ELEPHANTS 61 



elephants and capture the young. I put stress on 

 the royalty payments he would receive, and thus I 

 won him to my way of thinking. 



He assigned his nephew Omar a tunku to the 

 duty of assisting me, and gave him full power to 

 force as much labor as we might need. A few 

 days later, Omar and I, accompanied by the Sultan, 

 sailed down the coast to the Pahang. It was a 

 wide, deep river, infested with crocodiles; settle- 

 ments dotted the banks. At each of these we 

 stopped and called on the headmen to conscript 

 labor. 



Since the men had to supply their own food and 

 travel in their own boats, the cost of the expedition 

 was reduced to nothing. We arranged that the 

 men might be replaced by others from their villages, 

 because they were loath to remain long away from 

 their families. 



Five days after leaving the capital, we arrived 

 at the place where the herd had been located. We 

 disembarked. There followed two weeks of hunt- 

 ing before we found the spoor that told us we had 

 reached the elephants. 



It was dense jungle; undergrowth, creepers and 

 vines bound the trees together. The lack of sun- 

 light and the dense atmosphere made progress 

 slow. Sometimes the task of driving elephants 

 on foot through such country seemed hopeless, but 

 I kept the men at work, hacking out trails with 

 parangs their big knives. The insects were 



