f Orangs in
Borneo more than 4 feet 2 inches high.

CHAPTER V. BORNEO--JOURNEY INTO THE INTERIOR.

(NOVEMBER 1855 TO JANUARY 1856.)

As the wet season was approaching, I determined to return to Sarawak,
sending all my collections with Charles Allen around by sea, while I
myself proposed to go up to the sources of the Sadong River and descend
by the Sarawak valley. As the route was somewhat difficult, I took the
smallest quantity of baggage, and only one servant, a Malay lad named
Bujon, who knew the language of the Sadong Dyaks, with whom he had
traded. We left the mines on the 27th of November, and the next day
reached the Malay village of Gudong, where I stayed a short time to buy
fruit and eggs, and called upon the Datu Bandar, or Malay governor
of the place. He lived in a large, arid well-built house, very dirty
outside and in, and was very inquisitive about my business, and
particularly about the coal-mines. These puzzle the natives exceedingly,
as they cannot understand the extensive and costly preparations for
working coal, and cannot believe it is to be used only as fuel when wood
is so abundant and so easily obtained. It was evident that Europeans
seldom came here, for numbers of women skeltered away as I walked
through the village and one girl about ten or twelve years old, who had
just brought a bamboo full of water from the river, threw it down with a
cry of horror and alarm the moment she caught sight of me, turned around
and jumped into the stream. She swam beautifully, and kept looking back
as if expecting I would follow her, screaming violently all the time;
while a number of men and boys were laughing at her ignorant terror.

At Jahi, the next village, the stream became so swift in consequence of
a flood, that my heavy boat could make no way, and I was obliged to send
it back and go on in a very small open one. So far the river had been
very monotonous, the banks being cultivated as rice-fields, and little
thatched huts alone breaking the unpicturesque line of muddy bank
crowned with tall grasses, and backed by the top of the forest behind
the cultivated ground. A few hours beyond Jahi we passed the limits
of cultivation, and had the beautiful virgin forest coming down to the
water's edge, with its palms and creepers, its noble trees, its ferns,
and epiphytes. The banks of the river were, however, still generally
flooded, and we had some difficulty in finding a dry spot to sleep
on. Early in the