[Scenery along Lucban-Maubon road.] 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 was getting dusk, we crossed the river, then tolerably broad, on a wretched leaking bamboo raft, which sank at least six inches beneath the water under the weight of our horses, and ran helplessly aground in the mud on the opposite side.

[Visitors to festival.] The tribunal or common-house was crowded with people who had come to attend the festival which was to take place on the following day.  The cabezas wore, in token of their dignity, a short jacket above their shirts.  A quantity of brightly decorated tables laden with fruit and pastry stood against the walls, and in the middle of the principal room a dining-table was laid out for forty persons.