CHAPTER IV. 



RIVER AND FOREST TRAVEL. 



A Sea-snake — A dreary landing — Native dancing — Orchids at home — 

 Tropical flowers — The jungle leech — A bad dinner — Rough paths 

 — The blow-pipe — Head-hunting — A Murut reception. 



Setting forth for the first time in a new country, of 

 which but little is generally known, is always exciting 

 work, and as a rule things turn out to be very different 

 to what one had imagined they would be. I had pictured 

 to myself landing in Borneo beneath a hot sun, and at 

 one of the trading stations ; but, on the contrary, it was a 

 dark stormy night when I reached its shores amid a perfect 

 deluge of cold rain ; the thunder and lightning was more 

 impressive than I ever saw it before or since, and the 

 place where I landed was an obscure little village of 

 scarcely a dozen palm-leaf huts, and up a river nearly 

 twenty miles from the coast. It came about in this way. 

 The Hon. W. H. Treacher, of Labuan, very kindly 

 undertook to introduce me to the Bornean Kadyans 

 and Muruts — the last a head-hunting tribe — who had 

 settlements near the head of the Lawas and Meropok 

 rivers a little to the northward of the capital. We crossed 

 in a small open boat pulled by eight Brunei men with 

 paddles, which is here the usual and best way of making 

 short sea or river journeys. We started from the fish- 

 market pier, Labuan, about 9 p.m. on September 7th, 



