the banks of the great river Rejang. When a
man's child died he sallied forth, killing the first
person he met, even were it his own brother.
The Saráwak government, however, not being of
an antiquarian turn, abolished that old custom.
These wild villagers have wilder neighbours in
the wandering Pakatan and Punan, who build
no permanent dwellings, but run up temporary
huts, until they have exhausted the game and
fruit of their camping-ground; when they hie
them to fresh fields and pastures new. They
are industrious collectors of wax, edible birds'-
nests, camphor, and rattans. It is said that,
living perpetually in the dark forest, and never
exposed to the sun, they are fairer than the
other inhabitants of Borneo; but Mr. St. John,
though he often found their nests in the woods,
and slept in them, never came across a tribe. It
is by these true foresters that the blowpipe arrow
is used, and, being often poisoned, is really a
formidable weapon. The Sea-Dyaks, to whose
class the Pakatan and Punan belong, salute
their infants with music; though one man told
the traveller that he had killed his only surviving
child, having lost the other by disease,
because he could not bear to see it grow up, to
love it, and to see it slowly die. Instances have
occurred of fathers, when their children were
rude and abused them, taking poison in despair.
The Sea-Dyaks are garrulous and hospitable; they
accustom their brides and bridegrooms betimes
to family jars by knocking their heads together
three or four times on the wedding-day. They
sacrifice a pig when civilised nations not seldom
sacrifice a woman; and, when domestic broils
occur, what does your sensible Dyak do?
Instead of quarrelling and fighting at home, he
starts out for a few days until the affair has blown
over, and sulks by cutting off other folks' heads
in the jungle. "The white men read books,"
they urge, "we hunt for heads instead;" and
they account their way the most conducive to
return of cheerfulness. The Kayans are another
tribe, curious and little known. Mr. St. John
visited them soon after his  arrival at Borneo.
They dwell on the banks of the stream in verandahed
houses, sometimes clustered into towns,
are primitive in dress and ideas, and have an
inordinate regard for undiluted brandy.

Then, there are Land-Dyaks; their home being
the Saráwak interior, to the left of the river,
among the hills. They were, at the time of Mr.
St. John's visit, gone away to prepare their farms,
but the round houses, raised on posts, in which
the heads were formerly kept, marked their places
of resort, and the old men remained at home
cowering over the embers of low fires. The
Land-Dyaks are ingenious, industrious, and
imitative; they construct elegant little suspension-
bridges, and their humour is agricultural. The
feet of the Europeans having been washed, the
water was kept to manure the soil.

The island of Borneo, it should be premised,
extending, with its parasite group, through
eleven degrees of longitude and ten of
latitude, contains two climates—that of Celebes
on one side, and that of Java on the other. It
is so imperfectly known, even by its own
inhabitants, that many of the inland tribes have no
notion that they are islanders, while to others a
solitary stream is the whole world of waters.
Sir Stamford Raffles spoke of Borneo as little
more than a blank on the map of Asia. A large
proportion of its surface still remains so, but
new lines may now be traced around Kina-Balu,
and in the regions hitherto unknown beyond
Brunei. Even before he saw Borneo, Mr. St.
John had been ambitious of climbing the mountain;
he had aspired to be the first to stand
upon its silent peaks; but Mr. Low, colonial
treasurer of Labuan, was before him by seven
years, and deposited a paper in a bottle within
a few hundred feet of the summit. In the
spring of 1858, Mr. St. John, with Mr. Low
for his companion, started with two servants,
a crew of six, and seventeen followers. It
was agreed to reach the base of the mountain
by way of the Abai river, on whose banks the
salt-makers dwell, the salt being boiled from
the roots of the nipa palm, which always grows
in sea or brackish water. The nipa is, indeed,
a little treasury of comforts to the natives. From
its root the native extracts, as we see, salt;
from its stem, sugar; with its leaves he contrives
a roof for his house, and mats for the walls and
for the awnings of his boat; he rolls his cigar in
the fine leaf lining, and so on through a dozen
other homely uses.

The party went slowly up the stream. On
the way was seen a chief's grave, ornamented
with sevenfold umbrellas. Thence the journey
was continued on foot; visits were paid to great
men, whose households displayed a sort of
picturesque economy, and, as the distance from
the coast lengthened, the travellers found
themselves in a country where no European had
hitherto been seen, so that if the region was
strange to them, they were equally strange to
the people. But it was no easy work to ascend
barefoot the dry bed of a torrent in search of
mountain pinnacles above the clouds. And what,
the village folk asked, could these strangers
promise themselves for their pains? Were they
looking for gold or copper mines, or for the fruit
of the tree lagundi, which, if eaten, restores
youth and confers unending life; or, in the steps
of Sadak, seeking the waters of oblivion? There
was, moreover, a great diamond up there, and,
in connexion with these stories, or Bornean
romances, there being no Fadladeen in the party, one
of the men commenced a tale which lasted seventeen
days in the telling, all about a princess who
"for seven days and seven nights neither ate
nor drank, but only wept." However, like the
Arabian hero, the travellers pushed on. There
was an occasional curse, with a menace or two,
from the villages—menaces and curses being
deprived of all evil results by an exhibition of
revolvers. Presently the mountain began to
show itself boldly at close quarters. Its fortress
faces of granite towered in front, and over masses
of rock, through thickets of shrubs, bright with
blood-coloured flowers, the explorers scaled the
peak. The air was light, buoyant, and exhilarating.