. A naturalist's wanderings in the Eastern archipelago; a narrative of travel and exploration from 1878 to 1883. signis, rejoiced our way with its fragrance. The strata cropping out in the river-bed were quite differedfrom any I had noticed elsewhere on my journey. They werepale-gray rough crystalline sandstones in beds half a footthick, alternating with black bands of about the same thick-ness of what had been once fine mud, whose lower surfacesexhibited radiating annelid-like fossil impressions. Thesestratified rocks, which dipped into the river at a high angle,were in many places clearly se
. A naturalist's wanderings in the Eastern archipelago; a narrative of travel and exploration from 1878 to 1883. signis, rejoiced our way with its fragrance. The strata cropping out in the river-bed were quite differedfrom any I had noticed elsewhere on my journey. They werepale-gray rough crystalline sandstones in beds half a footthick, alternating with black bands of about the same thick-ness of what had been once fine mud, whose lower surfacesexhibited radiating annelid-like fossil impressions. Thesestratified rocks, which dipped into the river at a high angle,were in many places clearly seen to be entirely embeddedafter they had begun to be attacked by some rodiDg 472 A NATURALISTS WANDERINGS cr denuding agency, in the horizontally laid-down blackshingly detritus which I have already so often referred to,plainly indicating that at some epoch not geologically veryremote, they had been long submerged, as the whole of EasternTimor seems to have been, below an arm of the sea, or pos-sibly beneath an inland lake ; and after some hundreds offeet had accumulated on them they were again subjected to. elevation—which has gone on so long, and may still be pro-gressing—that the rivers have cut their way down throughhundreds of feet in height, and cleared out ravines a thousandor two of feet in width. Such is the story of the strangevicissitudes of Eastern Timor revealed by the buried rocks inthe valley of the Fahiletan. At the entrance to the Eajahs compound I was startled bysuddenly coming on a tall pole with a fringed triangle near IN TIMOR. 473 its summit, the pole, as I thought at first sight, impaling ahuman body, and the outer corners of the triangle transfix-ing each a human head. These were happily only made-uprepresentations of what at no far-back date would have beenrealities. This ghastly sign-post, called a hero, had been erectedas a warning to all thieves and offenders of the dire punish-ment that would be mercilessly meted out to them, just as ithad been
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