Although four or five miles away, the trees on the top of Singghi mountain stood out distinctly that afternoon in the lurid light of an approaching thunderstorm. His thumbs pointing in the direction of the mountain, Pa Baniak said, “Antus live up there, and my tribe has made wooden images of men and women to keep them amused. If ever the trees on the top of Singghi are cut down, leaving the antus without either playground or shelter, they would roam amongst the trees in the plain and tease the people living there.” We listened to Pa Baniak’s talk for some little time, and he told us many things, as for instance, about the terrible consequences of men eating the flesh of deer, which made them cowards; of the importance of being burned instead of buried in the earth, in order that one’s relations could tell by the direction of the smoke whether or no the dead had started for Paradise. But at length we became tired and allowed him to depart. He rose slowly, grunted, scratched himself under his armpits, took a little brass bell off the sirih basket hanging at his waist, and gave it to me. “It will preserve you from lightning, snake bites, and antus,” he said. Then, followed by his attendants, he made his way downstairs. Thunder was growling in the distance, and drops of rain were falling as the trio went out of the house, each opening Chinese umbrellas to keep the rain off their naked bodies, for most Sarawak natives imagine that rain falling on their skin brings on malaria. We watched them as they went along the plain in single file; then the rain came down in torrents, blotting them out from view. CHAPTER XXXI One morning Bertram and I, accompanied by Mr. Frank Maxwell, Mr. Awdry, and Dr. Langmore, started from Kuching in a steam launch on an expedition to Munggo Babi, a Land Dyak settlement. Up the Sadong River we passed Malay villages with palm-leaf houses erected on poles and standing in the mud. A few ragged flags of red, white, blue, and yellow, on long thin sticks, fluttered along the banks near Chinese houses, where women and children set fire to bunches of crackers, for they had somehow got wind of our journey. On the banks grew great, sweet-smelling, white lilies, called by the natives “bungga bakong,” but by European scientists _Crinum Northianum_, because they were first made known to European botanists by Miss North’s pictures. They looked like crowns of great white stars resting on green and glossy lance-like leaves.