34 
NORTH BORNEO. 
These guns were used at one time on the coast as money, and are employed for this 
purpose still in out-of-the-way places; they are valued by weight, ornamentation going for 
nothing. I bought one of these weapons on this river (see illustration, p. 76), but should 
not care to fire it off, as it would be decidedly more dangerous to the person who fired it 
than to the mark aimed at. 
An early start next morning took us past similar scenery, but native houses were more 
plentiful, there being one about every mile. The inhabitants of this part of the river are 
different from the Bruneis, though also Mohammedans, and are called 44 Orang Sungei ” or 
Kiver-men; these people are probably the real inhabitants with a strong strain of Brunei 
blood in their veins, who have been conquered centuries ago by the Brunei Malays and 
forced to follow Islam. The Orang Sungei do most of the agricultural work, growing rice 
and various fruits, such as Durians, Jack-fruit, and Pisangs ; they also rear numbers of 
fowls. In the afternoon we reached the house of the Orang Kaya Sahabandah, where, as it 
was getting late, we decided to stop the night. Here we were evidently unwelcome guests, 
the people asking three and four times their value for fowls and eggs, which we refused to 
pay. On the following day we again proceeded up stream, leaving at the house of one 
of the Company’s subsidized chiefs part of our baggage, the prahu being too heavily laden 
to pass over the first rapids which we should meet with before our next camp, which was 
beyond the limit to which Mohammedans go on this river. 
The populations of the Padas and most other Bornean rivers are clearly defined by the 
streams themselves. The estuary is occupied by Bruneis, who prepare fish and salt, to 
be bartered for other goods with the Orang Sungei; they also often have trading-prahus 
for collecting jungle-produce from the same people. The Orang Sungei act as middlemen, 
collecting jungle-produce from the Muruts, and extend up to the first rapids; these they 
seldom pass, as their prahus are too big, and the country becomes hilly and unsuitable to 
their mode of agriculture, the land best suited to them being flat, where they can raise 
large quantities of sago, but at the same time subjected, I should fancy, to terrible floods. 
Beyond the rapids you find yourself among the more uncivilized tribes on this river—the 
Muruts; they seem very little removed from the Dyaks. These people cultivate the hills 
by cutting and burning the forests, when they plant rice known as hill-paddi, which is, 
in my opinion, preferable to the swamp-rice. Plere, as elsewhere on the Padas, a great 
many natives have left their campongs on account of a perfect plague of rats which 
devoured their crops, and they were continually asking whether we had brought any 
rat-poison with us. The Muruts also are great pig-hunters, and collectors of various 
gums, rattans, wax, and other forest-produce, which costs them a great deal of labour, and 
for which they do not receive one-hundredth part of the value in barter with the Orang 
Sungei. Then, as we go further inland to the watershed of these great rivers where they 
become tiny trickling streams, we find man but little removed from the higher apes, living- 
all his life in the forests, neither sowing crops nor building villages, but still with enough 
intelligence to collect the produce of the forest, which is passed from hand to hand until 
it reaches our homes in this far-off country in the shape of cane-chairs and varnishes ; thus 
commerce, like the river, stretches out her feelers until they become so fine as to be hardly 
recognizable. 
