of snakes
and lizards; but I rather think this did not prevent them from tasting
it. We were accommodated here in the verandah of the large house, in
which were several great baskets of dried human heads, the trophies of
past generations of head-hunters. Here also there was a little mountain
covered with fruit-trees, and there were some magnificent Durian trees
close by the house, the fruit of which was ripe; and as the Dyaks looked
upon me as a benefactor in killing the Mias, which destroys a great deal
of their fruit, they let us eat as much as we liked; we revelled in this
emperor of fruits in its greatest perfection.

The very day after my arrival in this place, I was so fortunate as to
shoot another adult male of the small Orang, the Mias-kassir of the
Dyaks. It fell when dead, but caught in a fork of the tree and remained
fixed. As I was very anxious to get it, I tried to persuade two young
Dyaks who were with me to cut down the tree, which was tall, perfectly
straight and smooth-barked, and without a branch for fifty or sixty
feet. To my surprise, they said they would prefer climbing up it, but it
would be a good deal of trouble, and, after a little talking together,
they said they would try. They first went to a clump of bamboo that
stood near, and cut down one of the largest stems. From this they
chopped off a short piece, and splitting it, made a couple of stout
pegs, about a foot long and sharp at one end. Then cutting a thick piece
of wood for a mallet, they drove one of the pegs into the tree and hung
their weight upon it. It held, and this seemed to satisfy them, for they
immediately began making a quantity of pegs of the same kind, while I
looked on with great interest, wondering how they could possibly ascend
such a lofty tree by merely driving pegs in it, the failure of any one
of which at a good height would certainly cause their death. When about
two dozen pegs were made, one of them began cutting some very long and
slender bamboo from another clump, and also prepared some cord from the
hark of a small tree. They now drove in a peg very firmly at about three
feet from the ground, and bringing one of the long bamboos, stood it
upright close to the tree, and bound it firmly to the two first pegs, by
means of the bark cord and small notches near the head of each peg.
One of the Dyaks now stood on the first peg and drove in a third, about
level with his face, to which he tied the bamboo in the same way, a