Some Of
The Accessible Caves Have Roofs Seventy Feet In Height.
Gunong Pondok
is shaped like the Bass Rock, and is about twelve hundred feet in
height.
Its irregular top is forest-crowned, but its nearly
perpendicular walls of white or red rock afford scarcely roothold for
trees, and it rises in comparatively barren solitude among the
forest-covered mountains of the interior.
At the end of ten hours' traveling, as I was tramping along alone, I
began to meet Malays, then I met nine elephants in groups of three,
with men, women, and children on their backs, apparently taking "an
airing," the beasts looking grand, as their fronts always do. But that
part of the road passes through a lonely jungle region, tiger,
elephant, and rhinoceros haunted, and only broken here and there by
some rude Malay cultivation of bananas or sugar-cane. When the sun was
low I looked down upon a broad and beautiful river, with hills and
mountains on its farther side, a village on the shores of a promontory,
and above that a grassy hill with a bungalow under cocoa-palms at its
top, which I knew must be the Residency, from the scarlet uniforms at
the door. There was a small bridge over the Kangsa, then a guard-room
and some official residences on stilts, and at the top of a steep slope
the bungalow, which has a long flight of stairs under a latticed porch,
leading to a broad and comfortably furnished veranda used as the
Resident's office and sitting-room, the centre part, which has a bed-
room on each side of it and runs to the back of the house, serving for
the eating-place.
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