EXCITEMENT BY MOONLIGHT. 
109 
gloomy-looking creek. Here again we were disappointed : 
there were still no houses; and, as the boat shot into the 
dark and gloomy opening, the captain whispered me 
to shoot the native nearest me upon the first sign of 
treachery. We began to think that we might be paying 
a moonlight visit to a nest of Malay pirates. 
‘^We found the creek so full of logs and banks, so 
dark and so narrow, that we could no longer use our 
oars: we therefore had to ‘point’ them and pole the boat 
against the current. I have remarked that it was moon- 
light; but then the bushes were so thick, both over and 
around us, that this luminary might as well have been 
behind a constant cloud: we could scarcely see the oars 
with which we were poling. Sometimes the hanging 
bushes would brush us in the face, or catch the upper 
ends af the oars as they were lifted up; and upon these 
occasions I could not but wonder if more than one snake 
might not coil himself around hanging bushes, and if 
they might not snap at us as -we brushed by, or drop 
down upon us as the oars struck the branches overhead. 
It was a most exciting moonlight visit. 
“After poling a mile or more through this darkness, we 
came out upon a little basin, on the right side of which 
was a bamboo wharf. We landed at this wharf, and, leav- 
ing two men by the boat with orders to warn ofl:* every one 
unless they heard English spoken, took the other two and 
the interpreter, and followed the headman up a broad and 
winding road, which he said led to the long-looked-for 
village. We were now well in for it: if there v/as a trap 
we had only to make a running fight. This was what we 
thought as we got farther and farther from the boat; but 
