BABOE DALIMA; OR, THE OPIUM FIEND. BY T. H. PERELAER TRANSLATED FROM THE DUTCH BY THE Rev. E. J. VENNING, M.A. LONDON: VIZETELLY & CO., 16 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN. 1888. 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. The wind howled and roared as though a legion of fiends were holding Sabbath in the black mass of clouds which were driving along. The waves of the Java sea were running mountain high, and came curling into the beach in monstrous billows topped with mighty crests of dazzling foam. These crests were brightly phosphorescent, and each breaker, as it came rolling in, for an instant shed a pale fantastic shower of sparks upon the black seething waters, leaving, the next instant, the blackness darker than before. The sea-coast on which our story opens formed here, as in so many other places in Java, an extensive marsh, the slimy clay of which the influence of the tropical sun had clothed with a most curious kind of vegetation. Had it been day, the eye, as far as it could reach, would have rested upon thousands upon thousands of 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 all directions, so that the trees might be likened to many-footed creatures, the supports or legs of each of which crossed and recrossed with those of its neighbour. Thus looking along 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 festoons from the singular archways and climbing upwards into the tops of the trees. By daylight, between those myriads of twisted roots forming, as it were, a gigantic labyrinth, there might have been seen a swarming mass of living things, unsightly and loathsome, which would have filled the beholder with wonder and disgust.