thousand feet high, and covered with luxuriant forest
There are three Dyak villages upon it, and on a little platform
near the summit is the rude wooden lodge where the
English Rajah was accustomed to go for relaxation and
cool fresh air. I t is only twenty miles up the river, but
the road up the mountain is a succession of ladders on
the face of precipices, bamboo bridges over gullies and
chasms, and slippery paths over rocks and tree-trunks and
huge boulders as big as houses. O A cool spring under an
overhanging rock just below the cottage furnished us with
refreshing baths and delicious drinking water, and the
Dyaks brought us daily heaped-up baskets of Mangusteens
and Lansats, two of the most delicious of the subacid
tropical fruits. We returned to Sarawak for Christmas
(the second I had spent with Sir James Brooke), when all
the Europeans both in the town and from the out-stations
enjoyed the hospitality of the Rajah, who possessed in a
pre-eminent degree the art of making every one around
him comfortable and happy.
A few days afterwards I returned to the mountain with
Charles and a Malay boy named Ali and stayed there
three weeks for the puipose of making a collection of
land-shells, butterflies and moths, ferns and orchids. On
the hill itself ferns were tolerably plentiful, and I made
a collection of about forty species. But what occupied
me most was the great abundance of moths which on
certain occasions I was able to capture. As during the
whole of my eight years’ wanderings in the East I never
found another spot where these insects were at all plentiful,
it will be interesting to state the exact conditions
under which 1 here obtained them.
On one side of the cottage there was a verandah, looking
down the whole side of the mountain and to its summit on
the right, all densely clothed with forest. The boarded ,
sides of the cottage were whitewashed, and the roof of
the verandah was low, and also boarded and whitewashed.
As soon as it got dark I placed my lamp on
a table against the wall, and with pins, insect-forceps, net,
and collecting-boxes by my side, sat down with a book.
Sometimes during the whole evening only one solitary
moth would visit me, while on other nights they would
pour in, in a continual stream, keeping me hard at work
catching and pinning till past midnight. They came
literally by thousands. These good nights were very few.
During the four weeks that I spent altogether on the
hill I only had four really good nights, and these were
always rainy, and the best of them soaking wet. But wet
nights were not always good, for a rainy moonlight night
produced next to nothing. All the chief tribes of moths
were represented, and the beauty and variety of the
species was very great. On good nights I was able to
capture from a hundred to two hundred and fifty moths,