AN EXPEDITION TO PENRISEN 251 



by five or six women and a man. These Land-Dayak 

 women wore dark blue petticoats, a coil of rattan 

 strips stained red or black round the waist, and brass 

 rings in long series on the arms and round the calves 

 of the legs, with two to three shell rings interspersed 

 amongst the brass armlets. Their canoe was very crank, 

 and I do not suppose that a white man would have 

 poled it very far without capsizing. But these women 

 were experts in the art ; the picturesque garb and 

 flashing ornaments setting off their glossy brown skins 

 to best advantage, and the rhythmical swing of their 

 bodies as they drove and lifted the long punt-poles 

 made a beautiful picture which lives vividly in my 

 memory even now. They exchanged some chaff with 

 our boatmen laboriously forcing our heavier boats up 

 the shallows, but they were evidently in a hurry, and 

 soon were lost to view round a distant curve. 



We stopped for a while at Brang, a village built on 

 a bluff commanding a fine view of the river, as Cox 

 wished to forewarn the chief that in a month or 

 three weeks he would return to collect the annual 

 poll-tax levied by the Sarawak Government. A mes- 

 senger was sent up the steep and slippery paths that 

 led to the village, and he returned shortly with the 

 chief and his daughter. The latter was a somewhat 

 forbidding-looking female with a very pronounced 

 squint, but she was a great character, and a few 

 minutes' conversation sufficed to show that the real 

 head of the village was the chief's daughter. The 

 Sarawak Government in this year had found it neces- 

 sary to demonetize the Japanese yen or dollar, which 

 for some time had been part of the legal currency of 

 the country ; the reasons for this course of action and 



