that I have ever seen. It looks like a setting on a
stage and you have the feeling that at any moment the curtain may
descend and destroy the illusion. It is not until you go ashore and
wander in the native quarter, where vice in every form stalks naked
and unashamed, that you realize that the town is like a beautiful
harlot, whose loveliness of face and figure belie the evil in her
heart. Even after I came to understand that the place is a sink of
iniquity, I never ceased to marvel at its beauty. It reminded me of the
exclamation of a young English girl, the wife of a German merchant, as
their steamer approached Hong Kong and the superb panorama which
culminates in The Peak slowly unrolled.

"Look, Otto! Look!" she cried. "You must say that it is beautiful even
if it _is_ English."

* * * * *

Of those lands which have not yet submitted to the bit and bridle of
civilization--and they can be numbered on the fingers of one's two
hands--Borneo is the most intractable. Of all the regions which the
predatory European has claimed for his own, it is the least submissive,
the least civilized, the least exploited and the least known. Its
interior remains as untamed as before the first white man set foot on
its shores four hundred years ago. The exploits of those bold and hardy
spirits--explorers, soldiers, missionaries, administrators--who have
attempted to carry to the natives of Borneo the Gospel of the Clean
Shirt and the Square Deal form one of the epics of colonization. They
have died with their boots on from fever, plague and snake-bite, from
poisoned dart and Dyak spear. Though their lives would yield material
for a hundred books of adventure, their story, which is the story of
the white man's war for civilization throughout Malaysia, is epitomized
in the few lines graven on the modest marble monument which stands at
the edge of Sandakan's sun-scorched parade ground:

In
Memory
of
Francis Xavier Witti
Killed near the Sibuco River
May, 1882
of
Frank Hatton
Accidentally shot at Segamah
March, 1883
of
Dr. D. Manson Fraser
and
Jemadhar Asa Singh
the two latter mortally wounded at Kopang
May, 1883