The Assistant Resident, Monsieur de Haan, was as glad to see me as a banker away from home is to see a copy of The Wall Street Journal. I brought him a whiff of that great outside world from which he was an exile, with whose doings he kept in touch only through the meager despatches in the papers brought by the fortnightly mail-boat from Java, or through occasional travelers like myself. Dutch officials in the Indies can obtain leave only once in ten years and Monsieur de Haan had not visited the mother country for nearly a decade, so that when he learned I had recently been in Holland he was pathetically eager to hear the gossip of the homeland. For an hour I lounged in a Cantonese chair beneath the leisurely swinging punkah—the motive power for the punkah being provided by a native on the verandah outside, who mechanically pulled the cord even while he slept—and chatted of homely things: of a restaurant which we both knew on the Dam in Amsterdam, of bathing on the sands of Scheviningen, of band concerts on summer evenings in the Haagsche Bosch. Only when his long-pent curiosity as to happenings in Europe had been appeased did I find an opportunity to mention the reasons which had brought me to Samarinda. I wished to go up country, I explained. I wanted to see the real jungle and the strange tribes which dwell in it; particularly I wished to see the head-hunters. Now in this I was fully prepared for discouragement and dissuasion, for head-hunters are not assets to a country; to a visitor they are not displayed with pride. When, in the Philippines, I wished to see the head-hunting Igorots; when I asked the Japanese for permission to visit the head-hunters of Formosa, I met only with excuses and evasions. At my taste the officials pretended to be surprised and grieved. But Monsieur de Haan, doubtless because he had lived so long in the wilds that head-hunters were to him a commonplace, not only made no objection, he even offered to accompany me.
"We can go up the Koetei on your cutter," he suggested. "It is navigable as far as Long Iram, two hundred miles up-country, which is the farthest point inland that one of our garrisons is stationed. Thus you will be able to see the Dyak country as comfortably as you could see Holland from the deck of a canal boat. On our way we might pay a visit to the Sultan of Koetei, who has a palace at Tenggaroeng. Though he has no real power to speak of, he exercises considerable influence among the wild tribes, of which he is the hereditary ruler. He's the very man to put you in touch with the head-hunters."
The suggestion sounded fine. Moreover, in visiting savages as temperamental as the Dyaks, there would be a certain comfort in having the head of the government along. So, as Monsieur de Haan did not appear to be pressed with business, we arranged to start up-river the following morning.
It was late afternoon when I returned to the Negros. I was completely wilted by the terrible humidity, and, as the river looked cool and inviting in the twilight, I decided to refresh my body and my spirits by a swim. But when I suggested to the Doctor that he join me he shook his head gloomily.
"Nothing doing," he said. "I've been wanting to go in all day but the port surgeon tells me that I'd be committing suicide."
"But why?" I demanded irritably, for I was ill-tempered from the heat. "It's perfectly clean out here in mid-stream and there is no danger from sharks here, as there was at Zamboanga and Jolo."
By way of replying he pointed to a black object, which I took to be a log, that was floating on the surface of the river, perhaps fifty yards off the cutter's gangway.
"That's why," he said dryly.
As he spoke a dugout, driven by half-a-dozen paddles in the hands of lusty natives, came racing down stream. As the canoe drew abreast of us, the paddlers chanting a barbaric chorus, there was a sudden swirl in the water and the object which I had taken for a log abruptly dropped out of sight.
"A crocodile!" I ejaculated, a little shiver chasing itself up and down my spine.