94 BRITISH NORTH BORNEO. [chaf. 



a mistake to suppose that all tropical rivers are alike, and, as I 

 Heated gently up stream on a rising tide, I could not help 

 feeling how much more to my taste were others I had seen in other 

 parts of the world, in spite of the undoubted beauty of the jungle 

 and the enormous height of the trees. The stream, forty or fifty 

 feet in width, looked a mere runlet beneath the huge forest giants 

 rising so abruptly from its banks. Towering up as clean, straight, 

 branchless trunks, often for a hundred and fifty feet or more, their 

 tops were merged in those of others by the dense masses of creeper 

 which had sprung from branch to branch and overwhelmed them. 

 The roots of these monsters of the vegetable world are strengthened 

 in their hold by buttresses of corresponding size, smooth and fiat 

 as though constructed by the hand of man, and supporting the 

 stem for a distance of perhaps thirty feet from the ground. Doubt- 

 less also the creepers which bind the trees together at their 

 summits help in no small degree as a support, but in this region 

 there are few high winds, and typhoons are non-existent. High 

 up, in the forks of the branches dozens of yards above our heads, 

 are thick dark masses which the glasses reveal as clumps of the 

 Birds'-nest Fern {Neottopteris), or the still more curious Platyccrium 

 or Elk's Horn, whose upper fronds, deeply dentate, cling to the 

 trunk with their base, from which the long, seaweed-like, fertile 

 fronds hang pendulous. Orchids, too, there are in abundance, 

 could we only see them, but their flowers are too small, or, like the 

 G-rammatophyllum, too dull in colour for us to distinguish them 

 with ease. Not a breath of air stirs leaf or water, and the oily, pea- 

 soup-coloured river with its oozy banks looks untempting enough 

 beneath a sun whose heat seems to penetrate to one's very marrow. 

 Few visible signs of life appear to break the monotony of the scene, 

 save when a flash of vivid cobalt blue tells us that an Irena has 

 crossed the stream, or a party of monkeys swing chattering from 

 bough to bough. But if there is rest for the eye there is little oi- 

 none for the ear. The forest is alive with sound, from the dull, 

 hoarse cry of the hornl)ill and the slow sioish, sunsh of its powerful 



