IN TIMOR. 469 



CHAPTER lY. 



SOJOUEN IN KAILAKL'K AND SAMORO. 



I proceed to Fatuboi — River Motaai — Crystalline rooks — A weird village — 

 Earc additions to my herbarium — Butterflies — Move on to the Eajah of 

 Sainoro's — Vegetation by tlie way — Geological notes — Penalties of theft 

 — Samoro — "Visit Sobale Peak — Botanising under diBBculties — Large 

 herbariimi — Return to Samoro and leave for Manuleo. 



Fkom Saluki I proceeded with a fresh cavalcade towards 

 Fatuboi, a conspicuous quadruple-crested mountain of remark- 

 able configuration, in the Suku of Kailakuk. We had to 

 commence with an inevitable descent of more than 1000 feet, 

 to the bed of the Motaai, which, like all the Timor rivers 

 I had made the acquaintance of, ran in a deep bed within 

 precipitous walls, which in some places rose nearly 300 feet 

 in height, clothed with unfortunately for me inaccessible 

 vegetation. After following its course for four or five hours, 

 we turned off to the right, up the bed of a small tributary, in 

 which I found blocks of pure white crystalline limestone, a 

 kind of rock I had not encountered before. Hence ascend- 

 ing a long steep ascent of 1500 feet strewed with disrupted 

 blocks of limestone, we reached the top of the mountain, and 

 by a narrow rocky stairwaj' winding through a belt of impene- 

 trable jungle of thorny shrubs, were guided into the most weird 

 spot conceivable for human habitation, into a small plateau on 

 the summit of one of the rugged eminences of the mountain. 

 Guarded on all sides but one, by vertical walls of limestone, 

 the plateau was dotted about with gigantic blocks of rugged 

 and warted coral-like limestone, against and between which 

 dwellings standing on piles on the bare rock, were scattered 

 about. To right and left rose immense rough, almost in- 

 accessible pinnacles of the same black withered calcareous 

 crags, riven in all directions with cracks, caverned into dark 



