Strychnos tieute

The latex of Antiaris toxicaria contains intensely toxic cardenolides, in particular a cardiac glycoside named antiarin. It is used as a toxin for arrows, darts, and blowdarts in Island Southeast Asian cultures. In various ethnic groups of the Philippines, Borneo, Sulawesi and Malaysia the concentrated sap of Antiaris toxicaria is known as upas, apo, or ipoh, among other names. The concentrate is applied (by dipping) to darts used in sumpit blowguns employed for hunting and warfare. In Javanese tradition in Indonesia, Antiaris toxicaria (also known as upas) is mixed with Strychnos ignatii for arrow poison. In China, this plant is known as "arrow poison wood" and the poison is said to be so deadly that it has been described as "Seven Up Eight Down Nine Death" meaning that a victim can take no more than seven steps uphill, eight steps downhill or nine steps on level ground before dying. Some travellers' tales have it that the upas tree is the most poisonous in the world, so that no one can reach the trunk before falling down dead. Another account (professedly by one Foersch, who was a surgeon at Semarang in 1773) was published in The London Magazine, December 1783, and popularized by Erasmus Darwin in Loves of the Plants (Botanic Garden, pt. ii). The tree was said to destroy all animal life within a radius of 15 miles or more. The poison was fetched by condemned malefactors, of whom scarcely two out of twenty returned. Geoffrey Grigson proposed that this exaggerated description was perpetrated by George Steevens. In fact, the deaths were due to an adjoining extinct volcano near Batar, called Guava Upas. Due to confusion of names, the poisonous effects of the deadly valley have been ascribed to the Upas tree. Literary allusions to the tree's poisonous nature are frequent and as a rule are not to be taken seriously. A poem that has been frequently commented on and set to music is "The Upas-Tree" by Pushkin. Deriding the cliched, overwrought diction in Silly Novels By Lady Novelists, George Eliot observed, "In their novels there is usually a lady or gentleman who is more or less of a upas tree." One of the heroes of Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain written in 1924 mentioned this tree in the following context: "The knowledge of drugs possessed by the coloured races was far superior to our own. In certain islands east of Dutch New Guinea, youths and maidens prepared a love charm from the bark of a tree—it was probably poisonous, like the hippomane manzanilla, or the antiaris toxicaria the deadly upas tree of Java, which could poison the air round with its steam and fatally stupefy man and beast".