IN CHAINS
IT WAS rather more than five and twenty years ago that I returned from leave of absence in Europe, and took charge of the district which forms the interior of the native state of Pahang, and is the exact core and centre of the Malay Peninsula. It was a big tract of country, over three thousand square miles in extent, and in those days. was reckoned the wildest part of the protected Ma- layan states. It did not boast a mile of made road or bridle path in all its vast expanse; it was simothered in deep, damp forest, threaded across and across by a network of streams and rivers, the latter the best of our highways; and a sparse sprinkling of Malay villages was strewn over its surface—a dozen or two of thatched roofs in shady palm and fruit groves adjoining wide, flat stretches of rice-field and grazing grounds studded with rhododendron scrub. Besides the Malay population there were a few camps filled with Chinese miners engaged in fossicking for gold: a band or two of sulky Australian prospectors, sorely discontented with the results which they were ob- taining; and an odd thousand or so of squalid abori- gines, living in dirt and wretchedness up in the mountains. For the rest the inhabitants of my district were native chiefs. the overlords and oppressors, and Malayan villagers, the serfs and the oppressed. The power of the former (which was usually exerted for evil) had not yet been broken or fettered; the spirit of independence which to-day animates the latter class had not at that time been awakened, and the world into which I was suddenly precipitated an influence shot straight out of the civilized nineteeth century into a living past-was one as primitive as any which existed in Europe in the early Middle Ages.
I had a hut on the banks of the Lipis River, a single room staggering upon six crazy piles some fifteen feet in height, which was at once my dwelling, my office, my treasury, and my courthouse. The ceiling was formed by the browny-yellow thatch running up into a cone, supported upon an irregular arrange- ment of beams and rafters in which by day the big, black, flying beetles bored their holes, covering me with fine wood dust, while at night-time the rats chased one another along them, squeaking dismally.
When I looked out of my window, a little lopsided oblong of sunlight sawn unevenly out of the ragged bamboo wattle, my sight dropped fifty feet sheer into the olive-green waters of the Lipis, for the long stalk- like legs upon which the flooring of my hut rested were canted dangerously riverward. From under their feet the bank fell away in a headlong pitch, so that I lived in the expectation of seeing my habita- tion take a leap into the cool waters of the stream; and when the wind came down in the heavy gusts which, in the spring, heralded the daily afternoon downpour, I could feel the whole thing bracing itself for the jump, with a creaking of timbers and a noisy whining of the strained wattling.
It was not much of a hut, it must be confessed, and I speedily got myself into much better quarters; but in those days I stood in no great need of a dwelling- place of my own. The district under my charge was extensive and it seemed to be cut off from the rest of the world almost as effectually as would have been the case if it had been located on the surface of some alien planet. I had been set apart from my fellow civil servants to learn all that was possible concerning it, to win the shy confidence of a people to whom white men were a new and suspect breed, to make myself a factor in their everyday life, and thereby to establish a personal influence among them, The which, in a new land, is the first, surest founda- tion of British rule. All this meant that it was my lot to rival the restlessness of the Wandering Jew; to sleep rarely more than a single night in the same casual resting-place; to live on what I could get, which often enough did not amount to much; and little by little so to familiarize the natives with my ubiquity that they should come to regard me and my visits as among the commonest incidents in the ex- perience of every village scattered up and down a wide countryside.
It would not be easy to conceive a life more delight- ful for a healthy youngster blessed with a keen in- terest in the much which he was learning and in the little that he was slowly and cautiously teaching. A hurried meal soon after the dawn had broken; a long tramp from village to village while daylight lasted; a swim in the river; a huge plate of rice and curry, cooked by the womenfolk of the place and caten with a hunter's appetite; a smoke and a yarn with the elders of the place, pieturesque figures grouped around one in a semicircle, chewing betel nut, as the placid cattle masticate the end; a dis- pute or two, perhaps, settled between smoke and smoke, without any magisterial formalities; a shred or two of information picked up here and there upon matters which would some day be of importance; and then sound, soul-satisfying sleep, and early waking, and another long day of labour and of life. By boat and raft on rivers small or great; tramping through the gloomy depths of forests hitherto un- explored by white men or across rice-swamps sizzling in the midday heat; camping at night in my boat on the river, in a headman's house under the peaked roof of a little village mosque, or in some crop watcher's laut; sleeping out on a sandbank, or on the ground in the dead jungle, with my mat spread upon a bed of bonghis and with a green palm-leaf shelter to ward off the worst of the drenching dews; shooting rapids, paddling down or poling up the rivers; skimming the cream of inviolate snipe grounds, or watching for game on the edge of a salt-lick-however I travelled, wherever I stayed or halted, no matter who the strange folk with whom I daily consorted, I tasted to the full the joys of a complete independence, the delights of fresh, open air and hard exercise, and enough work to keep the mind as fit and supple as the limbs. I had been jerked out of the age in which I had been born, out of the scurry and bustle of Euro- pean life, out of touch with the mechanical contriv. ances which restrict a man's freedom of action and judgment and cause his love of responsibility to atrophy into a world of unfettered freedom among a semi-civilized people, where nature still had her own way unchecked by the intrusions of applied science, and where men and things were primitive and ele- mental.
I had had plenty of experience as a jungle-dweller long before I look charge of the interior district of Palang; and since a knowledge of how to travel and how to live in a Malayan forest land is more than half the battle, I escaped, for the most part, the heavy troubles of which so many newcomers are able to tell such moving tales. None the less, the jungles played their pranks with me more than once, and the first trip which I took after my return to duty was packed as closely with small adventures as is the average boy's book with hair-breadth es- capes and perils miraculously overcome.
I left my hul early one morning with half a dozen of my Malay followers trailing behind me in single file. A Gladstone bag, a japanned despatch box, and a large basket carried knapsackwise, and filled to the brim with cooking-pots, plates, dishes, and miscellaneous kitchen utensils, were the three princi- pal loads. A fourth man carried my bed. I remem- ber thinking, when I was a small boy, that the facility with which the man sick of the palsy complied with the divine command, "Take up thy bed, and go unto thine house," was the major part of the miracle; and this impression was confirmed by a picture in the old family Bible, in which the whilom invalid was represented staggering away under the weight of a vast four-poster. It was not until I came to the East that I realized how simple a matter is the sleep- ing gear of the average Oriental. My "bed" con- sisted of a native mat of plaited mengkuang palm leaves, a narrow flock mattress, half an inch in thick- ness, and a couple of European pillows. The whole thing did not weigh more than twenty pounds, unless it was saturated with rain water, when it tipped the scale at about double that figure. It had the additional advantage of possessing no sharp corners of projec- tions calculated to gall the bearer's back, and con- sequently it was the most popular piece of my bag- gage, and was usually annexed by the strongest and most violent-tempered of my men. The unyielding despatch box generally fell to the lot of the man among my followers who was least capable of stick- ing up for his rights and who was accordingly the least fit to bear the burden.
It was a bright, cool morning when we started with a little ribbon of cloudlike mist showing above the treetops as one looked up the valley of the Lipis, marking faithfully the windings of the river. The birds were noisy and a few gayly feathered paroquets fluttered from bush to bush as we made our way through the low scrub jungle near the bank of the stream. The spiders had been busy all night, and their slimy webs stretched across the footpath we were following glued themselves so unpleasantly to my face that, contrary to iny wont, I bade Akob, one of my men, walk in front of me to keep the way clear of these frail barriers. In this manner we had trudged along steadily for a couple of hours and the heat of the tropical day was already beginning to make itself felt, stilling the noisy life of the jungle and drying up the dewdrops, when suddenly Akob halted abruptly and pointed, in evident excitement, at something ahead of him. We were standing on the brink of a narrow creek on either side of which a steeply cleft bank rose at a sharp angle from the water's edge. Leaning forward to look over Akob's shoulder, I saw half a dozen yards away, upon the surface of the opposite bank, a curious patch, ir- regular in shape, and discoloured a peculiarly blended black and yellow. It had a strange furry appearance, but shimmered with a suggestion of restless life. All this I noted in an instant, not realizing in the least the nature of the object at which I was gazing; and then, without any warning, the patch rose at us, rose like a cheap black and yellow railway rug tossed upward by the wind. A humming, purring sound. accompanied its flight, and a second later it had resolved itself into its elements, and had precipitated itself upon us a swarm of bees, mad with rage and thirsting for blood and vengeance.
Akob, hiding his head in his arms, slewed round sharply and charged away, nearly knocking me off my legs. I followed headlong, broke through my bewildered followers, tore out of the little belt of jungle which we had just entered and sprinted for my life across a patch of short grass beyond. For a moment I believed myself to have given the enemy the slip, and I turned to watch my people, their burdens thrown to the winds, tumbling out of cover, yelling like madmen, and beating the air with their wildly whirling arms. Another instant and I was again put to ignominious flight. I pulled my huge felt hat from my head and flogged with it the cloudlike squadrons of my foes. All the while I ran as fast as my legs would carry me, but the bees were not to be outpaced. They plunged their stings deep into my flannel shirt and into the tough Cananore cloth of my rough jungle trousers; they slung my bare arms, and hands and neck mercilessly, and I had the greatest difficulty in warding them off my face and eyes. I was panting for breath, sweating at every pore and was beginning to feel most uncommonly done and to experience something akin to real fear, when suddenly I caught sight of the waters of the Rengai, a little river which flows through these forests to the Lipis.
"Take to the water! Take to the water!" ( shouted to my howling men, and only waiting to slip my pistol belt with its pouches for watch, compass, money, tobacco, etc., a delay for which I had to pay. a heavy price in stings, I plunged neck and crop into the shallow water. My Malays came after me helter- skelter, like a flock of sheep following at the heels of a bell-wether; but with us all came the army of bees, stinging, stinging, stinging, for the life.
I was thoroughly winded by the time I took to the water, and it was impossible to keep under for more than a few seconds; yet when I rose to the surface the bees were still there more angry than ever, and I was driven under again, while my lungs pumped and sobbed painfully. Again I rose, again was set upon, again was driven under water. My heart was leap- ing about in my body like some wild thing seeking to escape; I was so distressed for breath that my senses. were reeling; I was rapidly becoming desperate. It flashed across my mind that to be drowned or stung to death in a puddle by a swarm of insignificant in- sects was about as ridiculous and as ignominious a way of making one's exit from life as could well be conceived; yet, at the moment, it seemed almost certain that this was the preposterous lot which a capricious fate had assigned to me.
As I came sobbing to the surface to meet yet another furious assault, I heard Saleh, my head boatman, cry aloud:
"Throw a bough for them to alight upon!"
The words were in my ears as I was again driven to dive, and in a flash their meaning was made clear to me. I struggled toward the bank, tugged off a branch from an overhanging tree, threw it on the surface of the stream, and dived once more. One or two of my men followed suit, and when, having remained under water as long as I could, I rose once more in a state of pitiful exhaustion, I saw half a dozen branches floating gayly downstream covered. three deep by clusters of struggling and stinging bees.
I rose to my feet, waded to the bank, and for a good quarter of an hour sat there panting and hawking and fighting to regain my breath. Then we fell to counting our losses and to estimating the damage done. One of my men, a Sumatran Malay named Dolman, was in a fainting condition. He had been stung in nearly two hundred places; his face was reduced to a shapeless mass in which no feature was any longer distinguishable; and he vomited so violently that I feared for his life. We put him into a boat and the neighbouring villagers of Dolut undertook to send him back to my hut at Penjum. Then the rest of us limped across grazing grounds to the village and lay down upon the clean mats spread for us on the veranda of the headman's house, where we endured the fever that was burning in our blood. Our hands were like great boxing gloves, our heads and faces were swollen, and puffy, and we had to abandon all idea of proceeding far- ther upon our journey that day.
We were profoundly sorry for ourselves, and we were less relieved than disgusted when one of our number, who had been missing and whom we had reckoned as dead, came in half an hour later per- fectly unharmed. He had seen the bees coming, he told us, and had squatted down and remained quite still to await their assault. They had covered him from head to foot; but as a bee is aware that using his sting usually results in his own death, he never strikes unless he has persuaded himself that the last sacrifice is demanded of him on behalf of the hive. Accordingly the clouds of insects had settled all over my Malay, had investigated him closely, and then had passed on leaving him unhurt. It was exasperating to realize that we had had our frantic stampede, our fight, our suffocation under water, and the pains we were then enduring for nothing, and that all might have been avoided by the exercise of presence of mind coupled with a sufficiency of cool nerve. The latter, of course, was the really vital possession and fresh from my recent encounter, I questioned whether I had enough of courage in me to enable me to sit calmly under a load of investigating bees, knowing that a single voluntary movement would entail a peculiarly pain- ful and ugly death. Therefore, I sat in silence, listening to my follower's account of his proceedings, while he picked six and thirty stings out of my felt hat and more than a hundred out of my flannel shirt.
The bees, he said, were irascible and unreasonable creatures. Their nest had, on this occasion, been swooped down upon by a kite, which had borne off a portion of the nursery before the fighting part of the population had become aware of the danger. Then the standing army had been called out, and sinee we elianced to be the next living thing to come their way, they had mistaken us for the thieves and had promptly declared war upon us. Therefore we had been made to bear the punishment due for the sins of a kite, and had run ourselves dizzy and had half drowned ourselves in the river when we should have done better to sit still. The situation was sufficiently humiliating.
Next day we continued our interrupted march, and nothing worth detailed record happened for a week or so. At one village a stealthy visit was paid to me by three young nobles, whose father had recently had a difference of opinion with the rulers of the land, which had resulted for him in a violent death. His sons who had had no share in their father's misdeeds, had promptly taken to the jungle, and as they were fighting men of some repute, all manner of wild rumours as to the trouble they were meditating were afloat in the district on my arrival in it. I had known them intimately before I left Pahang on leave, and as soon as they learned that I was once again in their neighbourhood, they sought me out for the purpose of talking matters over and, if possible, of making their peace with the Govern- ment. They crept into my camp in the dead of night, armed to the teeth, very apprehensive, and ready for all eventualities. At first they were like hunted jungle creatures that feared a trap, but they ended by spreading their sleeping mats alongside mine and snoring contentedly until the daybreak woke us.
Another night I passed in a mining camp, where a crowd of depressed Australians were squatting in a couple of makeshift huts beside a pool filled to the brim with dirty water, green with arsenic and duckweed This was all that at that time represented the Raub Mine, which later became a rather notori- ous centre of speculation, and was at one time ex- pected to prove one of the great gold producers of the East.
From Ranb I tramped on to the foot of the main range, where people of many nationalities were busy shuicing for tin; and thence I decided to cut across the forest so as to strike the head waters of a river called the Sempam which at that time had never been visited by an European and was terr incognita to all save a very few of even the Malays of the district.
Not without difficulty I succeeded in enlisting the services of an aboriginal tribesman-a Sâkai-who undertook to guide me to the banks of the Sempam, but stoutly declined to have anything to do with my proposed attempt to descend that rock-beset river. He moved along in front of my party, with the noiseless, catlike gait which distinguishes the jungle- folk, and once he complained bitterly that the "klap- klip-klap of my canvas shoes on the ground behind him was so bewildering that he feared that "the doors of the jungle would thereby be closed to him." which was his way of suggesting that he thought it likely that he would lose his way. In common with the rest of his race, he possessed no power of instituting a comparison between one thing and another, and when we were within a couple of hum- dred yards of our destination he still obstinately maintained that it was as far ahead of us as our orig. inal starting-place was behind us. When, a few minutes later, this assertion was disproved, he re- mained quite unabashed. The difference between the two distances a matter of some seven miles- was to him, he declared, imperceptible. They were both "a long way," and viewed from this standpoint, they were to the limitations of his intellect indis- tinguishably alike.
At the point where we struck the Sempam River, its banks were covered by dense clumps of bamboos of the kind the Malays call buloh padi, graceful, drooping stems, tapering to slender shoots five and twenty feet from the ground, all rising, plumelike, from a common centre, and set with innumerable delicate branches and feathery foliage. The river, at this point about a dozen yards in width, ran swiftly and silently, an olive-green flood, flecked here and there by little splashes of sunlight. The forest around us was intensely still, for the hot hours of the day were upon us, and a sense of the wildness of the place and of its utter remoteness from mankind, filled me with a sort of awe. It was with a feeling akin to shame that I gave the word which was to disturb the profound peace and to set man's defacing thumb mark upon all this inviolate beauty.
As soon as they had stacked their loads, however, my men drew their woodknives and set to work felling bamboos from which to fashion cur rafts. The ringing notes of their blades simiting the hollow stems carried far and wide, awaking the forest echoes, and the bamboos creaked and groaned like things in pain, as one by one they slowly collapsed, toppling into the river, whence they were towed into the shal- lows to be trimmed of their branches and cut to the requisite length. A couple of hours' hard work saw four stout rafts floating high out of the water, the river fretting and fuming about their slippery green sides, the newly cut rattans exuding a milky sap as my men bound the bamboos together by means of strong cross-pieces fore and aft and amidships. Small raised platforms were erected in the centre. of each raft, and on three of these we stowed our baggage. The fourth raft was reserved for me; and when I had rewarded the Sâkai for his pains with a wedge of coarse tobacco and a palm-leaf bag filled with black rock-salt, I took my seat upon the plat- form prepared for my accommodation and bade my men push out into the stream.
"In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compas- sionate!" they cried; and my raft slid across the glassy surface into the tug of the current, the three others following us in single file.
Until you have had the good fortune to taste of it, the peculiar fascination of exploring a belt of coun- try in which no white man and very few human be- ings of any kind have hitherto set foot cannot easily be realized. To find one's self penetrating, the first of all one's kind, into one of Nature's secret fast- nesses, where free from the encroachments of man- kind she has worked her mighty will during cons upon eons of unrecorded time, is extraordinarily stimulating to the imagination. One looks round upon a world in the fashioning of which the hand of man has had no part. Age has succeeded age; race has swept forward, has surged up and has obliterated race; history has been made and unmade a thousand times by myriads of puny men; but all the while in this hidden cranny of the globe the great Mother has been working her gradual miracles. It is old, old, old; older than record; older than speech; older than man; and yet for you it is newer than aught else, a secret kept faithfully through all the ages to be revealed at last to you. You look around you with a keen delight, with eager eyes that find a fresh interest in all they light upon, with a heart chastened by the solemnity, the mystery of this unfrequented wilderness. The awfulness of your surroundings, the aloofness from your fellows, the sense of your exclusive privilege, impart to you a feeling akin to that by which the newly initiated priest may be inspired when, for the first time, he lifts the veil that cloaks the inner temple of his wor- ship; but here there is no grinning idol to dispel illusion, but rather a little glimpse vouchsafed to mworthy man of the vision of the true God.
For nearly an hour we glided downstream through long, calin reaches, where the sunlight flecked the dancing waters between banks thickly set by bam- boo thickets backed by impenetrable forest, and each bend in the winding river revealed yet another perfect picture of the beauty and the splendour of this jungle paradise. We were heading for the un- known, passing thither through untrodden ways, and at every turn we looked for some surprise, some difficulty to be encountered and overcome, some wild prank that this untamed river might try to play upon us. It lent a fresh zest to our journeying, put an additional throb of excitement into the scanning of each reach of running water, as the frequent twist- ings of our course displayed them to us one by one.
On either hand low hills ran steeply upward from the water's edge, smothered in vast clumps of bam- boos, the stents resembling some gigantic, irregular palisade crowned by bunch above bunch of feathery plumes, the highest making a broken, undulating line of fretwork against the colourless afternoon sky. Near the river brink huge ngerum trees leaned out- ward, clasping friendly hands above our heads, throwing a grateful shade, and staining the waters to a deeper olive tint with their sombre reflections. From root to branch tip they were festooned with innumerable parasites, great tree ferns, smooth or shaggy, with their roots in deep, rich mosses; orehids of many kinds with here and there a little point of colour marking where a rare blossom nestled; creepers and trailing vines, some cating into the marrow of the boughs to which they clung, some hanging from the branches like fine drapery, some twined about and about in an inextricable network, others drop- ping sheer to the stream below and swaying con- stantly as the current played with their tassels. It was a fairyland of forest through which the river was bearing us, and I lay back upon my raft, feast- ing lazy eyes upon the constantly shifting scene, and fully conscious of my own supreme well-being. How fair was my lot, I thought, compared with that of the average young civil servant who rarely got much beyond a pile of dusty files on an over- loaded office table.
The stream ran rapidly with a merry purring sound and the rafts, kept end on to the current by polers at bow and stern, slid forward at an even pace. Suddenly we whisked round a sharp bend, and be- fore we knew what awaited us we were caught in the jaws of a formidable rapid. I was aware of a waste of angry water, white with foam, stretching away in front of us; of a host of rugged granite blocks. black with spray, poking their sharp noses out of the river, which boiled and leaped around them; of an instant acceleration of pace, and then I found my self standing in the bows of the raft, punting pole in hand, helping ny forward boatman to fight the evil- tempered thing which a moment earlier had been the placid, smiling river. We were travelling at a headlong pace now and the raft reeled and wallowed and canted with such violence that, even bareshod as we were, it was no easy matter to keep our footing on the slippery, rounded surfaces of the bamboos. Of the length, extent and difficulties of the rapid into which we had been so suddenly tossed we, of course. knew nothing. Of prospective dangers, however, we had no leisure to think, for we were wholly preoccupied by those which we were already beset, and every instant decisive action had to be taken to meet crowding emergencies, grasped, mel and dealt with all in a breath. At the end of a hundred yards of running fight we reached a point where the stream was split in twain by a great out- erop of granite, and in a flash we had to make our selection between the alternative routes offered. Instinctively we chose the left-hand channel, which looked the more likely of the two, and on we whirled at a perilous pace. The battling waters broke above my knees; the uproar of the stream deafened me; the furious pace set every nerve in my body tingling gloriously; the excitement of each new danger averted or overcome filled nie and my Malays with a perfect intoxication of delight. On we whirled, yelling and shouting like maniacs, plying our clash- ing poles, leaping down fall after fall, our raft sub- merged, our souls soaring aloft in a veritable delirium of excitement. It lasted for only a few moments and then the end came-came in a jarring crash upon a rock which we had failed to avoid, a violent thrust ing upward of one side of the raft till it ran almost on edge, a sudden immersion in the wildly agitated water, and three sharp yells, stiffed ere they were fully uttered. Presently I and my two Malays found ourselves clinging to an outlying projection of the rock which had wrecked us, though none of us clearly knew how we had got there; and to our surprise, except for a few euls and bruises, we were entirely unhurt. The raft, bent double like a piece of folded paper, lay broadside on across a wedge of granite, one side lifted clear of the stream, the other under water, the two ends nearly meeting on the far side of the obstruction. Such of my gear as had been placed upon my sitting platform had been whirled incontinently downstream, and I could see portions of it bobbing and ducking on the tumble of waters thirty yards below me. Then, one by one, these bits of flotsam dropped suddenly below the line of sight, disappearing at a point where an upleaping line of founi seemed to cut the stream at right angles from bank to bank.
Looking upriver, we saw the second of our rafts plunging down toward us, the two Malays at its bow and stern trying vainly to check its wild career; and even as we watched, the catastrophe befell and they were left clinging to a rock in the same plight. as ourselves. Their raft, breaking away, darted down toward us, scraped past us by a miracle, and disappeared in a shattered condition in the wake of my lost baggage. My men on the two remaining rafts had become aware of the danger in time, and we could see them making fast to the bank a couple of hundred yards upstream.
Sitting stranded upon a rock in the middle of the river with the boiling waters of the rapid leaping up at me like a pack of hounds when its kill is held aloft, we shrieked suggestions to one another as lo what should be our next move. The only thing was to swin for it, and cautiously I let my body down into the torrent and pushed out vigorously for the shore. The current fought me like a live thing, but the river was narrow, and after a rather desperate strag- gle I drew myself out of the water on the left bank and sat there panting and gasping. I had come into violent collision with more than one rock during my short swim and I was bruised and cut in many places, but it seemed to me then that I had escaped almost scot free, and I and my fellows screamed congratula- tions to one another at the top of our voices above the roar of the rapids. Then we rose to our feet and picked our way along the bank, through the thick jungle, to rejoin our companions farther up- stream.
Here a blow awaited us. The raft which had been following mine proved to have contained, among other things, our cooking utensils and our store of rice, and its loss meant that our prospects of having anything to eat that night was unpleasantly remote. We knew that there existed a few Malay villages on the banks of the lower reaches of the Sempam; but what might be the distance that separated us from these havens of refuge we could not tell. This was a problem that could only be solved by personal in- vestigation, which for hungry men might well prove a lengthy and therefore painful process.
The first thing to be done, however, was to find out the nature of the river below the rapid which had wrought our undoing, as we still hoped that it might be possible to lower our two uninjured rafts down the falls by means of rattan painters. Those who have never seen a Malayan forest will find it difficult to realize the difficulty which "getting out and walk- ing presents to the wayfarer in an unfrequented portion of the country. The rivers in such localitie; are practically the only highways, and the jungle upon their banks is so dense, so thorny, so filled with argently detaining hands, that progress is not only very slow, but speedily saws your nerves and temper into shreds. I bade Saleh, my head boatman, follow ne, and the other Malays stay where they were until we returned to them. Then I climbed back along The steeply shelving bank to the foot of the rapid in which the remains of my raft still flapped feebly, and thence scrambled through the dense forest and underwood to a point whence a view of the next reach of the river could be attained. It took us the best part of half an hour to gain this point of van- tage; but at last, clinging with one hand to a stout sapling, I swung out to the very edge of the forest- clad hill and looked about me.
Then my heart stood still in my body, for there suddenly was revealed to me the appalling danger which we had escaped by providentially coming to grief at the point where the rapid had defeated us. Certain destruction had awaited us only some thirty yards lower downstream.
From where I clung to the hillside I could look upriver to the point where the flotsam from the raft had dropped below the line of sight, and their abrupt disappearance was now explained. The Sempam ran here through a narrow gorge, enclosed by steep hills smothered in jungle; but at the top of the reach the river fell in a shaggy white curtain down the face of a precipice, which was walled on either side by black dikes of granite, clean-cut as though hewn by a single stroke of some giant's axe. With an intolerable roar, the whole body of the river leaped in a sheet of foam into the black abyss seventy feet below, throwing great jets of spray aloft that hung like a mist in the still air, drenching rocks and trees for many yards around till they dripped with moisture, and churning up the waters of the pool into which it. fell, so that their surface was a boiling, heaving mass that looked as white and almost as solid as cotton wool. A little lower downstream the pools widened out somewhat, and here the waters were so deep a green that they were nearly black, circling slowly round and round in innumerable, sullen- looking eddies, ere they shot forward again upon their course to plunge down fall after fall in never-ending strife. Even under the brilliant afternoon sunlight the place was steeped in a profound, mysterious gloom.
From where I was perched I could see for near a quarter of a mile along the river's length-a most unusually extended view in the heart of a Malayan jungle and at every yard of the way Death was written in unmistakable characters for any living thing that the falls might succeed in sucking into their grip. Had we taken the channel on the right, instead of that which we had chanced to select, nothing could have saved us; had our raft not come to wreck exactly where it did, a moment later malchwood would have been nade of it and of us; for once within the clutch of the upper fall, nothing could have saved us from a dreadful death. As l gazed at the masses of water plunging sheer down the face of the rock, I realized with a shock how closely I and my fellows had looked into the eyes of death so short a while before, and how unthinkingly, how light-heartedly we had seampered to the very brink of destruction while half intoxicated by the fierce joy of living.
I sent Saleh back for my fellows, and sat down where I was to await their coming. I wanted a ciga- rette to aid my meditations upon man's precarious tenure of life; but the river had rendered tobacco and matches alike useless.
The insistent roar of the rapids filled my hearing; the wild beauty of the scene held me spellbound; but most of all was I impressed by the insolent free- dom, the vigour, the complete, unrestrained savagery of the river. IIere was a stream which for countless ages had leaped and thundered down this granite- bound pass, had slain innumerable living things in its day with the callous cruelty of the mighty, and had never known an instant's restraint, a moment's check, a second's curbing or binding. As the stream below me tossed its white mane of spray restlessly to and fro, it seemed to me to be in truth some wild monster escaped from a primeval world, charging down this rock-pent defile, instinct with life and liberty. The very roaring of those resistless waters seemed to me a shout of triumph wherewith they boasted of their freedom; their furious commotion mocked aloud at the restraints of nature and of man. It was the embodiment of unfettered power, this river it was free, free, free-and the noise of its falls set my nerves quivering with a sympathetic excitement.
When my men had rejoined me we pushed on through the thick jungle and by dark we had suc- ceeded in passing out of hearing of the resonant thunder of the falls. But there were other rapids all along the river, and the music of the troubled waters was constantly in our cars. We camped on a sand bank by the river's side, and we went to bed supperless. We had paid tribute to the river of our last grain of rice, and Saleh, my head boatman, who had been selected for that post because he com- bined in a remarkable degrec a short temper and a long vocabulary, expressed himself on the subject of fate and of our situation with refreshing lati- tude.
The dawn broke grayly through a dense and drench- ing mist, and it found us very hungry and unhappy. We made an early start and scrambled and swarmed along the shelving river bank, through the bamboo brakes, the thorn thickets, and the tangled under- wood of that unspeakable forest, hour after hour, to an ever-increasing accompaniment of famine and fatigue. It was not until the afternoon sun was beginning to creep down the sky that we at length reached a place where it seemed possible again to make use of rafts with some prospect of success. We set to work in sullen silence, and an hour later we set off downstream, looking eagerly for a village as each bend was rounded, and accepting the recurrent disappointments with such philosophy as we could muster.
The night shut down upon us once more, but we did not call a halt. We had no knowledge concern- ing the distance that still separated us from the nearest human habitation and we were running a race against hunger-an opponent that never grants an armistice. We were already so spent that we dared not rest lest we should lack the force and courage to renew our efforts, and the pangs we were suffering for none of us had now tasted food for five and thirty hours-were goads that pricked us onward. Therefore, we fumbled and groped our way down the Sempam with the dogged, spiritless per- sistency of the desperate. Our discomfort was com- pleted by the fact that we had got ourselves smoth- cred in jungle ticks, crablike monsters that fix their claws into selected nerve centres, whence they can only be withdrawn at the cost of acute pain.
At about half-past eight we saw a point of light ahead of us and a few minutes later we were eagerly devouring all the available cooked rice in the little village of Chĕrok.
"The falls of this river are very difficult, Tuan." said a village elder to me, as I sat smoking and talk- ing to the people of the place, after I had crammed myself with fat, new rice. "They are very difficult, and no man may pass up or down those which are of the largest size. Moreover, even we, who are children of the river, may not approach the lesser rapids until fitting offerings have been made by us to the spirits which have in them their abiding place. Strangers who, being smitten by madness, nake free of this river thrust their heads into a noose whence it is not easy to draw back.
"The great fall, which is full twelve fathoms in height, is named the Fall of the Kine-cleft Bank, for it is a narrow pass such as giant kine might make at the spot where they were wont to go down to water. The next fall is named the Fall of Dew, for by reason of its spray the rocks and trees around it are perpetually drenched as it were by dew; and the last of all is the Fish Trap, for from out of its grip not even a fisli can escape.
"Ah, Túan, it is not well thus to tempt the Spirits of the Sempam, for they are very vengeful, and if they had killed you a great shame would have been put upon our people. Our Spirits are orang mêrd- hêka free folk-who care not at all for rája or overlord, and have no respect even for while men, Tuan, before whom the rajus themselves must give way, if all that men tell us be true. And this, too, Tuan, the Sempam hath taught you in hunger and in travail, it will bear no chains!"
And the old fellow chuckled, well pleased by his jest and proud of the prowess of his native stream. Fresh from my view of the falls and still aching from the rough handling which I had received at the hands of the river, my thought echoed the old man's vaunt. The wild freedom of the Sempam was what impressed me-the freedom of some savage creature, instinct with unrestrained vitality and a fierce, splen- did liberty.
Nine years later, by which time unregenerate Pahang had become a solid portion of the British Protectorate, and I, as resident, had been appointed to preside over its affairs, I visited the Sempam Falls again.
I was driven to them from the foot of the moun- tains in a smart dog cart by the manager of a mine, and I spent the night in a well-appointed bungalow after dining at a table which fairly groaned under the good viands that it bore.
From end to end of the falls a made road skirted the right bank of the river for a distance of about a mile. In the valley, below the bungalow, stood a square power station with a hideous roof of cor- rugated iron. From it, running upward upon a sort of staircase of wooden sleepers, a line of black pipes three feet in diameter climbed a succession of steep hillsides to the skyline half a mile away. This line of pipes communicated with a solid eoncrete reser- voir, which in its turn was fed by a large, square, wooden flume, which burrowed through the hills like a tar-smeared snake, and rose upon a gentle incline to the head of the Fall of the Kine-cleft Bank. Here the Sempam had been dammed across from bank to bank by a solid wall of eoncrete. Such of its waters as were not for the moment needed by the tyrannous white men were suffered to flow down the old chan- nel; but the rest of the river was eribbed and confined by the wooden walls of the flume, was stalled like a tame ox within the four walls of the reservoir, was forced, protesting but obedient, into the unsightly piping, and at the power station, three hundred feet below, was compelled to yield up its angry strength to the service of man, its master, in order to work and light the gold mines at Raub, seven miles away.
I listened as the engineer in charge told me, with the air of a lecturer upon anatomy, how many gal- lons of water per minute went to the pulsing of that once free river; how much of its strength was taken for the electrical works, how much left to the dimin- ished waters of the torrent.
The scene, as I stood looking down at it, was won- derfully little changed from what it had been that day long ago when I, first of all my kind, had gazed in fascination at those boisterous falls. On the left bank, where I had clung, the jungle still ran riot to the skyline. An outcrop of white limestone, which I remembered having noted, stood out prominently as of old, a glaring landmark, bare of vegetation on the flank of one of the higher hills at the foot of the falls. Through the deeply cleft walls of granite the river still danced and leaped wildly, though with sadly diminished volume, and with a voice that was like a mere whisper compared with the roar and Thunder of other days. Except when my eyes rested upon the works of man upon the right bank, all was as beautiful as in the past. But the supreme free- dom of the river, the quality which for me had had so overmastering, so compelling a fascination, had vanished utterly. The valley was no longer one of nature's inviolate and secret places, and the river was no more the strong, unfettered, vainglorious monster of my memory. It was in chains, a thrall to man, and to me it seemed to bear its gyves with a subdued and chastened sadness at once bitter and heartbroken.
The next morning I left the Falls of the Kine-cleft Bank and rode fifty miles to the residency of Kuala Lipis. My way took me through country which had once been wild, where now the great trunk road strung village to village, like onions on a string, and the whole line of my ride was marked by newly oc- cupied plantations, and by signs of the commercial progress and material development which white men and their civilization bring in their train. Then as I neared my home and turned my thoughts to the piles of official correspondence which I knew must be awaiting my return; caught sight of the hurrying telegraph peons, and remembered how at the end of that infernal wire there sat men whose business it was to impede me with instructions concerning matters which they imperfectly compreltended; as I heard the pat, pat of the tennis balls on the court within the dismantled stockade and saw the golfers. driving off from a neighbouring tee-suddenly the thought came to me of what my life in that district had wont to be less than a decade earlier. And then, though all the changes around me had been things for which I had worked and striven with all my heart and soul, somehow it seemed to me for the moment that it was not only the river that had lost its vitality and its freedom. Together we had shared the wild life which we had known and loved in the past; together in the present we went soberly, working in chains.