until the whole plantation resembled a row of gigantic torches flaming and waving in the

250

FLAMING COCOA-NUT TREES.

air. We were of course unable to make any further attempt to stay the conflagration, and some had narrow escapes of their lives from the fierce rapidity with which the fire leapt from one object to the other, and licked up with its fiery tongue everything as it went.

No natives nor Siamese were to be seen in any direction; and I afterwards pretty correctly ascertained the origin of the fire. Under every one of the houses, which, as usual, were raised some three feet from the earth, the natives of Tamelan had been in the habit of throwing the husks of the rice used daily in their families, forming, on the day they left, very moderate-sized heaps, and when they departed, the embers from their hearths had been thrown on those heaps of husks. So long as it was calm, the ignited husks of rice had merely smouldered, but directly the breeze sprang up, they were fanned into flames, and in a few minutes, as I have described, wrapt the whole village in a sheet of fire.

The people of Tamelan had evidently determined that their conquerors should not dwell in the houses their industry had constructed; and my Malays seconded them, by not pointing out to me the conse