Lifting My Mosquito Net, Therefore, Very Quietly, I Let Drive With My Fist At It, Putting All My Pent-Up Indignation And Anger For Sleepless Nights Into The Blow.

Alas!

It was a very solid dog that I struck against, being nothing more nor less than the side of one of my boxes, and I barked my knuckles rather badly. The laughter of the Dayaks was loud and prolonged when Dubi translated the yarn to them next day, and they remembered it long afterwards. Until I heard the roar of laughter that went up, the story had not struck me as being so very amusing!

All around the house for some distance was a forest of tall fruit-trees. They had of course all been planted in times past by the Dayaks' ancestors, and every tree had its owner, but they had become mixed up with many beautiful wild tropic growths which had sprung up between the trees. Some of these fruit-trees, such as the "durian," "rambutan," mango, mangosteen, "tamadac" or jackfruit, "lansat" and bananas, were familiar to me, but there were a great number of fruits that I had never heard of before, and I got their names from my Dayak friends.[13]

Needless to say, I never before tasted so many fruits that were entirely new to me, and most of them were ripe at the time of my visit. The "durian" comes easily first. It is without doubt the king of all fruit in both the tropic and temperate zones, and is popular alike with man and beast, the orang-utan being a great culprit in robbing the Dayaks of their "durians." I never saw the "good" "durian" growing wild in Sarawak, but I tasted here a small wild kind with an orange centre which made me violently sick.

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