The steps of the surveying engineers had been dogged silently and relentlessly by the remorseless savages. When the former had gained a point sufficiently remote from the belt of civilisation, they were laid low by poisoned arrows. The relief-party accounted for every engineer, but one and all were beyond human succour. They were found in a gruesome row, poised upside down, with stakes driven lengthwise through their bodies and heads into the ground. They had been pinned down with no more compunction than the school-boy secures his etymological prize to a piece of cardboard. A few years ago British North Borneo was the scene of a similar disaster. It had been decided to drive a railway from coast to coast, and a party set out on the reconnaissance, as the first step in a new railway undertaking is called. The path lay through the dense forest which had never been penetrated by the white man, and where the dreaded Head Hunters held undisputed sway. The prospect was forbidding in the extreme, but it did not dismay the engineers who plunged fearlessly into the bush. As the crow flies their journey was only one of some 150 miles, but the thick vegetation concealed difficulties innumerable. That survey was doomed to failure. The party was overwhelmed by the Dyaks and massacred, with the exception of three native porters who succeeded in making good their escape. After experiencing terrible privations, this trio regained civilisation and communicated the sad tidings of the calamity. For years that stretch of forest defied conquest. Finally another attempt was made to traverse the jungle, and on this occasion no interference to progress was offered. The surveyors gained the opposite coast in about six months, being called upon to fight only one enemy--disease. It was a desperate plunge, for the party had to hack and hew its way foot by foot through the matted scrub and trees. These afford instances of the hostility of mankind which fortunately to-day are encountered but seldom. It is the hostility of Nature which is feared more greatly now. Yet the work possesses a fascinating glamour. The existence of difficulty only spurs the determined to further effort. Railway surveying in the effort to roll back the map in a new country offers the young man all the adventure in life that can be desired. As one surveyor who had spent more years than he could remember in the wilds between China and Peru remarked to me, “If it is not the natural difficulties or the hostility of the natives which lend variety to the work, the chances are a hundred to one that a revolution will fill the gap, especially in China or the South Americas.”