CHAPTER IV. 



RIVER AND FOREST TRAVEL. 



A Sea-snake A dreary landing Native dancing Orchids at home 

 Tropical flowers The jungle leech A bad dinner Rough paths 

 The blow-pipe Head-hunting A Murut reception. 



Setting forth for the first time in a new country, of 

 which but little is generally known, is always exciting 

 work, and as a rule things turn out to be very different 

 to what one had imagined they would be. I had pictured 

 to myself landing in Borneo beneath a hot sun, and at 

 one of the trading stations ; but, on the contrary, it was a 

 dark stormy night when I readied its shores amid a perfect 

 deluge of cold rain ; the thunder and lightning was more 

 impressive than I ever saw it before or since, and the 

 place where I landed was an obscure little village of 

 scarcely a dozen palm-leaf huts, and up a river nearly 

 twenty miles from the coast. It came about in this wa}\ 

 The Hon. W. H. Treacher, of Labium, very kindly 

 undertook to introduce me to the Bornean Kadyans 

 and Muruts the last a head-hunting tribe who had 

 settlements near the head of the Lawas and Meropok 

 rivers a little to the northward of the capital. We crossed 

 in a small open boat pulled by eight Brunei men with 

 paddles, which is here the usual and best way of making 

 short sea or river journeys. We started from the fish- 

 market pier, Labium, about 9 p.m. on September 7th, 



