looking south, in the distance high above all, with nothing but the thin air between, rose another peak, so lofty that it was impossible to estimate its distance. In that rarefied air remote objects appear near, and the voice can be heard without an effort through a space which in the plains below it could not penetrate. I had never before attained so great a height, and never before had I seen such flowers so brilliant and so numerous. There were rhododendrons of the brightest scarlet, or blood colour, or rosy pink, in bunches of forty blossoms, covering trees twenty feet in height. And not single trees, but masses of rhododendrons in sheltered nooks, literally bending beneath the weight of their flowers. And how marvellous were the shapes of the nepenthes, how beautiful in colour, how delicate in form! Fourteen thousand feet does not appear very lofty for a mountain, but from the north-west you see the whole gigantic form without the intervention of other summits. In Bolivia I have looked at heights rising to over twenty-five thousand feet, but you observe them from plains twelve thousand feet above the sea; in Mexico, the highest volcano reaches to about nineteen thousand feet, but then it is usually seen from the capital, itself at seven thousand five hundred feet; and the same with the highest European mountains. Sir Hugh Low and I were for many years the only real explorers of these mountains, and I feel a sort of paternal interest in the British North Borneo Company, as Sir Alfred Dent once informed me that it was my work, _Life in the Forests of the Far East_, which first suggested the idea of acquiring the north-west coast for a governing and developing company. The north-west coast possesses two very important harbours. Gaya Bay has often been recommended as a naval station to command the China Seas. It certainly offers every facility, and would be a port of refuge in war time for our mercantile marine. In many respects, however, the Port of Labuan is more suitable for all purposes, as it not only has an excellent anchorage easily defended, but it is well supplied with coal from mines on the island itself, and is opposite the terminus of the trans-Bornean railway, now in course of construction, which would bring down full supplies of cattle and provisions from the fertile districts of Padas and Kalias. It has also the advantage of having the whole of Brunei Bay enclosed by territory under English protection, with the Sarawak Government coal mines at Muara, and the productive rivers of Limbang and Trusan to add to its supplies. Labuan is administered, with the sanction of our Government, by the British North Borneo Company, and is likely to be one of the most flourishing of its possessions, as it is not only connected by telegraph lines with Singapore and Hong Kong, a through British line, but it must increase in consequence in these days of wars and rumours of wars.