36 IN MALAY FORESTS. 



formless mass it was. I made the inevitable mis- 

 take, and a careful aim at the spot where I imagined 

 the heart to be only hit him far back in the quarters. 

 As on the preceding day, he rushed away on re- 

 ceiving the bullet, and the country in which the 

 tracks took us was extremely dangerous. This was 

 another clearing made for the cultivation of hill- 

 rice such as that we had passed through the day 

 before ; but this was younger, and therefore worse. 

 That of yesterday was some two years old, and 

 through it one could see a few yards ; this was only 

 seven months old, and an object a foot away was 

 invisible. Of course, I repeat, no sane man would 

 seek an encounter with any dangerous animal in 

 either place. But the younger growth is really 

 wonderful : it is a mass of tangled vegetation for 

 here the giant lalang grass, that grows some six 

 feet high, fights for its life with the horrible creepers 

 that bind and choke it, and with the scrub-bushes 

 that send their roots down into the earth to under- 

 mine it. Here, like wrestlers, they strain and pull, 

 and the victory is to the one that can endure the 

 longest. The loser dies, and giant grass, creepers, 

 and scrub fight interlocked at death-grips. 



Through this almost impenetrable thicket the 

 rhinoceros made his way, and, to use a homely 

 simile, his track looked like a double cutting on 

 a railway line. It was necessary, therefore, to give 

 him time to quit such desperate country, for in a 

 patch of such wide extent a detour was out of the 

 question. We therefore sat down for half an hour 

 and then followed on ; but soon we found that what 



