brilliant but harsh voiced birds, its lizards and flying foxes, its
infinite variety of monkeys, sitting, hanging by hands or tails,
leaping, grimacing, jabbering, pelting each other with fruits; and its
loathsome saurians, lying in wait on slimy banks under the mangroves.
All this and far more the dawn revealed upon the Linggi river; but
strange to say, through all the tropic splendor of the morning, I saw a
vision of the Trientalis Europea, as we saw it first on a mossy
hillside in Glen Cannich!

But I am forgetting that the night with its blackness and mystery came
before the sunrise, that the stars seldom looked through the dense
leafage, and that the pale green lamps of a luminous fungus here and
there, and the cold blue sheet-lightning only served to intensify the
solemnity of the gloom. While the blackest part of the night lasted the
"view" was usually made up of the black river under the foliage, with
scarcely ten yards of its course free from obstruction--great snags all
along it sticking up menacingly, trees lying half or quite across it,
with barely room to pass under them, or sometimes under water, when the
boat "drave heavily" over them, while great branches brushed and ripped
the thatch continually; and as one obstacle was safely passed, the
rapidity of the current invariably canted us close on another, but the
vigilant skill of the boatmen averted the slightest accident. "Jaga!
Jaga!"--caution! caution!--was the constant cry. The most unpleasant
sensations were produced by the constant ripping and tearing sounds as
we passed under the low tunnel of vegetation, and by the perpetual
bumping against timber.

The Misses Shaw passed an uneasy night. The whisky had cured the
younger one of her severe sick headache, and she was the prey of many
terrors. They thought that the boat would be ripped up; that the roof