After a few days spent in Singapore, we embarked in the Rajah’s yacht, the _Heartsease_. She was a wooden gunboat of 250 tons, and her admirers had told me she was as lively as a duck in the water. This behaviour on her part was exceedingly annoying to me during the passage to Kuching, a journey which took two days. It was on board the _Heartsease_ that I had my first experience of cockroaches and rats, and these kept me in a perpetual state of terror at night. Cockroaches are like black beetles, only much larger, flatter, and tawny brown in colour. At the approach of rain they are particularly lively, and as rain falls daily in this region, their habits are offensive to human beings. They fly or spring from great distances, and alight on their victims. I remember how they startled me by jumping on to my face, arms and hands, as I lay in my bunk trying to get to sleep. The tiny prick of their spiky, spindly legs was a hateful experience. Every one must be familiar with rats more or less at a distance, but the _Heartsease’s_ rats were disconcertingly friendly. They glided up and down the floor of my cabin, sometimes scratching at my pillow, which did not add to my comfort. It was on the third morning after leaving Singapore, that I suddenly felt the ship moving in absolutely smooth waters. This encouraged me to crawl up on deck, and look around me at the scenery. It was the most beautiful I had ever seen. The tide was on the turn, and the morning mist was still hanging about the watery forests on the banks and about the high mountains of the interior, and as it swept across the river it brought with it that curious, sweet, indefinable smell, half-aromatic and half-sickly, making one think unaccountably of malaria. I remember that I felt very cold, for everything I touched was dripping with dew. I could see the high mountain of Santubong, a great green cliff rising almost out of the water to a height of about three thousand feet, covered to its summit with luxuriant forests. At the foot of the mountain was a great expanse of sand, over which enormous brown boulders were scattered, as though giants had been disturbed at a game of ninepins. At the back of the sandy shore grew groves of Casuarina trees (the natives call them “talking trees,” from the sound they make when a breeze stirs their lace-like branches), looking as though the slightest puff might blow them all away in clouds of dark green smoke.