“You really are too handsome for Dayaks,” said Dalim; nor was he wrong to think so, for though the Europeans exposed the broad chests and finely-developed arms and shoulders proper to their assumed caste, they lacked the crooked legs to which the inhabitants of Borneo owe their name. Dayak is really an abbreviation of dadajak—to totter. With very few exceptions all the natives have bandy legs, which circumstance causes their peculiar tottering gait. This physical deformity is the result of the position they are compelled to assume while sitting in their canoes. But though their natural fondness for the sea thus attenuates and deforms their lower extremities, the upper parts of their bodies become so developed as to make them fit models for the sculptor. The disguise of the deserters being effected, they tied their military clothes in a bundle, to which they attached a heavy stone and sank it in the deepest part of the river. They then resumed their route and tried to get further up the soengei; but it proved a difficult task to accomplish. The Dahasan is nothing but one of the many side canals of an enormous marsh thickly studded with forests. Large creepers abound everywhere, bridging over the numerous rivulets, climbing the great trees and covering their tops with a dense growth of parasitical plants which forms, as it were, an elevated vegetable plateau. The creeper most generally found among the trees of these primeval forests is the rattan, called oeai by the natives. It runs along the ground, covering everything it meets with a network of branches which only the powerful hatchet can clear away. It is covered with sharp thorns which make it a most formidable obstruction to all who travel through these wilds. The seven men soon waded through the water on the bed of the soengei. Five of them, hatchet in hand, tried to remove the creepers at the cost of much laborious exertion and many painful scratches. The other two walked along the margin of the channel, pushing the boat through the tortuous passage which was in reality only a pathway made in the soft mud by some passing canoe. It was an almost superhuman labor and the united strength of the whole party was often in requisition to free the roof of their vessel from its entanglement among the overhanging branches. At mid-day they had proceeded a few miles only, but they felt so exhausted that they were compelled to rest. The water too had been left so low by the receding tide that the boat seemed fixed in the mud. Nothing would move her, so they were compelled to wait for the next flood.