"'When you
first came upon me, sir, in the Lodge, this day, more as if a Upas
tree had been made a capture of than a private defendant, such
mingled streams of feelings broke loose again within me, that
everything was for the first few minutes swept away before them,
and I was going round and round in a vortex. I got out of it. I
struggled, and got out of it.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the upas-tree is "a fabulous tree alleged to have existed in Java . . .with properties so poisonous as to destroy all animal and vegetable life to a distance of fifteen or sixteen miles around it."