We slept in a Malay house at a village called Gading. The house was made of palm leaves, and the poles supporting it stood on the mud: the whole construction was lashed together by rattans, as no nail or peg is ever used by the poorer Malays in building such humble dwellings. Clean mats were laid upon the floor, and I noticed that one portion of the roof was used as a storeroom, whilst scattered about the floor were large water-jars and cooking-pans. At night, as I lay on a mattress stretched on the floor, I heard the incoming tide gurgling, as it were, under my pillow. Frogs, insects, nightbirds, and all sorts of creatures, grotesque or beautiful, hooted, whistled, and coughed, sounding like the shrill and rough jabbering of drunken men; and there were hummings, moanings, murmurings--the cogitations, so to speak, of spirits of the darkness and evil, all heard as distinctly by me as if I were resting outside in the mud right amongst them. I thought of crocodiles moving through the slime, until I felt terrified, and almost welcomed the homely sensation of being bitten by a flea. Then morning dawned, the sun came out, and with its joyous advent I felt that sense of security we none of us can account for at the dawn of day. But to return to our journey. We embarked on the launch early. The river soon narrowed, and the banks were full of that beautiful shrub with its enormous deeply-indented leaves, pale yellow flowers as large as soup-plates, its clustered, bullet-shaped, carmine-coloured buds, and its open pods revealing seeds of a ravishing coral colour. I am not quite certain, but I think the plant must be a species of Wormia. Then there were screw pines growing near the mud, from which strong fibre can be obtained, their beautiful red fruits nestling in their roots, reminding one of gigantic strawberries. I saw dark green small-leaved shrubs starred over with waxy sweet-smelling blossoms, rather like stephanotis, and mauve, yellow, and pink convolvuli throttled great trees in the entanglement of their embrace. A large grey bird flew from out the lilies, alighted on a piece of driftwood, and was borne down the stream. We passed a place called Tana Mera (red earth) where at a little distance from the bank is the grave of an exceedingly righteous Malay gentleman whom the people called Datu Sumbang Kring. He lived many years ago, but the influence of his holy life still endures, and the people in the neighbourhood are never tired of relating how he taught every one to be kind and good, and how he spread abroad the precepts of that holy book, the Koran. I could not make out how long ago this righteous life was lived, but, according to the people, it was many years before the first Rajah Brooke came to Sarawak.