Brown huts, made of dried palm leaves and built on poles, dotted the beach, and small canoes tethered to the shore held little brown naked children, playing and baling out the water. Women were washing clothes on the river-banks. They were clothed in one long, clinging garment, folded and tucked under their armpits, and their straight, long, black hair was drawn into huge knots at the nape of their necks. All this I saw as in a vision; the people were too far off for me to distinguish their features, and the incoming tide was carrying us up the river at a swift pace. Here and there, on our way up, we met Chinamen standing in the stern of swift, small, narrow canoes, propelling their boats gondolier fashion, with cargoes of fish for the Kuching market. We passed boats of all sorts and sizes, from the small sampan scooped out of a single tree trunk, with its solitary paddler, to the larger house-boats belonging to Malays, filled with women and children. These were roofed in to shelter their inmates from the rain or sun, and were usually propelled by old men sitting in the bows cross-legged, wearing dirty white cotton drawers and jauntily placed conical hats, which sometimes allowed the folds of turbans to be seen, these showing that the wearers had been to Mecca. My attention was attracted by one very small canoe, for I saw, sitting amidships, an old woman huddled up in a cotton scarf. A tiny boy, perfectly naked, was bravely paddling her along, whilst he shouted insults to his poor old lady passenger as our steamer passed by. It was on this morning also, that I made the acquaintance of the Malay crew of our yacht. Like all people suddenly finding themselves for the first time in the midst of an alien race, I thought the sailors all looked alike. I elicited from the Rajah that some were young and some were old, but whether aged eighteen or fifty, I could see no difference in them at all. They all had the same almost bridgeless noses, wide nostrils, thick lips, dark restless eyes, and the lanky hair belonging to their Mongolian race. I tried to make up to them in a feeble way; I looked at them and smiled as they went to and fro, but they only bent double as they passed, paying no more attention to my friendly advances than they did to my cane chair. They were the gentlest moving things I had ever seen; yet apparently, their work did not suffer, for I was told that they were as efficient as any ordinary European crew.