a 'nocturnal' flower that only bloom during nightime
Malay associated this flower with supernatural phenomenon
Often found in wood carving and perhaps its rarity in blooming, the caver choose the species as figure head in their work
A tale related to this beautiful and mysterious flower
Bakawali
By Lafcadio Hearn
© 2006 by http://www.HorrorMasters.com
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. . . And Bakawali was placed in the chamber of a ruined pagoda, deep-buried within the forests of Ceylon; and there did she pass the years, sitting upon a seat of stone, herself stone from feet to waist. But Taj-ulmuluk found her and ministered unto her as to the statue of a goddess; and he waited for her through the long years.
The ruined pavement, grass-disjointed, trembled to the passing tread of wild elephants; often did tigers peer through the pillared entrance, with eyes flaming like emeralds; but Taj-ulmuluk was never weary nor afraid, and he waited by her through all the weary and fearful years.
Gem-eyed lizards clung and wondered; serpents watched with marvellous chrysolite gaze; vast spiders wove their silvered lace above the head of the human statue; sunset-feathered birds, with huge and flesh-colored beaks, hatched their young in peace tinder the eyes of Bakawali. . . . Until it came to pass at the close of the eleventh year,—Taj-ulmuluk being in search of food,—that the great ruin fell, burying the helpless Apsara under a ponderous and monstrous destruction beyond the power of any single arm to remove. . . .Then Taj-ulmuluk wept; but he still waited, knowing that the immortals could not die.
And out of the shapeless mass of ruins there soon grew a marvellous tree, graceful, dainty, round-limbed like a woman; and Taj-ulmuluk watched it waxing tall under the mighty heat of the summer, bearing flowers lovelier than that narcissus whose blossoms have been compared to the eyes of Oriental girls, and rosy fruit as smooth-skinned as maiden flesh.
So the twelfth year passed. And with the passing of its last moon, a great fruit parted itself, and therefrom issued the body of a woman, slender and exquisite, whose supple limbs had been folded up within the fruit as a butterfly is folded up within its chrysalis, comely as an Indian dawn, deeper-eyed than ever woman of earth,—being indeed an immortal, being an Apsara,— Bakawali reincarnated for her lover, and relieved from the malediction of the gods
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