CHAPTER V. BORNEO—JOURNEY INTO
THE INTERIOR.
(NOVEMBER 1855 TO JANUARY 1856.)
As the wet season was approaching, I determined to return to Sarawak,
sending all my collections with Charles Allen around by sea, while I myself
proposed to go up to the sources of the Sadong River and descend by the
Sarawak valley. As the route was somewhat difficult, I took the smallest quantity
of baggage, and only one servant, a Malay lad named Bujon, who knew the
language of the Sadong Dyaks, with whom he had traded. We left the mines on
the 27th of November, and the next day reached the Malay village of Gúdong,
where I stayed a short time to buy fruit and eggs, and called upon the Datu
Bandar, or Malay governor of the place. He lived in a large, and well-built
house, very dirty outside and in, and was very inquisitive about my business, and
particularly about the coal-mines. These puzzle the natives exceedingly, as they
cannot understand the extensive and costly preparations for working coal, and
cannot believe it is to be used only as fuel when wood is so abundant and so
easily obtained. It was evident that Europeans seldom came here, for numbers of
women skeltered away as I walked through the village and one girl about ten or
twelve years old, who had just brought a bamboo full of water from the river,
threw it down with a cry of horror and alarm the moment she caught sight of me,
turned around and jumped into the stream. She swam beautifully, and kept
looking back as if expecting I would follow her, screaming violently all the time;
while a number of men and boys were laughing at her ignorant terror.
At Jahi, the next village, the stream became so swift in consequence of a
flood, that my heavy boat could make no way, and I was obliged to send it back
and go on in a very small open one. So far the river had been very monotonous,
the banks being cultivated as rice-fields, and little thatched huts alone breaking
the unpicturesque line of muddy bank crowned with tall grasses, and backed by
the top of the forest behind the cultivated ground. A few hours beyond Jahi we
passed the limits of cultivation, and had the beautiful virgin forest coming down
to the water's edge, with its palms and creepers, its noble trees, its ferns, and
epiphytes. The banks of the river were, however, still generally flooded, and we