Si Nina’s village contains about forty families, if we follow the numbers of doors, though he himself says fifty, and their lazy habits may induce two families to live in a space not fit even for one. Here we met Si Puntará, whom we accompanied two miles in a south-west direction to his village on the slope of a hill; it consists of two houses and perhaps forty families. Tapioca is extensively grown round this village, and the clearings are immense. What proves to me that the stories of constant harassing enemies are exaggerations, is that all these villages keep their rice granaries at some distance from the houses, where they might be destroyed without any danger or difficulty; to this the Muruts would answer that their enemies seek heads, not rice. The mountain at the southern end of the first eastern range, called by the natives Murud, or “the mountain,” bears south-east by south, and in a straight line is perhaps not more than three miles off. (Houses 3,679 feet). Orang Murut simply means a mountain man, or a mountaineer, but is now used for a particular class of aborigines. Standing near the rice granaries of Si Puntará’s village we had a fine view of the ranges that ran from north to south, whose lengthened summits showed occasionally white cliffs, but there was a peak not many miles from us, a little to the eastward of south, called Gura, and from its summit they said on a fine day the eastern coast was visible, with the broad sea beyond, and at its base and beyond it live the Main Muruts, who are the great suppliers of salt. There are some of the Main Muruts here. I have asked for a guide to their houses; I am promised one if I will remain another week, but as that excursion itself would take us eight days, I must not think of attempting it, as even now I shall not be back to Brunei within the time I promised. The Main Muruts are not only salt but slave dealers. I have noticed but one of them, and he in his pride has beaten out a brass gong into a broad belt a foot across. He is a forbidding-looking fellow, with a hair lip. They say the salt water issues from a spring, and is collected in small ponds, and then boiled for the salt; it looks dirty, and has a peculiar flavour, as if it had much soda in it. The Orang Kaya Upit, with a bad omen, has again deserted us, so that we are without a proper interpreter.