werful auxiliary for those who
are striving to make their fortunes through agricultural and mining
speculations in the wildest regions of the Peninsula.

But whilst near the sea the inhabitants and travellers can enjoy all the
luxuries and conveniences of the 20th century, in the interior of the
Peninsula, leading a nomadic life in the thick of the jungle, which
covers the range of mountains from north to south, a primitive people
still exists. All unconscious of the violent passions and turbulent
emotions that disturb the tranquillity of their fellow-creatures
(civilized in form if not in fact) at some miles distant from them, they
live quietly and peaceably in their forest homes preserving intact their
original simplicity and ingenuousness.

The hot breath of our fagging life, that generates every sort of nerve
complaint, has not yet reached their mountain haunts. On those wild
heights the nerves rest; the affections are not tormented; love is pure
and, for this, lasting; ambition neither perverts the mind, nor consumes
the conscience; there are no honours or favours to arouse envy; no
artificial boundaries to liberty or difficult problems about Capital and
Labour; there are no rich and no poor, for in that blessed spot money is
an unknown article and what is more--strange triumph of the Savage over
the Civilized--every man is a brother to the other!

Up there in the forest there are neither princes nor subjects;
Governments nor Police; no Tax-gatherers, public meetings or strikes so
that if Stecchetti[1] were still living he might have been sent among
the Sakais to find the ideal place of which he was always seeking the
address.

* * * * *

The 15th of June 1891 I landed at Penang (the Prince of Wales's Island)
on my return from an exploring tour in the Isle of Nias. I was feeling
rather worn out with the fatigues lately undergone so resolved to rest
awhile on British territory.

I had brought with me a rich and interesting ethnographical collection I
found no difficulty in selling to the Perak Government that destined it
to the Museum at Taiping, a small town where is the British Residence.

During my well-earned repose I often heard speak of the Mai Darats, a
tribe of Aborigines dwelling in the interior of the Peninsula and who
were called by the name of Sakais by the Malays, a scornful appellation
which signifies _a people of slaves_, and this insulting term is
explained by t