During the night, the thermometer at the entrance of the cave fell to 36° 5´; and on my going out to have a look at the night-scene, all the bushes and trees appeared fringed with hoar frost.
After breakfasting at the cave, we started for the summit. Our course lay at first through a thick low jungle, full of rhododendrons; it then changed into a stunted brushwood, that almost hid the rarely-used path; gradually the shrubs gave way to rocks, and then we commenced our ascent over the naked granite. A glance upwards from the spot where we first left the jungle, reveals a striking scene—a face of granite sweeping steeply up for above 3,000 feet to a rugged edge of pointed rocks; while on the farthest left the southern peak looked from this view a rounded mass. Here and there small runnels of water passed over the granite surface, and patches of brushwood occupied the sheltered nooks. The rocks were often at an angle of nearly forty degrees, so that I was forced to ascend them, at first, with woollen socks, and when they were worn through, with bare feet. It was a sad alternative, as the rough stone wore away the skin and left a bleeding and tender surface.
After hard work, we reached the spot where Mr. Low had left a bottle, and found it intact—the writing in it was not read, as I returned it unopened to its resting-place.
Low’s Gully is one of the most singular spots in the summit. We ascend an abrupt ravine, with towering perpendicular rocks on either side, till a rough natural wall bars the way. Climbing on this, you look over a deep chasm, surrounded on three sides by precipices, so deep that the eye could not reach the bottom; but the twitter of innumerable swallows could be distinctly heard, as they flew in flocks below. There was no descending here: it was a sheer precipice of several thousand feet, and this was the deep fissure pointed out to me by Mr. Low from the cocoa-nut grove on the banks of the Tampasuk when we were reclining there, and proved that he had remembered the very spot where he had left the bottle.
I was now anxious to reach one of those peaks which are visible from the sea; so we descended Low’s Gully, through a thicket of rhododendrons, bearing a beautiful blood-coloured flower, and made our way to the westward. It was rough walking at first, while we continued to skirt the rocky ridge that rose to our right; but gradually leaving this, we advanced up an incline composed entirely of immense slabs of granite, and reaching the top, found a noble terrace, half a mile in length, whose sides sloped at an angle of thirty degrees on either side. The ends were the Southern Peak and a huge cyclopean wall.
I followed the guides to the former, and after a slippery ascent, reached the summit. I have mentioned that this peak has a rounded aspect when viewed from the eastward; but from the northward it appears to rise sharply to a point; and when with great circumspection I crawled up, I found myself on a granite point, not three feet in width, with but a water-worn way a few inches broad to rest on, and prevent my slipping over the sloping edges.
During the climbing to-day, I suffered slightly from shortness of breath, and felt some disinclination to bodily exertion; but as soon as I sat down on this lofty point, it left me, and a feeling came on as if the air rendered me buoyant and made me long to float away.
Calmly seated here, I first turned my attention to the other peaks, which stretched in a curved line from east to west, and was rather mortified to find that the most westerly and another to the east appeared higher than where I sat, but certainly not more than a hundred feet. The guides called this the mother of the mountain, but her children may have outgrown her. Turning to the south-west, I could but obtain glimpses of the country, as many thousand feet below masses of clouds passed continually over the scene, giving us but a partial view of sea, and rivers, and hills. One thing immediately drew my attention, and that was a very lofty peak towering above the clouds, bearing S. ½ E. It appeared to be an immense distance off, and I thought it might be the great mountain of Lawi, of which I went in search some months later; but it must be one much farther to the eastward, and may be the summit of Tilong, which, as I have before mentioned, some declare to be much more lofty than Balu itself.
Immediately below me, the granite for a thousand feet sloped sharply down to the edge of that lofty precipice that faces the valley of Pinokok to the south-west. I felt a little nervous while we were passing along this to reach the southern peak, as on Mr. Low’s former expedition a Malay had slipped at a less formidable spot, and been hurried down the steep incline at a pace that prevented any hope of his arresting his own progress, when leaning on his side his kris fortunately entered a slight cleft, and arrested him on the verge of a precipice.
Among the detached rocks and in the crevices grew a kind of moss, on which the Ida’an guides declared the spirits of their ancestors fed. A grass also was pointed out that served for the support of the ghostly buffaloes which always followed their masters to the other world. As a proof, the print of a foot was shown me as that of a young buffalo; it was not very distinct, but appeared more like the impression left by a goat or deer.