188 IN MALAY FORESTS. 



kept the boat in mid-stream, and the four boatmen, 

 who sat in the bows, gently and rhythmically rap- 

 ping the boat's side with their paddles at each 

 stroke, had little more to do than to maintain suf- 

 ficient steering way. 



Both banks of the broad river were covered with a 

 dense forest of mangroves, and trees with dark, glossy, 

 fleshy leaves and quaint-shaped fruit pushed one an- 

 other actually into the river. A couple of miles above 

 my house we entered a tributary of the Kuantan, the 

 Blat, which gave its name to the elephant we were 

 seeking. 



At the next bend of the river Ahman pointed to the 

 bank, and asked me if I remembered it. I remembered 

 it well. Some months before, when the Blat Elephant 

 had last made one of its periodical visits, Ahman and 

 I had tracked it into this mangrove forest. It was 

 not easy to forget the horrible, slimy, stinking mud, 

 punched by the elephant's feet into great oozy holes, 

 between which we had to pick our way ; the dense 

 entanglement of branches and leaves all thickly be- 

 smeared with heavy slavers of the same mud wiped off 

 the elephant's body; and the almost unimaginable 

 myriads of the mosquitoes. Every separate nipah- 

 palm leaf, every single mangrove branch, was the 

 resting-place, not of dozens, but literally, I believe, of 

 hundreds of the most venomous little brutes. From 

 each leaf, each branch, there darted forth at our touch 

 a crowd of mosquitoes that can only be compared to a 

 swarm of bees at an overturned hive. Our faces, 

 necks, and hands were black with mosquitoes. They 

 bit with extraordinary viciousness, and the agony, as 



