Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/424

 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