1+ JOURNEY ACROSS THE MALAY PENINSULA. 
and for many miles below, the bed rock (a hard sandstone ) 
crops out and has been cut by the water into fantastic shapes, 
while huge boulders are piled in picturesque confusion on 
either side of the channel. These rocks as we came up were 
covered by men in many-coloured dresses, the rafts were either 
lying against the rocks at the head of the cataract, or slowly 
filing into the basin at its head and the clouds of spray dash- 
ed up from the rapid against the deep shadow of jungle foliage 
made a picture not to be forgotten. 
The rapid itself, comparatively small after four months’ 
drought, is the channel of the river running under the leit 
bank, and at first sight it did not look like a place down which 
either raft or boat could go in safety, but we were shortly to 
see that the operation, though attended with considerable risk, 
could be successfully performed. The rapid is about sixty 
yards long, with a drop of some twelve feet, the water rushes 
and boils and foams between walls of rock, and there are two 
corners in the length which make the principal dangers. Two 
Malays mounted a raft, one at the stem and the other at the 
stern, each holding a large bamboo paddle fixed im a tripod. 
The raft slowly reached the top of the rapid, and then leapt 
into the boiling stream, where the men were instantly up to 
their waists in water. The stern man was washed off the raft, 
and it looked as if nothing could save him in such a place, but 
while the bow man with two or three powerful strokes of the 
paddle kept the bow off the opposite rock, the stern man 
dexterously leaped again on the raft, and in a moment of time 
a few more strokes of the bow man’s paddle had cleared the 
raft of the second danger—a projecting rock on the other bank 
—and the raft was in smooth water below. After this, a second - 
raft was taken down in the same way, and then each man went 
alone on a raft, and, though one of them was again thrown off 
in the middle of the rapid, and the other one had the paddle 
whirled out of his hand as the raft took its first leap, no acci- 
dent occurred. A number of rafts were then sent down by 
themselves, and they seemed to accomplish the journey almost 
better without assistance, but this was explained by the fact 
that the weight of even one man sinks the raft to a dangerous 
depth, where the points of unseen rocks may wreck it. Qld 
Dato’ Kuri absolutely refused to allow us to tempt Providence 
