4 A TRIP TO GUNONG BENOM. 
highest point I decided that a beacon on it would at all events 
give some return for the expense incurred. 
On the 8th Che Musa reached the top and by the 11th nearly 
all the beacon had arrived enabling me to send ten of my party 
back to Raub there to be paid off. Nearly all of them were 
sick with fever or otherwise useless for clearing and filling and 
and I was very glad to have fewer men to feed. On the 14th 
the beacon was erected and on the 15th finally placed in posi- 
tion. By this time food was running short for all hands, and 
the coolies had got very tired of their job. Three had left 
without permission thereby forfeiting the greater part of their 
pay and on the afternoon of the 16th all the rest struck works 
The average foreign Malay who comes to Raub to look for 
work is not a pleasant person with whom to deal, and if he hail. 
from Tringganu as did most of my men did, his respect for a 
contract is very precisely measured by the ability of the 
other party to improve it. Luckily I was a Government officer 
and although my powers were not perhaps quite so extensive 
as I represented them to be, I succeeded in sufficiently impress- 
ing the men to induce them to go to work again late the next 
morning. I must own that I to some extent sympathised 
with them. Their work was pretty hard and their food had 
come down to rice and salt only. Fish sufficient for twice 
their number they had finished entirely. (My sympathies were 
sharpened by the fact that my own diet had fallen to bread and 
condensed milk.) When on the 18th the salt also gave out I 
found that I ran a risk of being left alone with my boatmen 
and a good deal more kit than they could carry. On the 20th 
therefore I started down although two very large trees up 
which a ladder had been contrived still stood on the side to- 
wards the Gunong. These are only noticeable from the Raub 
Rest House, whither late on the afternoon of the 21st I arrived, 
the return journey being done in two days. 
During the whole time between the 7th and the 20th the 
coolies were felling I was taking a round of theodolite angles 
and sketching the outlines of the hills in sight. The seeing was 
rarely good especially towards the north-west and south and 
trienometrical stations more than 25 miles away could not have 
been pitched up without the aid of the powerful telescope which 
Jour. Straits Branch 
