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so marvellously is this country watered that, from end to end of the
Peninsula, no two hills are found, but there is a stream of some sort in
the gut which divides them. Far up-country, the rivers run riot through
long successions of falls and rapids, but as they near the coast, they
settle down into broad imposing looking streams, miles wide in places,
but for the most part uniformly shallow, the surfaces of which are
studded with green islands and yellow sandbanks. These rivers, on the
East Coast, form the principal, and often the only highways, many of
them being navigated for nearly three hundred miles of their course.
When they become too much obstructed by falls to be navigable even for a
dug-out, they still serve the Malays of the interior as highways. Where
they are very shallow indeed they are used as tracks, men wading up them
for miles and miles. A river-bed is a path ready cleared through the
forests, and, to the Semang,[3] Sakai,[4] and jungle-bred Malay, it is
Nature's macadamized road. More often the unnavigable streams serve as
guides to the traveller in the dense jungles, the tracks running up
their banks, crossing and recrossing them at frequent intervals. One of
these paths, which leads from Trengganu to Kelantan, crosses the same
river no less than thirty times in about six miles, and, in most places,
the fords are well above a tall man's knee. The stream is followed until
a _ka-naik_--or taking-off place--is reached, and, leaving it, the
traveller crosses a low range of hills, and presently strikes the banks
of a stream, which belongs to another river basin. A path, similar to
the one which he has just left, leads down this stream, and by following
it he will eventually reach inhabited country. No man need ever lose
himself in a Malay jungle. He can never have any difficulty in finding
running water, and this, if followed down, means a river, and a river
presupposes a village sooner or later. In the same way, a knowledge of
the localities in which the rivers of a country rise, and a rough idea
of the directions in which they flow, are all the geographical data
which are required in order to enable you to find your way, unaided,
into any portion of that, or the adjoining States which you may desire
to visit. This is the secret of travelling through Malay jungles, in
places where the white man's roads are still far to seek, and where the
natives are content to move slowly, as their fathers did before