Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/203

Rh was spent collecting a fine series of specimens for future study, and well content I returned to Bau for tiffin.

Before returning to Kuching a day was spent exploring Mt. Sarambo, a place of special interest to the naturalist, because it was one of the places where Wallace made some of his most important collections in Borneo more than fifty years ago. My companion, Mr. Moulton, showed me the site of Wallace's house, where he had himself camped a couple of years before.

On Sarambo there are a couple of small communities of Land Dayaks who received us very hospitably, regaling us with green cocoanuts whose water was most refreshing after our hot climb.

My most interesting experience in Borneo was a week spent on Mt, Mattang, about ten miles from Kuching, but more conveniently reached by a rather roundabout route by water. This mountain was tabu for some reason, and consequently was avoided by the Land Dayaks, who, from time to time, have cleared most of the lower hill slopes in the neighborhood. Except for some relatively small clearings, planted to tea and coffee by the Rajah, the mountain is still covered by magnificent virgin forest. The Rajah built a small bungalow about forty years ago in this clearing, an unpretending, but sufficiently comfortable building, which was kindly placed at my disposal during my stay on the mountain. The site was formerly occupied by a temporary structure erected by the well-known Italian botanist, Beccari, who in the sixties spent a long time in Sarawak and made extensive collections on Mattang. These included many new species. Beccari called his dwelling Valombroso, and this name was transferred by the Rajah to his bungalow.

Accompanied by my Chinese boy and half a dozen coolies carrying the necessary impedimenta for a week's camp (including a crate of chickens and one of the huge pineapples for which Sarawak is famous) I was soon comfortably established, and, for the time being, monarch of all I surveyed.

The surrounding forest is an intensely interesting one. Gigantic trees bound together by great lianas, like huge cables, and with their trunks and branches often quite covered with a profusion of epiphytes, rose from a dense undergrowth of palms, giant ferns, rattans and a host of other strange tropical growths.

The wet banks were covered with beautiful ferns, liverworts and mosses and, although, as is usually the case in the tropical Jungle, flowers were not conspicuous, there were a number of very beautiful ones. One of the prettiest (Didymocarpus) had small fox-glove-shaped pale purple flowers borne on slender stems rising from a rosette of very dark green, almost black leaves, exquisitely veined with snowy white. These dainty plants grew abundantly on the mossy banks, mingled