Sometimes
the felling of one or two trees will ameliorate the situation
immeasurably, admitting fresh air and sunlight, and there is little
difficulty about it when one is accompanied by such able and willing men
as the Dayaks. For their own use when travelling they make simple shelters
as night approaches, because they dislike to get wet. The material is
always close at hand. Slender straight poles are quickly cut and brought
in to make frame-work for a shed, the floor of which is about half a metre
above ground. The roof is made of big leaves, and in less than an hour
they are comfortably at home in one or more sheds, grouped around fires on
the flimsy floor.
It is a curious fact that one can always manage to make a fire in these
damp woods; a petroleum burner is not essential. The natives always know
where to go to find something dry that will burn; as for the white man's
cook, he usually improves upon the situation by soaking the wood in
petroleum, which is one of the valuable articles of equipment. Often in
the jungle, when slightly preparing the ground for erecting the tent,
phosphorescent lights from decayed vegetable matter shone in innumerable
spots, as if a powerful lamp were throwing its light through a grating.
In ascending the hills it was surprising how soon the aspect of the
vegetation changed. The camp we were just leaving was only about a metre
above the Kayan River, so we probably were not more than twenty-odd metres
above sea-level. Twenty metres more, and the jungle vegetation was thinner
even at that short distance. Trees, some of them magnificent specimens of
hard wood, began to assert themselves. Above 100 metres elevation it was
not at all difficult to make one's way through the jungle, even if we had
not had a slight Punan path to follow. It is easier than to ascend the
coast range of northeast Queensland under 18 S.L., where the lawyer palms
are very troublesome. Making a light clearing one evening we opened the
view to a couple of tall trees called in Malay, palapak, raising their
crowns high above the rest; this is one of the trees from which the
natives make their boats. The trunk is very tall and much thicker near the
ground.
Reaching a height of 500 metres, the ground began to be slippery with
yellow mud, but the jungle impeded one less than the thickets around
Lenox, Massachusetts, in the United States. Toward the south of our camp
here, the hill had an incline of 45 degrees or less, and one hardwood tree
that we felled travelled downward for a distance of 150 metres.
