CROCODILE CATCHING. 71 



were connected, a dam erected at their lower end, and 

 a small mountain -stream deviated into the enclosure. 

 Many of the old spoil-banks were left to form islands 

 in the lake, some of them covered with closely-mown 

 turf and dotted with palms, while others, by way of 

 contrast, were allowed to remain under the wild, rank, 

 luxuriant growth of nature. A circular road, some 

 two miles long, runs through the gardens and round 

 the lake, and here the European community rides and 

 drives in the afternoon ; the golf-links are on one side, 

 and on the other is the race-course. It is not the sort 

 of place where one would expect to find crocodiles : 

 one looks for them in tidal rivers or backwaters, but 

 not in an artificial lake in a public garden. Crocodiles 

 have, however, the most extraordinary roving pro- 

 pensities, and often leave their native river to make 

 journeys of many miles overland. In the interior of 

 Perak they have been found in abandoned mine-holes 

 so far from any stream that it is difficult even to guess 

 from which direction they have wandered, or to tell 

 whether it was by an accident or design that they 

 have discovered an isolated pool in a limitless extent 

 of tropical forest. It made it none the less extra- 

 ordinary, but it was easy to see how the crocodiles 

 had got into the Taiping lake : the Squirrel River, 

 though a small, shallow, gravelly stream, incapable of 

 affording food or shelter to a crocodile, runs close by, 

 and lower down joins a tidal river. A crocodile could 

 make its way either up the channel of the Squirrel or 

 through the forest on its bank for a distance of some 

 three miles, and it would then be opposite the lake. 

 After that, to travel some two or three hundred yards 



