86 



TAHAN EXPEDITtOtf. 



proved much greater than I had supposed, and the next day saw us 

 only at the foot of the cliff, which I have described. 



This day's work proved a mere repetition of previous experiences. 

 A long and disheartening struggle with torrents of rain and a dense 

 smothering fog. The compass guided us safely, however, before 

 nightfall, over the last part of the sunken ridge and on to the 

 shoulder of the Barrier Mountain itself. During the day we had had 

 to climb several lofty peaks, including two very sharply pointed 

 " aiguilles, " covered with low scrub that was only knee-deep. The 

 summit of one of the aiguilles was only about two yards square and it 

 looked so dizzy a spot that only one of the men would follow me to 

 the top. Such small standing room at such a height was certainly, 

 however, enough to make anyone giddy and I could not blame the 

 others. A deep saddle between two of these peaks was covered with 

 low underwood which was absolutely choked with some species of 

 dwarf rotan. This took plenty of hard cutting to penetrate and tore 

 the men's clothes, already fairly ragged and rotten with the treatment 

 they had received, to ribbons ! 



At the end of the day the rain set in heavily and continued for 

 hours. We camped, fantc de mieux, on a projecting angle of the 

 Barrier Mountain and we had just pitched our tent — a trying ordeal 

 in the fast falling rain — when I heard the roar of a landslip on the 

 opposite side of the valley and spent an anxious and sleepless night in 

 consequence.* We had no supper that night, dry firewood being 

 unobtainable, the cold was greater than ever, and in spite of the tent 

 and shelter we were all drenched to the skin. Next morning we, at 

 first, attempted to circumvent the cliff above our camp by bearing to the 

 north-west ; f but the further we went the more difficult became the 

 ground, and coming to a precipice we then climbed up the cliff by way 

 of the screes for a good many feet, but as we climbed the cliff climbed, 

 too, and, though we got within some fifteen or twenty feet or so of the 

 top, we could never get any nearer. 



The " screes," as I have already said, lay at a very steep angle, so 

 steep in fact that in many places it was barely climbable, and at one 

 especially difficult spot, where the granite J was slippery with rain, 

 and there was only moss to hold by, the ascent became very precarious 

 and in struggling up at this point one of the men lost his chopper 

 (parang), a second lost his parang-handle and I lost a gold ring, which 

 slipped from my finger as I was hanging over the abyss. Then the 

 rain clouds shut down upon us steadily, and after climbing up to the 

 furthest point we could reach and finding it impossible to proceed, 

 we went down the mountain side to the eastward and camped that 

 night, in the rain, on the banks of a big mountain torrent. We had 



* Traces of landslips are visible all along- the cliffs of the western range. — 

 H. C. R. 



t The only practicable route and the one followed by us. — H. C. 11. 

 + Not granite; quaitzite. 



