IN THE VALLEY OF THE TĔLOM
VERY far away, in the remote interior of Pahang, there is a river called the Tĕlom–an angry little stream, which fights and tears its way through the vast primeval forest, biting savagely at its banks, wrestling petulantly with the rocks and boulders that obstruct its path, squabbling fiercely over long, sloping beds of shingle, and shaking a glistening mane of broken water, as it rushes downward in its fury. Sometimes, during the prevalence of the northeast monsoon, when the rain has fallen heavily in the mountains, the Tělom will rise fourteen or fifteen feet in a couple of hours; and then, for a space, its waters change their temper from wild, impetuous rage to a sullen wrath which is even more formidable and dangerous. But it is when the river is shrunken by drought that it is most of all to be feared; for at such times sharp and jagged rocks, over which, at ordinary seasons, a bamboo raft is able to glide in safety, prick upward from the bed of the stream to within an inch or two of the surface, and rip up everything that chances to come in contact with them as cleanly as though it were cut with a razor. At the foot of the largest rapid in the Tělom one of these boulders forms, in dry weather, a very efficient trap for the unwary. The
