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crafts which have capsized, baling water from those which have been swamped in the rapids, punting forward over the short smooth reaches which separate obstruction from obstruction. There is no eight hours' theory here, and white men and brown toil uncomplainingly and with a marvellous energy during all the hours of daylight.

"Aren't they splendid fellows?" says the Resident, enthusiastically. "Look at them! Would you ever get white labourers to work like that? You would think that they enjoyed it, and not a man among them is getting anything except his food!"

As he speaks, a mob of fifty yelling Malays rush the biggest of the boats against the foaming wave of a rapid. The river is only waist-deep; but the current is mighty, and no one but a Malay could keep his footing amid the roaring waters. On the punting-platform forward six men, with knees and bodies bent, stagger under the fearful strain as they essay to hold the boat in position by the poles with which they are grappling the rocks upon the bank. The remainder of those engaged in pushing the boat up the rapid struggle on either side, holding the gunwale with their hands. The charging volume of the torrent disputes every inch of the way. Little by little the boat forges ahead, then slides back a foot or two, then moves forward again, hangs poised and motionless, then thrusts its nose deeper into the white wave in

front of it. The Malays labour manfully, yelling in chorus with the excitement of their exertions, battling with the current as though it were some living thing. Once more the boat creeps onward; again it hangs in suspense; then, with a final rush, it leaps to the top of the rapid into stiller water. A great roar goes up; the men who have been pushing lustily fall forward when the resistance is so suddenly removed, and one of them is jammed between the boat's side and the jagged surface of a piece of protruding rock. The Resident gives a sharp cry and leaps forward to his aid, but the man extricates himself and limps ashore laughing. does not signify, Tuan," he says cheerfully. Two other men scramble on to the bank and dance wildly with grotesque gesticulations. They have overcome an enemy, and they are tingling with excitement no less real than that of the triumphant warrior. "They are wonderful fellows," says the Resident again. "I had rather have them to work with than any men I know, yet people will tell you that the Malays are the laziest animals on the face of the earth."

"It

"There's a good deal in the way you work them," says the second in command. "They will do their best for you or me, because we can talk to them, understand them, and show them that we wish to consider their comfort. The Malay requires the personal motive to set him going. He will only work like this because it pleases

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At the end of a week a spot is reached on the banks of the little river where the Resident means to leave his boats and take to the shore. The loads are apportioned, the men whose aid is no longer required are told off and given leave to return to their villages, arms are inspected, rations are doled out to the fighting-men, and all the necessary preparations are made for an early start on the morrow.

During the past week the expedition has been creeping through forest lands which have no inhabitants save the wild beasts whose cries are heard in the melancholy night-time, and whose spoor is seen so frequently in the yielding mud near the brink of the river. Native tradition tells that this route into the Benighted Lands was used once, long ago, by a little band of fugitives flying the anger of a hostile chief; and the Resident has selected it as the way of all others by which his coming will be the least expected. A Sâkai, a hill-tribesman, acts as guide. He is a citizen of the jungle, and owns no country as his home. To him the States on the fringe of the empire and the Benighted Lands are all one; he recognises no boundaries; he and his fellows have moved hither and thither through the forest, driven this way or that as their primi

tive food-supplies became exhausted. To him all the interior districts of the Peninsula form one state-the jungle-kingdom -a land without definite limits, where all men are free to come and go at will, and with its obscure byways he has been familiar from infancy. Without the aid of his knowledge-the knowledge of a creature who wears his scanty loin-cloth of rough bark ungladly, and can count no higher than the numeral three-the white men, the "heirs of all the ages," and the semi-civilised brown folk, their companions, would be unable to prosecute their journey ; without his help the great engine of empire, which, working from Downing Street, is propelling the little force into the Benighted Lands, would find its monstrous wheels clogged! The idea has something awful about it: it exemplifies the impotence of the mighty in a manner which is humiliating.

At four o'clock in the morning the camp is astir. An order has been circulated overnight, and the word passed for a march which is to occupy all the hours of daylight. The cold winds which herald the dawn are blowing down the stream from the near mountains; the moon has sunk to her rest; the darkness is profound. Suddenly a voice shouts through the gloom bidding men arise. The cry is taken up from hut to hut, travels round the camp, and is greeted with groans and the inarticulate murmurs of men heavy with sleep. Again the shout rings out imperatively from the white men's camp,

and with slow reluctance the Malays begin to move. No dressing is required, for the natives sleep in their dayclothes; but each man gropes his way to the river-brink and washes himself elaborately. Then fires spring into red life here, there, and everywhere. Against the ruddy smudges of flame forms are outlined blackly, squatting figures bowed above the cooking-pots, swaddled to the chin in shapeless cloaks. The heaviness of the wakinghour is still upon them, and their speech is broken and fragmentary, indistinctly heard above the growing volume of sound occasioned by the roar of fire and the crackling of dry

fuel.

One by one the white men awake, stretch themselves, creep down to the river to bathe, and stumble back through the darkness to dress. A pair of coarse jungle trousers, a flannel shirt, stout socks, canvas shoes, and a slouch hat constitute their simple costume. Belts, from which depend pouches for money, pouches for tobacco, watchpouches, compass-pouches, cartridge-pouches, a holstered pistol, hang about the Europeans' waists, giving them the air of dingy Christmas-trees. Shaving is postponed until a more favourable opportunity presents itself, and the morning toilet is, therefore, an operation which occupies little time. Before it is completed the orderlies bring huge plates of rice and curry which they place upon the sleeping - mats, and the white men fall to and make as good a meal as the early hour and a

total lack of appetite render possible. Natives have this advantage over their white brethren-they can feed at any hour, gorge themselves to any extent, take in rations as though they were stoking an engine, and so fortify themselves for the labours of the day which lies ahead. A white man may acquire a similar aptitude, but he needs constant practice; and during the early days of a jungle march he is apt to eat too little while the opportunity is his, and to go sorrowing all the day in consequence.

Presently the daylight comes, slowly and stealthily, with an almost imperceptible strengthening of wan light, looking in at the men camped under the overhanging trees with as much caution as an urchin uses in peeping under a flower-pot in which he believes an imprisoned bird to lie concealed. The Malays, having eaten their fill and thereafter swilled deep draughts of cold water, rise to their feet, settle their loads upon their backs, and form up into an irregular line. The hilltribesman leads the way, naked save for a bark girdle through which is thrust all his worldly gear. He steps forward lightly as a stag, and the tread of the bare-footed Malays behind him. seems heavy by comparison, while the thin shoes of the white folk trample and crash. Civilisation hath ever a weighty footfall, as those who have marked the wrecks of old and broken landmarks which it leaves in its wake know full well. The nearer man is to the beasts the more active and

catlike his agility; the nearer he wins to the Godhead the more ponderous and vulnerable is the body which weighs upon and shackles him.

The string of laden men wriggles into the forest. Here the highways of even semibarbarous men have ceased to be. The world is in its primeval condition, and human beings must share with their brothers the brutes the roads of Nature's contrivance. A little stream splutters down through lichened rocks and shingles to the river by the camp, and up its bed the Sâkai steps with the whole expedition trailing behind him. The waters vary from a depth of two feet to as many inches; they come leaping and squabbling from the mountains, and they are bitterly cold. The rocks and shingles past or over which the stream rushes are of a glassy slipperiness, and bareshod men trip and flounder along with their skin turned to goose-flesh, their marching accompanied by the sound of stones grating loudly one against the other, and a great splashing of disturbed water. Hour after hour passes away. Each one's legs are numbed to the knee, the heels and the balls of his feet are sore and bruised; even through their shoes the white men can feel the tenderness in the hollow beneath the instep which comes from balancing on insufficient foot-rests of hard rock. Overhead the branches of the trees join hands above the stream, in some places spreading downwards so lowly that men are forced to crawl under them on all-fours.

The

track is a mere thread of running water passing through a tunnel of greenery, and as each slow mile is traversed the size of the path shrinks and the stream is diminished in volume. The sun which now is soaring high above the forest is powerless to warm the dank atmosphere in this natural vault.

Shortly after mid-day a halt is called, and the white men and their followers seat themselves on boulders, with their drenched legs drawn up out of reach of the running water, and wait for the straggling baggage-bearers to arrive. A busy search is made in every fold of each man's clothes for lurking leeches, and the brown or green creatures, with their bodies erect and their pointed tips waving inquiringly in every direction, are hacked into pieces with wood-knives, or are shrivelled up for ever by a drop of tobacco-juice. Here and there on a brown leg, or showing dimly through coarse trousers, a smudge of dirty red leaves sure traces of a leech which has feasted heartily. The men are sweating from their toil, for in a tropical climate it is never so cold that exertion can be undertaken with a dry skin; but the perspiration is cold and clammy, and is not accompanied by any sensation of warmth. Slowly the baggage-coolies straggle in, and when all have arrived the Sâkai resumes his march upstream. Half a mile farther on he suddenly turns off, leaving the rivulet on his right, and begins to scramble up a hill which has a gradient steep as that of a thatched roof. The

armed Malays, the Europeans, and the baggage-coolies follow, clinging with hands and feet, pulling themselves up by means of the thick underwood, and wriggling through the tangles

of thorns and interlaced rattans. Ahead the Sâkai wields his knife restlessly, and at a touch the boughs and palm-fronds, the vines and the trailing creepers, part and fall asunder as though by magic. Each man makes the way a trifle easier for those behind him, so that the last to pass finds a well-trodden track stretching before him up the mountainside, although, when the Sâkai turned aside from the river, there was nothing to be seenno sign or token to guide anything less keen than his jungleinstinct, marking the existence of a possible ascent.

The summit of the first hill reached, the Sâkai leads the way along a spur, or hogsback, which has been much trodden by big game, and is studded here and there with the bare and twig-strewn circles where the argus pheasants strut and drum for the entertainment of

their admiring hens. Half a mile farther on the Sâkai again faces the steep hill upon his right, and climbs swiftly sky wards. As the Resident toils and scrambles up the ascent he looks aloft and sees almost over his head the brown limbs of the guide running through the brushwood on all-fours, swinging himself from shrub to shrub, darting nimbly between treetrunks, and breasting the sheer hill without effort. Behind him the Malays of the advance

guard strain and toil, panting slightly. Behind them again come the white men, blowing like winded buffaloes. The burdened baggage-bearers straggle over half a mile of hillside in the rear. Another hogsback, another brief stretch of level ground, and then another ascent. Will the summit of the mountain never be attained? The Sâkai does not even seem to think of halting, and the Malays are unwilling to lose sight of their guide. The Englishmen will not confess themselves to

be beaten. The line wriggles upwards, and the trees grow sparse and few. Another hogsback and another ascent, this time the last and the worst, and then the white men throw themselves down upon the drummingground which crowns the ridge, and pant as though they would burst their lungs. Their hearts are leaping and racketing about within them, and the coldness of the wind which plays around the mountain tops, at a height of near 3000 feet above sealevel, chills them horribly, catching their breath.

After a few minutes the white men rise and look around. From the peak on which they stand a view of the surrounding country is commanded: great billows of mountains rise on every side shutting out the plain-mountains smothered from base to crest in impenetrable jungle, of a dark even green, which fades to a blur of blue in the distance. There is not a single well-defined peak among them all. Everywhere, as far as the eye can reach, there are great round sweeps of hill-top, curve after

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