ornamented with bead necklaces, shells, and brass wire.
In the morning I waited some time, but the men that were to accompany me
did not make their appearance. On sending to the Orang Kaya I found that both
he and another head-man had gone out for the day, and on inquiring the reason
was told that they could not persuade any of their men to go with me because the
journey was a long and fatiguing one. As I was determined to get on, I told the
few men that remained that the chiefs had behaved very badly, and that I should
acquaint the Rajah with their conduct, and I wanted to start immediately. Every
man present made some excuse, but others were sent for, and by dint of threats
and promises, and the exertion of all Bujon's eloquence, we succeeded in getting
off after two hours' delay.
For the first few miles our path lay over a country cleared for rice-fields,
consisting entirely of small but deep and sharply-cut ridges and valleys without a
yard of level ground. After crossing the Kayan river, a main branch of the
Sadong, we got on to the lower slopes of the Seboran Mountain, and the path lay
along a sharp and moderately steep ridge, affording an excellent view of the
country. Its features were exactly those of the Himalayas in miniature, as they
are described by Dr. Hooker and other travellers, and looked like a natural model
of some parts of those vast mountains on a scale of about a tenth—thousands of
feet being here represented by hundreds. I now discovered the source of the
beautiful pebbles which had so pleased me in the riverbed. The slatey rocks had
ceased, and these mountains seemed to consist of a sandstone conglomerate,
which was in some places a mere mass of pebbles cemented together. I might
have known that such small streams could not produce such vast quantities of
well-rounded pebbles of the very hardest materials. They had evidently been
formed in past ages, by the action of some continental stream or seabeach,
before the great island of Borneo had risen from the ocean. The existence of
such a system of hills and valleys reproducing in miniature all the features of a
great mountain region, has an important bearing on the modern theory that the
form of the ground is mainly due to atmospheric rather than to subterranean
action. When we have a number of branching valleys and ravines running in
many different directions within a square mile, it seems hardly possible to
impute their formation, or even their origination, to rents and fissures produced
by earthquakes. On the other hand, the nature of the rock, so easily decomposed
and removed by water, and the known action of the abundant tropical rains, are
in this case, at least, quite sufficient causes for the production of such valleys.
But the resemblance between their forms and outlines, their mode of divergence,
and the slopes and ridges that divide them, and those of the grand mountain