Wild Men of Borneo — Upper Baram, Sarawak 1990/91

These Dyaks have a distinct notion of a future state, which is
often mentioned in their conversation. There are different stages
before reaching it—some agreeable, and others the contrary—and
their final abode, or as it appears dissolution, is a state of dew.
Charles Brooke, 1866


On its way to Kudat, in Sabah (or British North Borneo, as it then was—this was in the 1920s), Aldous Huxley's ship anchored a furlong or so offshore of Miri in Sarawak, while a cargo of opium-drugged pigs was unloaded into lighters. In the distance, Huxley saw 'dark green forest' broken here and there by 'little clearings' and European bungalows, some 'miniature Eiffel Towers marking the site of the oil wells', and a few 'cylindrical oil tanks, like white martello towers dotted along the coast'. Then he spied, through the growing thickness of the atmosphere and his worsening myopia, 'far-off and sun-illuminated, a range of fantastically jagged mountains … Then the rain began to fall, a few warm drops, then a shower; the mountains became the ghosts of themselves, faded, faded and were gone'.

I didn't see Miri from the sea, or for that matter from the air—though that's how I arrived (via Royal Brunei Air, rather than borne aloft on angel wings), but I did see, I'd claim, exactly what Huxley saw. I, who was on my way to the Kelabit Highlands and a state of dew, like that door-keeper of perception, who was on his way to California and another kind of dissolution, can surely be granted a little perceptual license. His coast was the one that I arrived on—populous, built-upon, forested, looking inwards towards ghost mountains.

I used to sit in a rattan chair on the back veranda, gin pahit to hand, roll-up burning in the other, looking out over a field of lalang grass. (Lalang can grow to over six feet tall. It is sometimes called razor-grass and is full of ticks and funnel spiders. The human emptiness of all that softly hissing vegetation could be consoling.) A wire fence and drainage ditch separated the field from the bungalow. There were said to be intelligent foot-long rats in the ditch, but I never saw them. What I saw beyond the fence were chestnut munias (part of the finch family, lonchura malacca according to my pocket-sized edition of B. E. Smythies' hefty classic). They had black heads and wicked eyes. They would land in flocks, sometimes two or three to a grass stem. The stems would bend a little but not much—munias are tiny creatures. The grass would surge, Mexican-wave style, in the late afternoon wind, but the munias would stay put, clinging on to their perches. Beautiful and brave, I thought, particularly when the rains came smashing down.

There were also coucals bloop-blooping in the gusts. Sometimes I'd spot one, lunging around like escaped washing, someone's trousers striding drunkenly in the troughs. At other times, I'd see kites, flat diamond-shapes made of plastic shopping bags stretched over bamboo frames, launched from the kampong, soaring above the field. They went up very high, moving this way and that through the clouds. Sometimes two lines would snag, and I always thought of lovers.

Our landlords, the Chows, sent out menacingly worded invitations during the Chinese New Year, when custom decreed they receive crimson envelopes of cash, and on Hari Raya, when it was prudent to show an interest in the ruling elite's cultural enthusiasms. Their bungalow, actually two inter-linked double-storied bungalow-villas, occupied a well-grassed space, cooled by mature coconut palms and shade trees, on the far side of the compound. I'd been impressed by the flowering shrubs, carp pond and garlanded pergolas in the gardens. Mrs Chow, who spoke only Hokkien and some sort of demotic Malay, had given me to understand, however, by virtue of angry arm-waving and shouting, that I couldn't possibly emulate her horticultural accomplishments, that, in point of fact, I shouldn't even think of emulating them, and that rather than waste her time asking for cuttings, I'd be better employed joining the other foreign devils at the gate. The house Dobermans, she indicated with a powerful double-fingered whistle, were on hand to help me find my way there. Unlike other landlords I'd known, who at least made a pretence of civility, the Chows were openly, even happily, ill-disposed towards their tenants, shunting them off into the farthest, most uncongenial corners of their property—beside blowtorch-wielding mechanics, in Kenya Mike's case, or next door to sewage, in mine—keeping the dwellings nearest their own empty (like a Green Zone), and glaring or making derisive noises whenever they saw us.

I would plant anything I could find (coconut, banana, papaya, bamboo) to improve the view and annoy Mrs Chow. The ground was dense spongy clay in the wet season and solid baked earth in the dry, and only a moron would attempt to grow anything in it. Mrs Chow made this clear to me with her loud cawing laughter, when she came over with her entourage to inspect my experiments with budding coconuts. But I was not going to be put off. I fetched sacks of manure and wood chips from the army stables at Barakas. Then I dug several holes, filling these with the chips and dung. I'd taken cuttings from the municipal gardens up near the town. (Go at nightfall, quick glance back over the shoulder, break off a branch, tucking it away in a bag. Careful husbandry in water—a trick taught me by Iban Pete—then wait for the first suckers to appear, nurse it in a pot, then plant it in one of the holes, and after a few weeks you'd have your reward.) A number of artfully spaced bushes—hibiscuses with their scarlet shoehorns, allamandas with their golden trumpets, thunbergias with their Venetian-style dark blue wine glasses—soon blocked out the spiky sea-facing nibongs to the north. The banana trees glinted like pink tinfoil at sunset. Even the delicate bamboos took on a sinister grandeur in their corner. You could hear them whispering at night like scheming aunts. I grew other plants, red and purple bougainvillaea, frangipani and moon orchids, in glazed dragon pots which softened the white glare of the walls.

I would go out at the weekend, returning with fresh sacks which I'd unload onto the drive. Mrs Chow, wax-paper parasol twirling over a shoulder, would swagger out of the heat haze with her compañeros. 'Ah longi?' she'd bark coquettishly, or some such formula. She was very short and very wide, with stocky bow legs and hips you could hang a road-barrier on. 'Ah longi?' I might repeat archly, 'What are you implying, you naughty thing?' 'Papa junti', she'd comment, or some such, pointing at a sack and smirking back at her mates. 'Grade A horseshit', I'd tell her. 'Ow?' 'Well, the brutes don't have anything better to do all day, except eat apples and turnip tops. Goes in one end and out the other, pretty continuously, I'd say'. 'Di bahi?' 'Indeed. Like a torrent'. I might mime equine evacuation for her. We'd part on that happy note. I always got a feeling of great satisfaction from these encounters, and one which I felt, oddly enough, must be mutual. (Mrs Chow's flashing ivories, as she headed off, the way her friends clapped her on the back.) Even though neither of us understood a word the other said, we both went away, I suspect, convinced that we'd successfully bested one another. Afterwards, across the compound, I'd hear her high-spirited whoops and then the crash of aluminium pots being tossed into the air.

The Chow's had a son called Oliver. Named after the silent-movie comedian (Laurel and Hardy were very popular in those parts), though his spectacles and eating habits reminded me most of Billy Bunter. Like the Owl of the Remove, he wasn't slow on his feet either. Contemplating the purple phallus of newly fruiting bananas or a bee turning somersaults on the rim of an allamanda trumpet, I might hear shrill commentary coming from the road. 'Yaroo! Fockin clapper! Meester Oss-sheet! Oh lor!' Nipping round the side of the bungalow, I'd glimpse Oliver's fat haunches mooning over the saddle of his mountain bike as he Tour-de-Franced away down the road. Later on, as adolescence kicked in, he'd stop at the fence, leaning on the handle-bars, to compliment my efforts as I rolled a dragon pot into position or emptied another sack of dung into its hole. I'd make a point of staring at his pimples, when I went across to tell him what I was going to do with my spade, letting my gaze range across each angry protuberance. Far from being terrified or hurt, Oliver would seem positively elated by this attention. 'You are my big brudder', he'd say, with an appearance of fanatical admiration. 'My boss, my fadder!' He had a sister called Constance, who sometimes accompanied him on these visits. In contrast to her brother, she had a decisive Aztec face and the beginnings of a figure. 'Ought to eat more spinach', was all she ever said, after eyeballing my legs.

Others, attracted by all the colour, were more appreciative. They even began to include my garden in their itinerary of sights on their evening promenades. In the vanguard, 'How are the, uh, hollyhocks?' Amaury would call facetiously. 'Coming along are they?' 'Nice one, dude', Kenya Mike would boom, adding out of the corner of his mouth to his uncertainly tittering Kikuyu wife, 'Fucking Chinks'. 'I'll stand you one, mate', Ronnie would rumble, from under his doom-laden brows, while his plump spouse batted her eyelashes behind his back. Salim, one of the blowtorch-wielding mechanics from the garage, who always followed after these two, would rub his genitals enthusiastically. I would be asked for tips, in extraordinary Byzantine English, by Mr Augustin ('Would that I might flourish a frond in the way that you do, young man, heretofore. Deign you to impart your secrets to one not wholly green in the thumb?'), and the lushly carnal Norayati, eluding the supervision of her aunts, would give her tightly saronged tush a perceptible shake or two. The slouching gorilla shape of Barry would despatch a manly nod, and klaxon-voiced Karen would 'Oooh, isn't that prettay!' the bougainvillaea which was now raging up the walls like a conflagration. Jim the Birder would emerge from behind his heavy German field glasses to salute the thunbergia, which he opined must surely be attracting a flowerpecker or two. Even Shelagh, dressed in a stained dressing-gown like a mental patient and hugging the fence in the rear, would twitch her approval.

Why did I do it? Well, I wouldn't say that I was staging some sort of rebellion or that I was 'holding a candle up against the encroaching night of postcolonial oppression', as Iban Pete drolly put it. Was I staking another kind of claim, then, throwing in my lot with those who toiled on the edge of eternity? At the time, I liked to think of it as an act of Dadaist pyrotechnics, an all too flagrant epatering le bourgeoisie, even though—or perhaps because—it would almost certainly collapse and rot away when I left. It wasn't that I was just killing time, nor simply that I enjoyed the gardening.

Amaury was a large uncomely man, recently married to a Filipina with a stock of demanding ever-increasing dependants. He lived on a hill, on the other side of the tracks, safely outside the Chows' scornful jurisdiction. In the Chinese Snooker Club, down the road, he could be skittish, charming or ruthless in play; but on his own he seemed sad, comically, cosmically sad. He gave an impression of great antiquity and massively accumulated gloom like God. Catching a glimpse of him, between the darting heads of the other players, seated alone and pensive, drawing shapes in the spilt froth of his beer, he made me think of the Almighty on a really bad day, perhaps pondering humanity's failings or, on a less sanguine note, the protracted enormity of His own. Sometimes, when I drove back from town, I would see him on his hill-side, stubbornly planting King Edward potatoes which the rains would wash away, his huge thighs set wide apart in their flapping khaki shorts.

Ronnie lived in the bungalow opposite mine. Each day he drank a litre of Chinese brandy, with no obvious ill-effects. He had an overhanging forehead, a Punch and Judy nose and Victorian-style Piccadilly weepers. He had a strange silent way of laughing. You'd look at him and see him staring at the floor, jaws stretched open, shoulders heaving with mirth. He laughed at nothing in particular. His wife Wendy appeared to make extravagant sexual demands on him. Across the road, two or three times a day, you'd hear a door slam, the creak of a bed, then her grunting with increasing speed, the whole sequence ending in a crescendo of blasphemies. This did not go politely unremarked. Shelagh had gone round to complain—not to Wendy but to Ronnie whom, in formidable technical language, she accused of spousal abuse. ('I'd never do that, man. Jesus')—and the Chows had sent a deputation of leering heavies in sunglasses. (Only they went to the wrong house, giving Mr Augustin the fright of his life.) Over the months, Ronnie grew thinner and more haggard. Nine months after his arrival, his wife ran off with an Australian lesbian. A few days later, Ronnie was found dead, his head in a plate of boiled rice, jaws open in a rictus of laughter. I may have invented that last bit. I may have read too much W. Somerset Maugham.

Shelagh—'don't pronounce it like the paint'—had the remains of a Belfast accent. She had a pathologically shy or absentee husband, and pent-up religious inclinations. She was not the most forthcoming or neighbourly of neighbours, avoiding male company and eye contact. I recall sitting on a couch, in my bungalow, with her (I have no idea how this came about, she may have come over to inquire, presumably in some desperation, about her husband's whereabouts). We were having a fairly nondescript not totally awful conversation—about mud-wasps and their habit of building hard immovable nests in the joins of door frames—and sipping at mugs of green tea. Shelagh had been fidgeting about, dragging her gown back over her knees, throwing her arms behind her head, pulling them back, letting them trail along the spine of the couch. At one point, her fingers brushed up against my shoulder. She let out a piercing scream, then immediately continued with what she was saying—'Dettol by itself won't do it, but if you mix it with a little kerosene, that seems to have an effect, not a lot, don't get me wrong, but a little, and a little's about as much as might be expected in these parts'.

Mr Augustin hailed from Kuala Lumpar on peninsular Malaysia. He used to be principal of a school there, but something scandalous had occurred and he'd fled to this bustling backwater of Malay new money. He looked as if he'd been dipped in carpenter's staining fluid, with only partial success, so that his face, especially about the eye-sockets, was a lot darker than the rest of him. He had soft bulbous eyes, like peeled eggs, and a humorous caste of mind that survived gossip and prodigious bouts of sweating. He was my colleague at the Science College and liked to tutor me in the ways of our bosses, the datus and cikgus. 'They are brainless creatures, do you see, like poultry', he'd point out during thunderstorms. In the staff-room, he'd sit amidst the sari-clad Indian women and their rolls of caramel belly, immobile and cross-legged like a saint amongst nautch-girls. Once he took me aside to inform me, critically, that baldness was a European trait and that the men of India were possessed of 'abundant black mops well into their dottage'. When I mentioned Mahatma Gandhi, he threw back his head and emitted a complacent bray, as at the astonishing ignorance of youth. 'But my dear boy, Gandhi was an African!' He had a furtive way of squeezing the soft underside of my forearm, whenever a pretty student passed… Perhaps, this time, I've been influenced by Anthony Burgess.

Salim had a squat upper body balanced on spidery Olive Oil legs. The former he kept hidden under the same grubby tee-shirt ('Don't just drink Tiger, mate, be one'), the latter he exhibited courtesy of very tight powder-blue hot-pants. His legs were extraordinarily hirsute, black tightly coiled hair growing in a matted pelt all the way down to his toenails. When he walked, he seemed to lurch backwards, while his legs, like furry cantilevers, swivelled underneath and dragged him forward in rapid lurches. His eyes were always bloodshot. He had fantasies of violent sex with Constance Chow, as (in an extremely drunken state, it has to be said) he'd confided to me during one of our parties, and had there and then decided that only Ronnie's wife would be up to granting them full and lengthy realisation. 'God bloody focking practice, baas, wouldn't it?' Wendy did nothing to discourage him, churning her hams in his direction during the slow numbers, while Ronnie guffawed silently behind her. Salim's cousin Saeed ran the garage. He had an air of expensively acquired criminality, which he lavished on the cars we left in his care. Barry the gorilla lost an entire crankshaft on the coast road, shortly after putting in for service.

Jim the Birder was, single-mindedly, a birder. He'd come here because he wanted to spot a Paradise Flycatcher. Just that. He had no other aim in mind. Teaching, travel, salary, these were just pretexts, bubbles blown in the air. He'd worked in Tanzania, or it might have been Tanganyika. ('I'm an old Africa hand'.) He wore grey flannel trousers and braces which tugged the seat half way up his back like a parachute harness. In his day, he'd been 'a bit of a lady's man'. One of his stories concerned a drunken prostitute. Finding himself broke—'not even any loose change'—he'd had to pay her with empty cocoa tins and beer-bottles. (He was a crafty story-teller, leaving it deliberately vague as to who was supposed to come out looking the more ridiculous in the exchange.) He was still being chased around the globe by a Zulu masseuse he'd met in Jo'burg, but the only thing he had energy for now was the feathered type of birding, as he'd informed Kenya Mike's puzzled wife. He plunged heroically through the coastal swamps of Borneo in his flannels and braces, binoculars cocked and readied, the treacly water surging at his waist, captioned by G. A. Henty.

There was also a dog, Bang-Bang, whose task was to keep the garden free of vermin and kris-wielding amoks, but who spent most of his life cowering under the water-tank. A gift from Salim, his name came from his fear of back-firing cars. He wasn't a very loveable beast. Ticks, swollen with blood, clung to the hair below his collar. They had the look of sleek Mediterranean olives. He had a fondness for faeces, most particularly human ones. (Horse dung appeared to hold the same attractions as micro-waved coq au vin would to a gourmand.) I once saw him drooling while one of Kenya Mike's naked toddlers, caught short, heaved and grunted over her stool. The turd, a sizeable compact-looking object, hadn't touched ground before Bang-Bang had caught it, gulping it down with Houdini-like skill and haste. Unsurprisingly, he gave off a distinctive odour. I was embarrassed by his devotion, and found his assistance at parties, especially when the curries and limited toilet facilities caused some of the guests to retreat to the bushes to do their business, humiliating. He had to be chased away with a parang.

The rains always fell at 4 o'clock sharp. They'd cool the veranda for a moment. The eaves of the bungalow projected over, so that the water fell in thick beaded columns and split plastic drapes—like those door-coverings you find in old-fashioned corner-shops or caravans—whose ends, when the wind changed, thrashed about my feet. There was a moment of eerie indistinction, an enclosed blacked-out world, whose clapper-board walls admitted lines of light every few seconds like an effect of torchlight or beams from helicopter gunships. Then the rain blasted the corrugated roof, and speech and hearing became redundant. In the aftermath, the breeze dropped; it grew sticky; mosquitoes did that needling sound about one's ears. In the ditch, frogs began a monotonous but pleasing chorus, like hundreds of little bells tolling invisibly during an armistice.

Once, after rain, a chrome-bright snake, like a length of bathroom hose, came out of the grass. I don't know how it got past me, but it described amazing accelerating Ss across the tiles. The slipperiness of the floor seemed to increase its speed. My heart knocked in my breast. I managed to pin the thing with a broom. After a while I began to beat it, bringing the broom down with a violence that still shocks me.



One day, into this reckless fun-filled idyll, came a man with a suggestion. Marble white and statuesque like a Renaissance art form, but with a face that looked as if it had been created in a punch-up, Mushroom Dave sat down in the other chair. We played chess, a complex variation on an Alekhine classic, I think (Dave had a book of Alekhine games). The talk turned to the period when our contracts would end. In the 1990s, forest conservation was all the rage. Logging was the buzzword. Sting had become a household name. Iban Pete had just given us Eric Hansen's Stranger in the Forest. Mushroom Dave said that he planned to visit the Kelabit Highlands and say goodbye to friends he'd made on previous trips. As I frowned over the baffling pawn move he'd just made, he burped beerily and added, 'You want to go up there with me and make a film?' Make a film, eh? I'd always wanted to make a film, darkly comic, noirishly suggestive, full of sepia lights and deep purple shadow, monochrome moments and the music of Tom Waits. I saw myself as the Jim Jarmusch of the Bornean jungle. But was this the sort of film had Dave in mind? 'The people of the Highlands, how they live, what's happening to them', Dave ummed. 'Penans, Kelabits, Kenyahs, logging companies, the barricades, that kind of thing. You know'. I knew.

I saw us—midgets in the shade of one of those mighty buttressed ironwood trees that feature on the covers of Oxford University Press travel book classics (cool red bandana'd midgets with American accents, of course, rather than the pith-helmeted duck-voiced Englishmen the OUP classics favour)—near the orange gash of a logging road, filming blue-tattooed Kelabit warriors manning a barrier of jagged stakes while snarling police, stooges of government-backed monopolies, threatened them with guns. Tugging on my roll-up, squinting through the wreaths of blue smoke, I saw myself filming Penan hunter-gatherers in their habitus, fishing, working on their tools, foraging for edible ferns, playing on sapés, in the gloom of deep forest, far from the sawdust piles and stink of diesel. I saw myself throwing off the trappings of civilisation, shrugging off my Marks & Sparks briefs and plunging into a jade-green pool to a Michael Bolton track. Perhaps I wouldn't return, perhaps I'd do a Bruno Manser and tattoo my throat, perhaps I'd become a White Rajah, like Lord Jim, ruler of a remote jungle paradise, and end up with a beautiful café-au-lait mistress with good teeth like Nick Nolte in Farewell to the King.

What we'd planned seemed fairly straightforward. I had access to a video camera at the College. Panasonic, as I recall. These were still a luxury at that time, and neither of us really wanted to buy one ourselves. The idea was that I'd 'borrow' the Panasonic. We'd take along a few extra batteries (as there wasn't any electricity in the Highlands), and Dave, who knew the routes and the right people, would get us to the logging flash-points. Our roles fell into place. I'd do the filming, Dave would do the interviewing. Contentedly, we looked out on the garden, where a new addition—green leafy crowns (from seeds that had been given me by Iban Pete, when he came back from a holiday in Thailand)—was beginning to bristle above the rim of a dragon-pot. 'I think they're just weeds', Dave said. He always said that. He leant over and stroked one of the narrow hairy leaves. He always did that.

A week before our planned departure, I learnt that the camera was going to be locked away in the one room to which I had no key.—I'd already hedged my bets by warning Mushroom Dave this might happen. Dave had said he'd pay for a camera himself, if need be, but neither he nor I ever did anything in preparation for such an eventuality. We never said anything, but you could tell we were both seriously disappointed in one another. We went anyway.

Goodbyes were accomplished over a cask of Tiger beer on the back veranda. Iban Pete agreed to find Bang-Bang a home. Mr Augustin proffered obscure warnings (about the extract of a certain plant which when mixed with rice-wine induced dizzying fantasies of time-travel and—I may have misheard this bit—a recurring desire to fornicate with squirrels) while Amaury sang a Celtic dirge to Kenya Mike's guitar accompaniment. Not exactly MTV unplugged. As dawn broke, we all began to look at one another with that blank incomprehension you fall into when to part is to die a little. At the gate, Salim grew so maudlin he let Bang-Bang nose amongst his extremities. In the last few days, I harvested Mushroom Dave's weeds, dried them in the sun and sealed them in a pouch. I left the rest of the place to the birds. I was angered (yet secretly gratified) when I learnt, months later, that Mrs Chow had made off with the moon orchids.

There were other reasons for going, and these had nothing to do with making a splash with Greenpeace, earning a slot on BBC2 or scoring big in Findhorn, Scotland… I'd long been bothered by a childhood memory of Malayan forest, a greeny-brown haze on the edge of vision, or the groping vision of earliest memory. (I say 'groping' because it has never been clear to me whether this memory is/was mine—product of my perception—or something that came from elsewhere—yours, his, hers.) I'd come to Borneo in the first place, because it was about the nearest I could get to clearing things up. A Proustian investigation.

There are the things in themselves and the things we do to them. (Story, myth, religion, ideology, structure, post-structure, discourse, discurs, simalucra, the Symbolic, self and other, EFL, the IMF, Eminem, these are just some of the framing-devices.) What I had was this thing we call jungle. V. S. Pritchett describes the edges as looking as if 'lorries had crashed into them'. When you came out, you came out panting, dripping like a swimmer, covered in a complex tracery of scratches. It was very easy to get lost, as the paths often became confused with animal tracks. You could trip over an exposed root, break a leg and no one would ever find you. You could die of thirst or amoebic dysentery, even if you had water-purifying tablets with you. On the whole, a walk in the jungle was not what you'd call an edifying experience.

The Malays thought of it as the haunt of ghosts. The true rain forest—the ulu—far in the interior, had no appeal whatsoever. Neither the Malays nor the Chinese would be caught dead in such a place. 'The sticks, my dear, the ebsolute sticks', as Cikgu Mokhtar, a toothy colleague with a preposterous accent told me. Rain forest only appealed to 'orang putih' ('white cheps'), who were prone to silly folklore, Darwinian obfuscation and other nineteenth-century romanticisms. 'But, my dear!' Cikgu Mokhtar shrieked, 'perhaps they're orf searching for their ancestors, what? hwa-hwa'. The Dyaks of the 'Orxford clessics' spoke of 'mino pajahin', a state of distress or disaffection which seemed to afflict middle-aged white men. This affliction eventually turned into a longing, inexplicable and unanchored, which could only be appeased by walking it orf, one day, in the trees. No one ever returned, it seemed. In all likelihood, 'hentu-hentu' (ghosts) got 'em. Or—here the Cikgu gave me a sly poke in the ribs—perhaps they were sucked dry by female vempires, eh? what? what? Perhaps they died of vastation or some such primeval terror. Eyes bulging, voice shaking with theatrical emotion, he told me a story about hunters, three days into the ulu, stumbling upon bones, khaki-fabric tangled on the pelvic girdle, the jaws stretched screamingly wide. Overwhelmed by these fantasies, I would go off on my own, to stand at the lorry-battered edges, and look on, a child peeking wistfully between curtains.

You walked to the coast road, and took a right. Once, I found a dead monkey—pig-tailed macaque, I believe. Thrust-out lower lip and heat-popped eyes. Orange hair, grey fingers and grey sinewy skin where the muscle of the thigh met the groin. The size of a small man, sprawled with its ear to the ground as if listening for horsemen in an old Western. On the grassy verges, you might see a monitor lizard, all long crocodile tail balanced on little Queen Anne chair-legs, its rigid staring head. A little farther on, there was a track leading up into secondary forest. Stands of emerald green bamboos, each one as thick as your thigh, each lancing out from a common centre, the joints knuckled and hairy. Kingfishers with electric blue throats leading you away—like those dolphins in mariners' stories—from treacherous ground and black oily pools. I found a cemetery up there. A melancholy untended place because it was so far away from the kampong, given over to the jungle and its wandering ghosts, shot through with stiff green stalks of ginger, their reddish florets. Peg-like gravestones, flat-faced for the men, curved for the women. Far below, in the kampong, I could hear the rattle of hadras, the clapping hands and soporific chanting of a wedding.

Another jungle path, outside Tutong. Superheated churchy shadows broken here and there by three-dimensional shafts of sunlight that fell exactly like the light through stained glass windows in a Merchant and Ivory film, casting faint biblical allegories on the ground. Rose Mackay up ahead, hair strawberry-blonde like the coat of an orang utan. She didn't wax or shave her limbs, so that when she entered the sunlight her arms and legs seemed encircled by golden candy floss. Huge silences broken by stark institutional screams as of someone in great pain, a woman on the point of giving birth or the victim of cunning and sustained torture. The sudden buzzsaw noise of insects. The surprise of coming upon a patch of dry padi, between columns of tapang and other trees. Jim the birder, quivering behind his binoculars, short-back-n-sides pimpled with sweat: 'Yes! Yes! Thank you God!' Falling on his knees to wring his hands. 'Oh thank you, thank you!'

Then there was the path to Marudi in Sarawak which I'd been on a few times, with Iban Pete or Mushroom Dave or by myself. About four hours on foot. It was a way of fetching liquor when Brunei went dry, as there was no need for a visa and the border was unmanned. After the Teru longhouse (where Iban Pete would deposit Bang-Bang), you had to negotiate half a mile or so of slippery logs laid end to end over swamp. Sometimes in the distance you'd hear animals trampling on rotten branches. The deafening workshop sound of insects, starting up and falling away as you passed. Lizards and tree-shrews flash-frozen to crumbled stumps. Once, a wild pig came up, big as a bus to my appalled eyes, bristly and tusked and enraged, but it was probably just as terrified of what it couldn't properly see as I of what seemed to be a visitation out of M. R. James. There were pitcher plants in the drier stretches, orange art nouveau lamps with toothy lids on stems trailing away like flex. In other places, the swamp was inky, and you felt you'd sink from sight if you lost your footing. Iban Pete ran along the logs with the nimbleness of a gibbon on a branch.

On the second stretch, after the Ridan longhouse, you followed the course of a stream. You'd see evidence of rubber tapping (little bamboo cups underneath diagonal cuts like corporal's stripes), the odd grain storehouse on stilts, butterflies (black and ragged in the shadows, slow-falling multi-coloured twisting ticker-tape in the light), little olive-green and yellow reed-warblers singing their hearts out, Iban boys on bicycles wobbling along the path ('Where you going? Where you going?'), munchkin pineapples (the spiny eyes red-rimmed and tightly packed), the stink of human excrement and planks instead of logs, as you got nearer to the town. Beneath some of the untapped trees, you'd find gum heaped up in hard glaucous piles or marbled and puddled like candle wax…

There's something illicit, fraudulent, wrong in this making of sentences. Worryingly, mesmerisingly wrong. But all is not lost. Even the most convincing, most truthful-seeming narrative contains within itself the traces of a fact or two.

Arrived finally in Borneo, Aldous Huxley expresses some disappointment: 'the tourist who supposes that he will be able … to study those romantic beings 'the Wild Men of Borneo', is profoundly mistaken. At Kudat, it is true, we actually did see two small and dirty people from the interior, hurrying apprehensively along the relatively metropolitan street of that moribund little port as though in haste to be back in their forests. Poor specimens they were; but we had to be content with them'.

December 14th. Miri. The taxi-driver was a well-fed man in blue shorts and red flipflops. He said he was called So-So, which suggested he'd misunderstood the question. We told him we'd like to go to the Baram ferry terminal. He drove off at breakneck speed, keeping his foot flat on the floor at roundabouts, whizzing through glittering puddles and saying 'weee!' over the hump-back bridges ('Sound effects, yah'), while giving a running commentary on the eccentricities of Japanese tourists. He was particularly exercised by the universal Japanese lepidopteral habit: 'All catch butterflies!'—face swinging round, eyes wide with bewildered indignation—'Not for eating!' Near Kuala Baram, we ran into a bicycle race, which caused him to expostulate at length on our behalf. A group of boy scouts who'd been deputed to re-route the traffic unhinged him. 'Look at those foolish childrens! Look at them, I tell you!'—fist banging the steering-wheel—'Oh my goodness! Look!' Why, if we were journalists we'd write this up in the Foreign News section of our journal. 'The foolish peoples of Sarawak making bicycle race stopping traffic…'

Today, reading my time-stained notes, I think of those Japanese tourists. Not for eating? What had So-So meant? Did he mean that butterflies were, in Miri, an everyday food, and that the Japanese habit of catching the creatures, rather than eating them, was inexplicable? Or, since he appeared to have transformed himself into 'one of us', and even to have adopted the air of detached Western observer of the local cultural scene, did he believe that we ourselves habitually snacked on them—grilled on toast, perhaps, or served on a bed of lettuce—and must, therefore, be astonished at this extreme behaviour? This second possibility seems to argue anthropological eccentricity, but not necessarily on the part of the Japanese.

My train of thought loses direction. I have a delirious sense of cultural identities running into one another like an effect of a deli van encountering a tree, the discrete contents of the van fusing with one another, creating a pullulating mess among fallen branches and yew berries. Retreating into the comfort-zone of late-imperial laughter, I think of Sanders of the River and Mister Johnson ('No, no, in England, Waziri, we do not beat our wives, that is a savage low custom'), of Malay sultans parading in European top hats and tails, human desire and ambition caught up in a whirl of imitation and wannabe-whiteness. I am thinking of power and its seductions, of dominance and subordination, of the face in the mirror endlessly othering itself, not the subtler dynamics of humour and its challenges. Forgive me. My understanding is libidinal, feral, rushing into holes like a thought-fox.

Outside the terminal, a municipal worker chose the wrong moment to sweep the road. Yelling out, Mushroom Dave and I gripped the head-rests as the car swerved and skidded. So-So leaned out of his window. 'What you doing, you bloody tom fool man?' he bellowed. 'Not understanding Highway Code?' 'Damn wogs', he told us amiably, as we drove up to the jetty. So-So had entered the spirit of his personation. It had become artistic.

More should be said in praise of these men who accommodate tourists in their rattling over-zealous taxis. They are today's dragomen, avatars of the Turks and Levantines who once extricated imperial Englishmen from the snags and snares of fearfully odd foreign customs. And as a sidebar, let us grant Robert Byron's or Alexander Kinglake's nameless intercessionaries a moment's suspicion. Could there have been, had there been, an element of charade and mockery in their all too-faithfully transcribed commentaries?

Kuala Baram was the logging port at the head of the Baram river, where we could catch one of the ferries that went as far as Marudi, about 40 miles upriver. The Baram was one of Sarawak's two major river-systems. It, and a few of its navigable tributaries, did duty for all other modes of transportation. (The only land thoroughfares, barring the littoral expressway, were the roads made by logging-crews with chain-saws and bulldozers.) Ferries plied continuously between Kuala Baram and Marudi. After that, you had to take a motorised canoe or launch, and these would only go on if the river was in spate.

Our ferry looked like an early Space Age rocket, with its Things to Come portholes, apocalyptic skipper ('Ahead! Yonder! To the Ulu!') and sealed cockpit. (According to So-So, it had been constructed out of an old Boeing fuselage. I could see the wing-joints, if I cared to let him hold on to my ankles while I hung over the gunwales.) As our ship gathered speed, we found it best to stay inside, out of the hurling spray and helter-skelter plunging, with the din of the engines vibrating our teeth and tympani. This noise was so excessive and inward-looking, speech became archaic, a remote tribal curiosity. I don't speak idly here. This was sound used to deprive one of sense and personality, like an experiment with Guantanamo Bay internees. Somerset Maugham's near-death experience with a tidal bore on the Sarawak river 70 years earlier struck me as a modest thrill in comparison. All one could do was attempt to read shivering lines of print (Odoardo Beccari's Wanderings in the Great Forests of Borneo, in my case, Larry McMurty's Lonesome Dove in Dave's) or watch the in-board videos—films with Chinese and Malay subtitles featuring demonic women and levitating corpses or a single mind-numbingly condensed wrestling bout (a yellow Hulk Hogan repeatedly stomping on a purple Macho Man's neck) through the blizzards of poor maintenance. The latter clip found one appreciative viewer in my neighbour, an old Kayan woman with betel-blackened teeth and distended earlobes (long, wrinkled and plump like English earthworms), who cackled and slapped her thighs till the tears came in great abdominal sobs—sometimes having to bend over to catch her breath between her knees—throughout each showing. We warp-fived thunderously through insulated space. I could make out nothing but a dim line of green through the scratched water-streaked portholes.

Marudi used to be called Claudetown, after the grandly named Claude Champion de Crespigny, first Residential Officer of the Baram region during the time of the second White Rajah, Charles Brooke.—Sarawak was once ruled by a dynasty of kindly English despots, a species of rule and ruler not so different from the current ones in neighbouring Brunei Darussalam. The Brookes started out with the stated aim of protecting local culture and peoples (Sea, Land or Hill Dyak, Chinese or Malay) from the sorts of excesses that had marred or were still hampering the British enterprises in India and Africa, limiting foreign trading companies and re-directing florid missionaries elsewhere. This led to some hardship, as the Brookes were a family of reduced means and Sarawak's known natural resources were unfashionable (gums, camphor) or worked out (gold, coal). The assistance of maverick British naval officers and the infatuation of an unmarried English heiress proved invaluable to the first ruler, James. He was able to restrict entry visas to hunting parties and naturalists; they were encouraged to mow down whole populations of orang-utans and bottle-nosed monkeys for the scientific cachet the corpses would bring. Coffee was briefly looked into.

While Mushroom Dave went off to buy liquor and dried fruit, I relaxed in a warm plopping shower through the town, chased by the usual cluster of shyly smiling girls. I say usual because, in all places outside Europe and north America, people like me earned the less than scientific cachet of being blond and blue-eyed, even when we only approximated the ideal. This cachet should not be over-simplified (Out walking on the road to Labi in Brunei, I was once stopped by a Malay couple who wanted to see my eyes more clearly. They examined me with the minatory curiosity of lab technicians: 'Note', the man observed, 'the plum-coloured edges to the irises', while the woman oohed through open lips, clasping her hands together. An inverted echo, one feels, of Karl Lumholtz exclaiming over his anthropometric measurements in Central Borneo seventy years earlier.) Below me, flanked with lalang grass and timber-mills, the river slid mud-brown past ranks of canoes and junks. You could see silvery heaps of ikan kecil (a sort of whitebait) on the wharves. Fresh from the forest, naked Penans, muscular as if from steroid abuse, wandered the glades of the bazaar. Flame trees and blue jacarandas enlivened the black and yellow stained Chinese chop-houses. Remains of the Brooke raj were visible in the flowering lawns of the government dwellings. Marudi still had the look of a colonial frontier town. In the bars, old lithographed prints of Claudetown did not seem anachronistic.

16th December. The route to Long Lama was lined with log-islands, raft-like processions, some nearly 50 metres in length, each outlying log linked to its neighbour by restraining-chains. Other processions resembled rows of pyramids as they approached, the logs stacked on top of one another, each pyramid connected by ropes to the one following it. These processions were hauled by tugs belching black smoke. Hills of red sawdust marked the banks. According to Charles Hose (de Crespigny's successor), this river used to be a place of interdictions (pamali) and romantic carved heads (black arched Marylin Manson eye-sockets and snarling mouths) warning visitors of trespass. But the dark kampongs, balanced on their hardwood piles, with their waiting Apocalypse Now war-canoes and painted warriors, had made way for the blue-grey gleam of Evintrude outboard motors, a flattened smoking landscape, tumble-down huts and posters of the Minister of Tourism. On the bank, a drunk in oil-stained overalls shook his fists at the future, like an Angel of History, and screamed abuse from a heap of wood-shavings. On the deck of the launch, we joined forces with a Frenchman called Michel who kept clicking his teeth and saying 'Sheet, sheet'.

Arrived at Long Lama, Mushroom Dave took us to see a Bible school, some 30 minutes' walk away through secondary forest. This institution owed its existence to SIB, or Storm Over Borneo, an Australian evangelical outfit devoted to weaning Borneo's native peoples off rice-wine and to replacing their carefree nomadic habits and gay expressions with a sedentary way of life and long faces. Evangelical Christianity has been able to make massive inroads into Sarawak, with the departure of the Brookes and the advent of the Malaysian government's pragmatic materialism (encouraging anything that pacified and settled the orang asli or original peoples, leaving the land available to exploitation), substituting hymn singing and typhus inoculations for the ritualised booze-ups and short lives of the past.

The school was pleasantly situated amidst padi-fields, fruiting rambutans (the fruits littered the ground under the trees like tiny red hedgehogs), pineapple and pomelo plantations. They had no water and so had had to dig out the fish-pond to irrigate the padi. The church was a small rectangular building furnished with guitars, tambourines and a small electric organ. The library was stocked with devotional literature, including the complete works of Billy Graham, and a disused stencil machine. The pastor stared at this last object with a sort of mournful hatred. Evidently it had been used to issue the classroom worksheets, but they'd run out of skins. Outside, the local ketua besar, or headman, did his duty by adat (custom or the burden of history), sharing a durian with us, hacking through its spines with efficient sweeps of his parang, gruffly thrusting the dripping contents into our hands.

I leave Darwin's competitor, the nineteenth-century naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, to speak for the flavours of this fruit: 'A rich butter-like custard highly flavoured with almonds gives the best general idea, but intermingled with it come wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, brown sherry and other incongruities. Then there is a rich glutinous smoothness in the pulp which nothing else possesses, but which adds to its delicacy. It is neither acid, nor sweet, nor juicy, yet one feels the want of none of these qualities, for it is perfect as it is. It produces no nausea or other bad effect, and the more you eat of it the less you feel inclined to stop'. Deprived of other forms of intoxicant, perhaps it was no wonder that our ketua besar should have guzzled his portion with deep scoops of the tongue and rapturously shut eyes.

Durians don't travel well. Their odour can take on a necrotic or bathroom foulness in enclosed spaces. Wallace observes, with a fine delicacy, that when brought into a house, durian smells 'so offensive that some persons cannot bear to taste it'; this was the case with him, he says, when he first encountered one in Malacca. You can buy the fruit in open-air markets, but not in shops. Neither clingfilm nor tupperware can contain the smell. Airlines won't allow passengers to bring durians on board. The best kinds are grown in Thailand, and Thai agronomists have been trying to cultivate an odourless, or less malodorous, variety for export. Outside Southeast Asia, the fruit is sometimes available in sausage-shaped plastic wraps, the pulp rendered down to a bland sugary paste. There would appear to be an allegory of race involved in these proscriptions and metamorphoses.

Long Lama was a small town. Besides the row of river-front chop-houses, there was a school (where Iban Pete had worked for VSO) and—something of a novelty for the region—a karaoke bar. The town's population seemed to consist entirely of cupiditous geriatrics. One old man tried to sell us the shirt off his back. On the quay, even before we'd hoisted our rucksacks, he had stripped down to stringy y-fronts and had to be bribed not to remove those. In the bar, we were encouraged to eat the local version of mee goreng—rubbery noodles and unshelled river shrimps—and drink several jugs of watery beer. Our host, a beaming fogey with a mottled orange scalp and bow-legs, invited us to perform on the stage. 'Yas', he insisted. 'Yas, yas, yas!' He had no teeth but his fingers felt like steel pincers on my wrist. I did what I felt must have been an emotionally draining version of 'Silent Night', to judge from my companions' tear-stained and reddened features. Then Dave bawled out 'You Are My Sunshine' in a tone-deaf baritone. Michel's mumbled cover of 'Sailing', augmented by short-sightedness ('I am selling, uh sailing, a cross, uh, across zee zee, non, not zee, sea, oui, sea, oui, zat's it, pardon, I begin again') completed our Pop Idol audition. I noticed a crowd of silently gaping spectators—passengers for the express boat back to Marudi—gathered at the steps. As we finished, we saw our host begin hauling them in. Up till then, his purposes had seemed relatively innocent. 'Not for free!' he was yelling. 'You pay for watch!' When we left, he winked conspiratorially.

Mushroom Dave thought we should take one of the single-engine airplanes from Marudi, rather than the boat to Long Akau, the next stop along the river. He was worried about the level of the water, and also felt it would be difficult to find a longboat to take us farther upriver beyond that because of the rapids. I found this argument controvertible. Miffed at this attempt to swizzle me out of the opportunity to ride a Kayan war canoe through white water, I said that the river looked quite wet to me. Dave said he swam poorly and was simply feeling apprehensive about his chances. When I realised that the longboats weren't carved from trees, I relented. We shook hands formally. Leaving Michel to the hazards of the Baram, we returned to Marudi.—The boat was empty (the rest of the passengers were auditioning in the karaoke bar), and we had the dismal fire-blackened views all to ourselves.

December 18th. We got a ride in a single-engine Cessna (150 ringgit each) which was bound for Long Banga, some way into the Highlands. The plane looked too small for passengers. There were only two seats, one for the pilot, the other for his navigator. We had to sit on sacks of rice in the cramped hold. The fuselage felt like a drum-skin to my fingers. The pilot—a magnificent man in a vintage leather bomber-jacket and baseball cap, but with a bootlace for a moustache rather than a sweeping-brush—turned my misgivings into exhilaration. He took us straight up into the stratosphere, then straight down again into the soupy tropics at speed. We swooped between the molar-like teeth of mountain peaks, and down into the colls, which, with their shiny granite faces and pearly waterfalls, hinted at antique ruins. Here were the half-buried masonry, the creeper-strewn walls and the steps of the lost pyramids and temples of colonial adventure stories. I recalled something Cikgu Mokhtar had said about deepest jungle not ectually being the guardian of secret Hindoo cities, febulous golden idols or men with tails, dear boy, whatever Henry Rider Heggard, Carl Bock or Discovery Chennel might tell you. 'Clock that, Dave', I said. 'Rajah James Brooke's Mines'. But Dave's eyes were tightly shut, and he'd turned even whiter, chalky with a bluish tinge.

We were roller-coasting just above a line of tree-tops, following a narrow crest of rock. Then the Cesna hit a thermal and appeared to ascend vertically as if trapped in a beam of alien light. As we banked and turned upside down (today, I can't go on a theme park ride without suffering flashbacks) I remember noticing the red loops of a logging road. These outlined the reeling anamorphic world beyond the window like piping on a military uniform. The plane dropped out of the sky, and when we opened our eyes, it was to ruler-straight mist flowing like dry-ice through rolling hills and heavy swirling rain. The navigator had to wipe the condensation off the windscreen with her fingers. We were lost, or so the pilot now informed us, emphasising this disclosure with incredulous shrugs and moues. We circled the same three forested hills for several minutes, sometimes disturbing the leafage with our wing-tips, while the pilot asked the navigator, whom I now saw was wearing a Walkman rather than earphones, for directions. She spread a map over her knees. Beyond her shoulder, I had a clear view of the fuel gauge. I kept staring at it. It soon took on a fascination out of all proportion to its rather prosaic appearance (a plain dial with black markings). I heard the pilot call someone up to ask if the plane was visible. 'Is that gauge correct?' I said. 'I wouldn't know', the pilot said, and emitted a horrible Beavis and Butthead laugh. The black hairs of his moustache blew out over his lips.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the forest canopy, acres of bubbly close-packed foliage the colour of synthetic turf, suddenly shrink away as in a fast zoom out. The tickly burlap sacks felt uncommonly transparent beneath my buttocks. Again, the plane seemed to turn over as the pull of gravity took hold. Rain formed miraculous stars on the windscreen and then ran around like giant water-dippers on the surface of a pond. I thought these liquid spiders looked incredibly beautiful—perhaps as all things do when you feel death breathing down your neck. Near my shoulder, Mushroom Dave said something. It sounded respectably religious, but also automatic or poorly remembered like a death-bed recantation or the insincerities used in saying farewell.

The pilot said he could see a river and a landing-strip, though he wasn't sure which. When we came down, the engine cut out several times, and we half-glided (that soft nearly audible bouncing of air under the wings, the unearthly sweetness of engine-silence) down over trees before splashing along the strip. I got out and kissed the earth like an important exile returning to his native land, my lips pressed into foul sticky mud. Mushroom Dave stood still, staring through the rain at the forest—to which we had come with such ambition. 'Ow you feel, bro?' the pilot said through a mouthful of chrome-edged teeth, banging him on the back. 'I wouldn't know', Dave said.

The settlement wasn't Long Banga, it was Long Lellang, sixty odd miles to the south-east. But it was close enough, and we were, as Dave pointed out—unnecessarily, one felt— now in the Highlands. Long Lellang was a well-established Kelabit longhouse, with its own airstrip and generator, power saws, glassed windows, panelled rooms and modern paint-work. There was considerable agricultural scenery. From the airplane, the rain forest had seemed relatively untouched by logging—at least, the Cesna's flight path had crossed few areas of desolation—but the nearer we'd got to Long Lellang the more frequent the depredations became. I told Dave about the logging track and a number of scalped hillsides, brown as old blood.

After the hothouse lowlands, Long Lellang felt cold and damp, and so we had two reasons to broach our small stock of bourbon. In the privacy of our own room, I made some notes, while Dave consulted a Gideon Bible, and then opened the pouch of weeds and shared a coarse, rather harsh-tasting smoke with him. The plain spartan walls took on a more homely feel. 'Tastes like weeds', Dave said, after considering the ceiling and its gritty beams for signs of mermaids and other pleasing shapes.

Kelabit is a tribal identity peculiar to the Highlands of Sarawak. Lower down the Baram, there are also Kenyah and Kayan peoples, each of whom were once well-known (to the usurping foreigners, who always like to think badly of the opposition) for their sexually voracious head-women, habitual warring and head-hunting, traffick in slaves, human sacrifice (impalement by stake), transvestism, custom of banishing confined women to the jungle and general resistance to toothpaste and the sanitary way of life.

Head-hunting was a ritual practice by which young men proved their hardihood and suitability for marriage. A man who took a head was entitled to tattoo his knuckle joint. Severed heads were kept in the longhouses, suspended from the rafters in rattan baskets where smoke from the fires would soon cure and kipper them, along with the fish and pig meat. They would be taken down on festive occasions and treated most lovingly, with caresses and soft words. Hugh Low, James Brooke's private secretary, reports seeing one being given the foot-long hand-rolled cigarette called rokos as a treat.

According to the literature, Penans were deep-forest hunter-gatherers. Because they rarely entered sunlight, their skin was much paler than that of other tribes. They slept in lean-tos woven from palm fronds or ongkodok. Charles Hose met one who did not understand what he meant by the sea. Head-hunting was not part of Penan culture. They were peaceable and tolerant, not much given to disembowelment or anthropophagy. Actually, Penans are an attitude of mind rather than a people. They are noble savages, or natural men, in Hose's lovelorn reminiscence, God's originals in tune with the cosmos, sharing everything, hugging trees, romantically picking nits from one another's hair; they are lure and reminder and promise to fallen endlessly guilt-conflicted white folks, the little daydream the men in tight breeches keep on having amidst the cement and carburettors. Penans are poor benighted creatures, lost in the forests of Darkness and Ignorance, in the crabbed imaginings of florid-faced men in Sidney; they are roadside eyesores, spoiling the view with their horrid ears and ghastly scabied legs, in the Malaysian government press... There are some Penans who don't much like being confined to other people's mental landscapes. You can see them paddling moodily in the mosquito lavae-infested puddles of the new clapper-board settlements. Some get so worked up they go out and sabotage bulldozers.

Native Bornean resistance to other people's customary practises is not a recent thing. Charles Brooke's Ten Years in Sarawak (1866) is less an account of a residential officer's life in an outpost of progress than a history of revolts successfully put down and rebel strongholds burned out. The Dyak hero Rentap earned a whole chapter in S. Baring-Gould's and C.A. Bampfylde's A History of Sarawak under its Two White Rajahs (1909). There are photographs of manacled revolutionaries in William O. Krohn's In Borneo Jungles (1927).

In Long Lellang, we heard much talk of 'the Company' and 'the Government'—two interchangeable kinds of brooding entity, it seemed, inching their way up the Baram, leaving piles of sawdust and soot-blackened figures in their wake. The Company had no figurehead or identifiable owner, perhaps because a heartless profit motive is best kept shrouded in collective darkness and anonymity. I thought of the nameless organisation responsible for sending Kurtz into the heart of darkness in Conrad's novella. Should Mushroom Dave and I be considered latter-day Marlows? If so, had we been sent by the very same organisation? By the same organisation that had, willy-nilly, plundered, devastated, scorched the earth where there had been… what? Head-hunting? Human sacrifice? A green thought in a green shade? I didn't like to think what. Morals require precisely delineated areas of light and dark, white and black…

We sat down that night with the headman, the head teacher of the school and their male companions. As in a Local Government meeting everywhere, men would do the talking… Drinking water had been fouled, the community's water-table was under threat. The Company was licensed to log wherever it found what it wanted—hardwoods mostly, especially the valuable dipterocarps, tapang, belian or ironwood, mengaris, minuang. The Kelabits could negotiate or blockade. Negotiation always led to loss on the one side and gain on the other. The Government said that the highlanders were being foolish—or 'primitive', as the Minister of the Interior put it—in their objections. The future was asphalt and TV. Time to come down from the trees. When they did, the people could enjoy the consolations of Brazilian soap operas and plumbing… By January, the Kelabits were planning to set up blockades on all logging roads to the south. If they did, it was probable that the Kayans, Kenyahs and Penans would follow suit…

What was involved in a blockade? Victor, the headman explained: You just stopped the traffic, basically. You couldn't blockade a road, even a logging road, with anything more heavyweight than string, without providing the police with a readymade excuse for arresting and then jailing the perpetrators—for the crime of 'placing an obstacle in the road'. Up till now, the Kelabits practised simple deceptions to avoid being nabbed They used a rope, or some other easily moved and concealed device, and stationed lookouts at the bends. Then they stood behind the rope, in various states of tattooed undress, holding blowpipes. The loggers dared not advance for fear of poisoned darts. If the police were alerted, the protesters—forewarned by the lookouts—could simply remove the 'barrier' and hide it in the undergrowth. When they turned up, the police found only a few tribals, smiling and waving at the side of the road… This was the talk in the longhouse, around a fire in the chill of a December evening, rain and mist washing over the hills.

Was it possible that Government had a point, that the highlanders were only trying to hold back the inevitable? It was possible—but what if that inevitability meant starvation or desuetude? The forest was not just a resource, it was a way of life. We listened to the banana fronds outside rattling together in the breeze… Blao, the schoolmaster, told us that the government should not be complimented for either its farsightedness or its integrity. If you stripped the forest of its tallest, most protective trees, you'd soon get a ruined landscape, unfit for farming or further growth, as the topsoil was immediately washed away by the frequent rains. That was why the rivers were so brown and turgid. Government was only interested in quick profits, some of which weren't even theirs to be had. Blao said that Penans no longer sent their children to the school in Long Lellang because they resented Government's misappropriation of funds meant for them. A fund of one million ringgit had been established to help with the costs of resettlement. Not one red cent had ever reached the Penans. Only blockades and 'Save the Rain Forest' campaigns could attract international attention, and so bring pressure to bear on the government to do something more humane or less vicious. There was another lull in the conversation… Our companions were not the merriest of men. The rain skirled on the corrugated roofs. 'It is good when it rains', Blao said, staring into the fire. 'Then there is no logging'.

The evening featured a 'welcome' for the new teacher, Cikgu William, and a new pastor. This was held in the communal space or hall of the longhouse—a space of bare floors laid with woven mats. The people sat in rows along the walls, leaving the centre of the hall clear for dancing. Everyone else wore smart freshly laundered clothes, and a few of the oldsters were togged out in rafia hats and feathers. Hors d'oeuvres was wild boar fat—sections of lightly broiled pig cellulite, each with a rind of scorched bristle, arranged on tin plates in the style of nouvelle cuisine, but without the sauces. It would have been absurd, as well as insulting, to decline such a feast—pig fat in Borneo, like sheep fat in Arabia, is an ancient delicacy, legacy of a time when lean beasts were standard fare. The highpoint of the entertainments was a hornbill dance. Every visit to a Bornean longhouse includes a dance. (These are now an integral part of Borneo tour packages and are a more or less permanent feature of the Model Villages on the coasts.) They are, in the ethnologically 'emic' prose of Charles Hose, 'imitative' pieces, rather than the clumsy 'pantomimes' Odoardo Beccari and Alfred Wallace sneered at, aiming to describe warlike actions (stalking, attacks with a spear, feints, the kill and much victorious prancing) through the behaviour of animals, such as big fish, the doku monkey or the rhinoceros hornbill, as these are continuous with the rest of the animate world—always to the musical accompaniment of gongs or gamelans, though nowadays tape decks and (for all I know) iPods have replaced the musicians.

Beccari and Wallace were unimpressed by the Hill Dyak dances they saw—Wallace refers to them as 'dull and ungraceful'—probably because they were drawing unstated comparisons with European balls and the more familiar thrills of crinoline and lace. (Always we like to make the thing new-met correspond to the familiar, less a tactic of domestication or assimilation than a habit of re-cognition, the rest and recuperation knowledge requires in its relentless battle with experience and its exposés.) These men were colonial types, representatives of empire who could not afford to lose face by attempting to imitate their underlings—however much they may have kowtowed to them in their generous prefaces (with such epithets as 'Nature's gentlemen'). We who came later were not so in awe of our ponderous sufficiency or the whiteness the natives divined in their own burdensome servitude. We danced too, ungracefully, if not quite as dully as Wallace would have liked. A hundred and thirty years after Wallace had spent an hour or two politely grimacing over the 'ridiculous' antics of his hosts, the racy naturalist Redmond O'Hanlon, questing after a mythical rhinoceros, experienced the same reservations coming from the opposite direction—only it wasn't grimaces but laughter that greeted his efforts. Filled with rice-wine (tuak), he fell on his considerable bottom, attempting the slow turning crouch on one leg that characterises the hornbill dance of the Kayans, and finished things off blindly, the hat jammed over his eyes.

In the Highlands, in 1991, after Storm Over Borneo had fire and brimstoned through the longhouses and forests, there was no tuak to fuel the performances, only the portions of nougat-stiff pig, and memory, and good will. The matronly women who danced, circling one another with mobile fans and stooping motions, were not quite the pubescent girls in see-through t-shirts O'Hanlon had slavered over. In fact, looking around, I noticed that the menfolk, too, were all middle-aged or elderly. The only young people were toddlers. Mushroom Dave was handed a coat of hornbill feathers, a straw hat and a spear and invited to perform a war dance, which he did with awkward aplomb. As a reward he was given a jug of warm tea to drink, a poor facsimile of the jeroboam of tuak he'd have had to drink in the old days, to hand-claps and roaring chants—Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya!

My turn brought the house down, I fancy. I may have outdone even O'Hanlon in my panto version of a randy hornbill—though Dave, jealous of my success, would compare it to an oversexed hen enticing a reluctant cockerel. My derriere waggle was, I have no hesitation in saying, hot. No one was upright when I emerged from the coat and straw hat, but from their various dispositions of collapse the household let it be known, with screaming and wolf-whistles, that I had won them over. The jug of tea was a tougher ask. I swallowed and felt my gorge and the pig fat begin to rise. Tea poured down my cheeks—it had been flavoured with Nestlé's condensed milk. Two litres of sickly-sweet tea in a stomach already made nervous by a few bars of heavy white lard took immediate effect. Mid-way through my quaffing, 'Ya! Ya! Ya!' ringing in my ears, I fled, hands clapped over my mouth, and threw up copiously over a railing. Behind me, the planks quaked with fresh hilarity and floor-banging salutes. Below me, a pack of dogs scrapped over my offerings. Nothing goes to waste in a longhouse.

19th December. While I packed up my stuff (blue bedroll, long johns, toothbrush, stash, books), Mushroom Dave went off to exchange coffee and salt for our bed and hospitality. Not knowing this area, he also hired a guide to take us to the Penans. We headed out into drizzly cold early morning. Dave and the guide, striding competitively, soon left me floundering. Sometimes I saw their footprints pounded into the mud of the track ahead. I only caught up with them, two or so hours later, at a stream, where they were replenishing canteens. Dave reminded me to pop a water-purifying tablet into mine. The idea is to prevent gastric upsets, but what one retains in well-being one loses in appetite. The result tastes the way the better class of toilet water smells. I slugged the stuff moodily. Mushroom Dave wondered if it was merely my indisposition of the night before which was slowing me down. At some point, we rested by a river, among flat slate-like rocks, and dined on a packed lunch of sticky rice, each slab of which had a moist centre of pulverised dried shrimp—the Kelabits had wrapped these confections in banana leaves which could then do as plates.

There was nothing in the forest, or nothing we had time to see. One felt only the rhythms of walking, resting, walking—a nightmare of unrelieved tedium enlivened by all too brief moments of shock (stumbling on a tree-trunk above a torrent, hanging on to a slick root at the top of a perpendicular mud-slide). This was to be the pattern of our lives over the next few weeks—the ferocious walk and then the rest, then the few seconds of stark terror, and then the ferocious walk again, no time to look around, laze under the spreading flutes of a tapang, or inspect the forest mulch for Beccari's natural wonders: giant centipedes, vegetable formicariums, phosphorescent toads. An evening of TV with a deaf World War II-fixated pensioner would have been far more exotic and much less boring. Arrival was the moment when the starved mind began to salivate again.

Long Sait. After a day-long trudge through brambly thickets, and soaked forest, we came to a small Penan settlement on a ridge above one of the Baram's tributaries. The villagers were either very old or very young—as in Long Lellang—and I began to wonder if all the young men and women of the Highlands were off manning barricades or plotting something insurrectionary and lethal at a secret gathering. Of course, there were other possibilities—farming, hunting, shopping in Marudi (Eric Hansen mentions two men he met on a trail, one bearing a zinc tub, the other a Singer sewing-machine)—or, less benignly, abduction, imprisonment, execution. The guide had gone, and there were no other English or Malay speakers to demystify the point.

For a moment, we stood beside our red and blue rucksacks, shivering a little in the awful light of disclosure, survivors of shipwreck being inspected by a brave new world. The children proved low-rent Ariels, with wild maggoty hair and dirty cheeks, the old had shaved eyebrows and temples, cropped fringes and looping ear-lobes—Calibans after a severe depilatory makeover. Everyone wore SIB shorts and tee-shirts. The stilt-houses (bee-hives really) had been erected around a central plot, putting me in mind of the disciplinary organisation of a concentration camp or an English housing-estate. It was a tranquil but somehow terrorised-looking paradise these Penans inhabited. We spent the night in a rickety hive, squatting on bare uncaulked planks above some aggressively restless fowls.

Our host crouched in front of us, motioning mutely over the victuals. His wife served us rice, chicken bones and edible ferns. (It only now occurs to me that this was a feast for them, and must have drawn on their stock of livestock.) Three children with unsuspicious Grey One's eyes giggled behind us when, for want of anything better to do, we attempted a shadow-play on the wall against the candle-light. Neither of us was much good at this—not as good at any rate as Alfred Wallace had been, a hundred or more years earlier, in his 'dog eating' show (he had had the sense to remember that a rabbit wouldn't be recognisable in Borneo)—unwittingly inverting Plato's Allegory of the Cave, convincing the children of the usefulness of their ignorance while demonstrating the redundancy of our own. Eventually we settled down to play candle-lit chess. The old fellow, with his swinging ear-loops, metal teeth and stark Ziggy Stardust features, came scuttling over (you couldn't stand upright, as the roof was so low), and watched for well over an hour, nodding his head, sucking on his teeth, murmuring to himself. I have an odd irresolvable sense of shame as I recall this.

The morning was given over to ablutions in the river. I relieved myself gassily into the current which I was glad to find was going in a different direction to the other bathers. Then we set off for Long Krong, which was only an hour away along the river, following two thickset girls carrying baskets. These girls were really built with thigh muscles that bulged through the slits in their sarongs and high-set jostling buttocks. They kept looking back and whispering to one another, sometimes giggling into their hands, whether with flirtatiousness or amusement I wouldn't like to say. The way was flat and fairly easy on the feet, even at Penan pace, but just before Long Krong we had to cross the river. The current here was much stronger than at Long Sait; even Dave staggered among the rocks and had to grab hold of the leading girl's hand. I took two spills, finally falling spread-eagled under the weight of my rucksack, uttering throttled turkey-like cries, pale gallinaceous legs kicking in the air. One of the girls came back for me, taking me by the arm and hoisting me up, rucksack and all, over a shoulder in a fireman's lift. I felt the reassuring sturdiness of her gait and the immensity of her pectorals as she strode off through the swirling water. It was like being carried to safety by St Christopher or Arnold Schwartzennegger.

20th December. Long Krong. This village had a longhouse, with rooms off the main hall for visitors. There was a pastor who spoke English. Like the inhabitants of Long Sait, these people had not been settled long; they still hankered after the migratory hunter-gatherer past, and so were not, as yet, much inclined to the futility of rice and fruit farming… The kids divebombed one another in the river, or hopped along the exposed rocks with enviable surefootedness to plunge, legs all over the place, into the scudding foam after bony mud-coloured fish. Toddlers, stripped down to their fake Fila shorts, played with their toys, a scruffy black hornbill and a traumatised whey-faced monkey. Other than the pastor and a young woman called Jenny, there were no adults in sight… At night, faces lit by candle-flames, the young were woodland beings out of an Arthur Rackham print, with their grace, small pointed breasts and luminous aquatic eyes. (Only daylight showed up the conjunctivitis, runny noses and erupting maculated skin.) They clustered round us, pixy fingers reaching for Mushroom Dave's candies.

These Penans seemed just as shy—or withdrawn or undemonstrative or meek—as the ones at Long Sait. The pastor complained that they were too conservative, too passive, to turn their settlements into the sort of thriving commercial concerns the Kelabits and Kenyahs had produced. They simply existed as they had always existed, grating sago and tapioca, shredding swamp spinach and edible ferns, wiping baby shit off on the notched entry poles. They didn't often have meat, as the wild life moved elsewhere with the season, and no one wanted to herd pigs. Malaria, scabies and dysentery were endemic.

A Westerner, used to the ebullience and assertiveness of fast-fed Western kids, is suspicious of silence and passivity; he associates it with some indistinct but inherent pathology of repression and guilt. Dave said poor diet and mosquitoes had sapped the Penans of the energy to smile and yell. I said that they had been worn down by Bibles and milky tea.

My colonial forbears also had the Penans, and a hoste of other forms of life, pegged as shy. In fact, they applied the word with a sort of even-handed generosity to whatever took their fancy as childlike or instinctual in behaviour, idiots, deer and women, as well as the shrinking violets in the villages; the term covered all that was unable (rather than unwilling) to talk or fight back. But today, bludgeoned by a remorseless ethics of contingency and self-vigilance, we like to construct less sweeping, less masculine, less Anglo-Saxon aetiologies of affect. Following the postmodernist obsession with subjectivised realities (in the plural), as produced by a painfully introspective linguistics, we locate these not in the persons observed but in the one doing the observing—which, after how many turns and swivels and slides, turns out to be, goodness gracious me, oneself.

One might say (of the colonialist mentality) that to call someone shy was not an innocent or harmless act but a form of violence, a sort of gentle violence of the letter, designed to highlight the speaker's boldness or assertiveness (and hence, coextensively, his superiority, his historical preferment) and, by the same token, to keep everyone else in their place or—forgive the pun—to tenderise them for civilisational cannibalism… The 'shyness' might have been real, but—and here I must attempt empathy—real only in the physical sense of an expression of fear or insecurity before the rifle-wielding (or camera-wielding) foreigner. What would you feel growing up in a world where strange men with beards came and went, displaying shamanistic powers with glass and powder, and mastery over the skies?

Children are shy because they haven't acquired the condescension, physical strength and technical accomplishments of adults. Women are shy because they're supposed to be. Wild creatures are shy because they don't want to be eaten.

Technology, especially the kind that can do magic (finishing off or reproducing someone invisibly), has a way of terrifying and then captivating the unwary… To the unprejudiced, technology is only so much smoke and mirrors. Hey presto! Fire leaps the gap, the shadows resolve into an image, a man on a ridge folds under a ghostly punch, the inert blue child turns pink and vocal… But when one's neighbours settle down to agriculture and commerce, taking up the arts of taikwondo and disco, one's terror soon changes into awe and worship. The White Man enters history on the back of religious dread.

So it was for Mushroom Dave and I, when by candlelight we taught the children of Long Krong the wonders of pelmonism and snap.