that I began to fear we should come into another
rapid, where our frail raft would have been washed
to pieces among the foaming rocks in a moment,
but at last they succeeded in stopping her, and we
gained the opposite bank. Thence my guidebook
me through a morass, which was covered with a
dense jungle, an admirable place for crocodiles, and
they do not fail to frequent it in large numbers;
but the thousands of leeches formed a worse pest.
In one place, about a foot square, in the path, I think
I saw as many as twenty, all stretching and twisting
themselves in every direction in search of prey. They
are small, being about an inch long, and a tenth of an
inch in diameter, before they gorge themselves with
the blood of some unfortunate animal that chances to
pass. They tormented me in a most shocking manner.
Every ten or fifteen minutes I had to stop and.
rid myself of perfect anklets of them.
I was in search of a coral-stone, which the natives
of this region burn for lime. My attendants, as well
as myself, were so tormented with the leeches, that
we could not remain long in that region, but I saw it
was nothing but a raised reef, chiefly composed of
comminuted coral, in which were many large hemispherical
meandrinas. The strata, where they could
be distinguished, were seen to be nearly horizontal.
Large blocks of coral are scattered about, just as on
the present reefs, but the jungle was too thick to
travel in far, and, as soon as we had gathered a few
shells, we hurried to the Musi, and rode back seven
miles in a heavy, drenching rain.
AH the region we have been travelling in to-day
abounds in rhinoceroses, elephants, and deer. If the
leeches attack them as they did a dog that followed
us, they must prove one of the most efficient means
of destroying those large animals. It is at least fortunate
for the elephant and rhinoceros that they are
pachyderms. While passing through the places
where the jungle is mostly composed of bamboos,
we saw several large troops of small, slate-colored
monkeys, and, among the taller trees, troops of another
species of a light-yellow color, with long arms
and long tails. On the morning that I left Tanjong
A gong, as we passed a tall tree by the roadside, the
natives cautioned me to keep quiet, for it was “ full
of monkeys,” and, when we were just under it,
they all set up a loud shout, and at once a whole
troop sprang out of its high branches like a flock of
birds. Some came down twenty-five or thirty feet
before they struck on the tops of the small trees beneath
them, and yet each would recover, and go off
through the jungle, with the speed of an arrow, in
a moment.
While nearly all animals have a particular area
which they frequent—as the low coast region, the
plateaus of these tropical lands, or the higher parts of
the mountains—the rhinoceros lives indifferently anywhere
between the sea-shores and the tops of the highest
peaks. This species has two “ horns,” the first being
the longer and more sharply pointed, but the Java
species has only one. The natives here know nothing
of the frequent combats between these animals and
elephants, that are so frequently pictured in popular
works on natural history. The Eesident has, how