A short time after my arrival in the country, I was seized with a somewhat unusual form of malaria. Now the ordinary malaria is known by almost all Europeans who live in the tropics. The Rajah, for instance, suffers from this ordinary but very trying and sometimes dangerous kind of fever, but the way the pest attacked me was of a kind not often experienced by Europeans. My kind was more prevalent amongst the natives. Its symptoms are disconcerting to your friends, for you feel very bad tempered. The palms of your hands get hot and dry, and a feeling of impending disaster takes hold of you. These preliminaries are painless. Then, all of a sudden, more often at sunset, you feel sick: nothing happens, but a band of iron, as it were, presses round your body, becoming tighter and tighter until you imagine that fingers of steel are twisting you up inside. You retire to bed, propped by pillows, for you can neither hold yourself up nor move in any way, and there you remain gasping for breath until the attack is over. It may last half an hour, or continue for half a day, when it returns the next afternoon at the same hour--the attacks resembling those of angina pectoris. Your complexion turns a bright yellow and your face is covered with an ugly rash. These attacks have lasted off and on for two or three months, when life becomes unbearable. You can neither eat nor drink, and get reduced to a shadow. Our English doctor in Sarawak, who was clever and intelligent, never understood the disease. He prescribed leeches, cupping-glasses, poultices, and fed me up with champagne, brandy, and even port wine, with the result that all these would-be remedies made me very much worse. I became frightfully thin, so that after nearly four years’ residence in Sarawak the Rajah decided to take me home, in order to recover my health.