] As everybody was occupied with
the preparations for an ensuing religious festival, I betook myself,
through Lucban on the eastern shore, to Mauban, situated amidst
deep ravines and masses of lava at the foot of Mount Majaijai. The
vegetation was of indescribable beauty, and the miserable road
was enlivened with cheerful knots of pedestrians hastening to the
festival. [68]

[Lucban.] I reached Lucban in three hours; it is a prosperous place
of 13,000 inhabitants, to the north-east of Majaijai. A year after my
visit it burnt to the ground. The agricultural produce of the district
is not very important, owing to the mountainous nature of the country;
but considerable industrial activity prevails there. The inhabitants
weave fine straw hats from the fibre of the leaf of the buri palm-tree
(corypha sp.), manufacture pandanus mats, and carry on a profitable
trade at Mauban with the placer miners of North Camarines. The entire
breadth of the road is covered with cement, and along its center flows,
in an open channel, a sparkling rivulet.

[Java-like rice fields.] The road from Lucban to Mauban, which is
situated on the bay of Lamon, opposite to the Island of Alabat, winds
along the narrow watercourse of the Mapon river, through deep ravines
with perpendicular cliffs of clay. I observed several terrace-formed
rice-fields similar to those so prevalent in Java, an infrequent
sight in the Philippines. Presently the path led us into the very
thick of the forest. Nearly all the trees were covered with aroides
and creeping ferns; amongst them I noticed the angiopteris, pandanus,
and several large specimens of the fan palm.

[Mapon river.] Three leagues from Lucban the river flows under a rock
supported on prismatically shaped pillars, and then runs through a
bed of round pebbles, composed of volcanic stone and white lime, as
hard as marble, in which impressions of shell-fish and coral can be
traced. Further up the river the volcanic rubble disappears, and the
containing strata then consist of the marble-like pebbles cemented
together with calcareous spar. These strata alternate with banks of
clay and coarse-grained soil, which contain scanty and badly preserved
imprints of leaves and mussel-fish. Amongst them, however, I observed
a flattened but still recognizable specimen of the fossil melania. The
river-bed must be quite five hundred feet above the level of the sea.

[Bamboo raft ferry.] About a league beyond Mauban, as it w