After Many Inquiries, I Found That A Day's Journey By Water Above Palembang There Commenced A Military Road Which Extended Up To The Mountains And Even Across To Bencoolen, And I Determined To Take This Route And Travel On Until I Found Some Tolerable Collecting Ground.

By this means I should secure dry land and a good road, and avoid the rivers, which at this season are very tedious to ascend owing to the powerful currents, and very unproductive to the collector owing to most of the lands in their vicinity being underwater.

Leaving early in the morning we did not reach Lorok, the village where the road begins, until late at night. I stayed there a few days, but found that most all the ground in the vicinity not underwater was cultivated, and that the only forest was in swamps which were now inaccessible. The only bird new to me which I obtained at Lorok was the fine long- tailed parroquet (Palaeornis longicauda). The people here assured me that the country was just the same as this for a very long way - more than a week's journey, and they seemed hardly to have any conception of an elevated forest-clad country, so that I began to think it would be useless going on, as the time at my disposal was too short to make it worth my while to spend much more of it in moving about. At length, however, I found a man who knew the country, and was more intelligent; and he at once told me that if I wanted forest I must go to the district of Rembang, which I found on inquiry was about twenty-five or thirty miles off.

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