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Updated: June 3, 2025
The gangway was hoisted, Captain Galvez gave brisk orders from the bridge, there was a jangle of bells in the engine-room, and we were off up the Koetei, into the mysterious heart of Borneo. Above Samarinda the great river flows between solid walls of vegetation. The density of the Bornean jungle is indeed almost unbelievable.
The Koetei, which has its nativity somewhere in the mysterious Kapuas Mountains, winds its way across four hundred miles of unmapped wilderness, and, a score of miles below Samarinda, empties into Makassar Straits, answered my requirements admirably, providing a highroad to the country of my boyish dreams.
Noticing that I was interested in the equipment of the Dyaks, the Regent of Koetei called up their chief and, without so much as a by-your-leave, presented me with his sumpitan and the quiver of poisoned darts, his wooden shield a long, narrow buckler of some light wood, tastily trimmed with seventy-two tufts of human hair, mementoes of that number of enemies slain on head-hunting expeditions a peculiar coat of mail, composed of overlapping pieces of bark, capable of turning an arrow, and his imposing head-dress, which consisted of a cap formed from a leopard's head, with a sort of visor made from the beak of a hornbill, the whole surmounted by a bunch of yard-long tail-feathers from some bright-plumaged bird.
The palace of the Sultan of Koetei stands in the edge of the jungle at a horseshoe bend in the river. You come on it with startling abruptness miles and miles of primeval wilderness and then, quite unexpectedly, a bit of civilization. In no respect does its exterior come up to what you would expect the palace of an Oriental ruler to be.
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