384 TWO TEAKS IN THE JUNGLE. 



On October 2d Mr. Eug Quee got up a grand tuba-fishing 

 party, and invited ine to make one of it, wliich I was very glad to 

 do. "We I'ose at midnight and started down the river with the 

 ebb tide. I lay down in the boat and slept until we arrived at the 

 mouth of the Eusengi Eiver, a large creek which empties into 

 the Sadong from the west, about six miles below the village. We 

 found there a number of Malays in sampans, patiently waiting for 

 daybreak, and, after a good deal of time-killing banter, all hands 

 lay down and went to sleep. 



At daybreak the little fleet of canoes started up the creek, and, 

 after paddling about two miles, the stream rose above tidal in- 

 fluence, and the banks were thickly fringed with pandanus. The 

 rendezvous was about foiu- miles up. 



When all had arrived there were present twenty-three sampans, 

 manned by about sixty Malays. The first thing in order with the 

 Malays was the usual breakfast of boiled rice, which many had 

 brought cold, wrapped in banana leaves, and others cooked on the 

 spot. After that, all fell to work to prepare the tuba, which is the 

 fine, fibrous root of a climbing plant (a species of Meni^pernmm), 

 w^hich possesses a powerful narcotic principle, and is grown for the 

 special pui-pose of taking fish. It was done up in small, close bun- 

 dles, the thickness of a man's wrist and six or eight inches long, 

 and was dry and hard. 



The bundles were distributed so that each boat received four or 

 five, each man procured a stout little club of green wood, and the 

 pounding began. The game was to reduce the tuba to a pulp, and 

 for an hour sixty clubs beat a lively tattoo on the root bundles as 

 they were held on the edges of the boats. A quantity of water, 

 perhaps twenty gallons, was dipped into each boat, into which the 

 tuba was dipped and wrung out from time to time, until it gradu- 

 ally softened under the pounding process and was reduced to 

 shreds. When water was squeezed out of the tuba it had a white, 

 frothy appearance, like soap-suds. 



As fast as the bundles of tuba were reduced to fine shreds, they 

 were chopped up with a parong, and the particles mixed with the 

 water in the boats. When all the root had been thus pounded and 

 chopped up, the Malays procured lumps of clay and dissolved them 

 in the solution until it was made quite murky. Each boat con- 

 tained about twenty gallons of this narcotic extract. 



The stream was about forty feet wide and eight to ten feet deep, 

 the current was swift and the water rather murky. 



