9268. VOYAGE FROM SINGAPORE TO BANJERMASSING. 
colonies of Pistia stratiotes, and a beautiful minute 4zol/a. Thousands 
of small black swallows, with chestnut-brown throats, were skimming 
about, or swinging in the wind, perched upon the feathery waving tops 
of the Reeds; snow-white herons gravely stalking over the floating 
grass; and a flock of busy little finches clinging and searching about 
the dry panicles, made it a lively and beautiful scene. The river was 
a good deal swollen today, bringing down much drift; and the current 
was very strong, so that we made little progress. 
About two o’clock reached the first settlement on the river, called 
Pulan Iumhaat. The clearings are not more than 200 to 300 
. yards wide, skirting the river for two or three miles; the stream 
is divided by an island, hardly above the now high water, but 
covered with Padi, and the black species of Coiz, called by the 
natives “Salli batu; ” and here and there small patches of Sorghum ; 
the whole interspersed with numerous Anan-trees, Saguerus saccha- 
rifer. 1 stopped the boat near this place to get some curious pen- 
dulous birds’ nests, of which there was a large colony on some low 
trees. The bird is a little finch or bunting; the nests are about two 
feet long, in shape like a Florence oil-flask ; in the bottom is a hollow, 
as in an ordinary wine-bottle, across which is a little perch, on which 
the natives assure me the male bird roosts while the female sits on the 
eggs, which are deposited in hollows excavated in the upper part, which 
is at first built solid. The whole fabric is of fine grass, beautifully 
woven together, and is fastened very finely to the branch by a band of 
grass passing round it; it swings, however, quite freely in the wind. 
- I got here some specimens of a curious black spiny Neritina, from the 
: long floating runners of the Reeds. We also got some unpleasant fellow- 
passengers, in the shape of a flight of large greenish-brown Gad-flies, 
whose bite was very painful. A large Aroid leaf, probably a Caladium, 
_ was here very abundant and ornamental; I saw no flowers. About four 
_ o'clock stopped at a small house in a Padi patch, at the mouth of a brook ; 
the family consisted of an old man, two women, and several children, and 
: certainly they were packed into the smallest possible room. There were 
two young men sitting in the house, whom, from their affectation of con- 
tempt, I knew at once to be Rajahs: they were, it appeared, the sons of 
a petty chief up the river, very oppressive and much disliked. There are 
many of these petty chiefs in the country, and they are a great curse to 
x the people, They are not generally oppressed by their absolute rulers : 
