50 AN EXPEDITION TO MOUNT BATU LAWI. 
in such surroundings one sees perhaps the best phase of Man in 
relation to Nature. 
In our large company of some 40 men there was one young 
Kalabit girl who, I learnt from Balang Katou, was a slave. She 
seemed a happy little party, rather pretty for a Kalabit, and always 
did her fair share of the work, paddling along in the middle of 
one of the boats, cooking, when we stop for the night, and later 
we saw her carrying a load of rubber through the jungle towards 
the Sidam. Several of these up-river tribes still keep slaves, and 
we had three or four with us on the walk to Batu Lawi, they being 
sent in place of their masters who had pleaded other engagements. 
It was some days before I knew that any of our coolies were really 
slaves and indeed from their treatment of one another it was quite 
impossible to guess which were slaves and which were not. Masters 
and slaves ate, slept, conversed or joked together with equal free- 
dom ; I was told that they usually become slaves owing to the death 
of their parents when quite young, so that they are left without 
anyone to look after them. If the child appears to be healthy 
a well-to-do native will buy him from his nearest relative and he 
thus becomes a slave. They do not ill-treat their slaves, for, as 
Belulok observed, it was’nt worth while to do so, since they would 
only run away and the money expended in their purchase would 
thus be thrown away. ‘The system seems more on a parallel with 
that so common nowadays among the Chinese; for with that race, 
when a family is becoming too large, one of the later additions is 
sold to a friend to bring up as his own child, and the relationship 
between the child and the purchaser is probably much the same in 
each case. Among the Kalabits however I gathered that the slaves 
and their owners belonged to different classes, and that inter- 
marriage between the two was very rare. 
June 9th. Weft early this morning climbing the hill at the 
back of our camp and followed a well-worn winding path until 
midday when we came to a little camp occupied by two Brunei- 
Malays and some Dayaks. The Dayaks were carrying gutta across 
for them, in this way wiping off their debts to the Malays. These 
Dayaks had been working gutta for several months in the Batu 
Lawi district and they had got as far as Balang Katou’s house on 
the return journey. There they met the Brunei traders, to whom 
they sold most of their gutta; they lived a whole year in the Kalabit 
house, helping the Kalabits on their farms and so earning their 
keep, ‘but at the same time running further and further into debt 
with the Bruneis, who ran a fine business among the Kalabits alone. 
I believe nearly all the Kalabits of that district owed the Bruneis 
a certain amount, and this in spite of the 40 odd pikuls of gutta 
that they and the Dayaks had paid the Bruneis in return 
for bazaar goods. The Kalabits too were working off their debts 
by carrying loads of gutta across to the Sidam. 
After a short rest and some food we followed a narrow water- 
course on through the jungle down to the head of the Sidam proper, 
Jour. Straits Branch 
