From These Swamps Rise
Many Isolated Mountains, On Some Of Which The Dyaks Have Settled
And Covered With Plantations Of Fruit Trees.
These are a great
attraction to the Mias, which comes to feed on the unripe fruits,
but always retires to the swamp at night.
Where the country
becomes slightly elevated, and the soil dry, the Mias is no
longer to be found. For example, in all the lower part of the
Sadong valley it abounds, but as soon as we ascend above the
limits of the tides, where the country, though still flat, is
high enough to be dry, it disappears. Now the Sarawak valley has
this peculiarity - the lower portion though swampy, is not
covered with a continuous lofty forest, but is principally
occupied by the Nipa palm; and near the town of Sarawak where the
country becomes dry, it is greatly undulated in many parts, and
covered with small patches of virgin forest, and much second-
growth jungle on the ground, which has once been cultivated by
the Malays or Dyaks.
Now it seems probable to me that a wide extent of unbroken and
equally lofty virgin forest is necessary to the comfortable
existence of these animals. Such forests form their open country,
where they can roam in every direction with as much facility as
the Indian on the prairie, or the Arab on the desert, passing
from tree-top to tree-top without ever being obliged to descend
upon the earth. The elevated and the drier districts are more
frequented by man, more cut up by clearings and low second-growth
jungle - not adapted to its peculiar mode of progression, and
where it would therefore be more exposed to danger, and more
frequently obliged to descend upon the earth.
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