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Updated: May 16, 2025
After crossing a level plateau we once more found ourselves in a forest so dense that our men had to use their parangs again. The heat of the jungle was intense, and we suffered severely from the stings of a fly that is not unlike a cicada in shape. From the jungle we emerged into an immense stone field, padang-batu, the Malays called it.
The delicate maidenhair lay like a rich carpet beneath our feet, while hundreds of magnificent climbing pitcher-plants doused us with water as we knocked against them. Our sympiesometer showed us that we were twenty-eight hundred feet above the sea. Beyond the padang-batu we entered a forest of almost Alpine character, dwarfed and stunted.
We then had a level plateau or shoulder to cross, after which the ascent was steeper and the forest denser until we came out upon the "Padang-batu," or stone field, a place of which we had heard much, but could never get anyone to describe intelligibly. We found it to be a steep slope of even rock, extending along the mountain side farther than we could see.
Our porters had followed us after a rest, bringing only their rice to cook, and luckily we did not require the baggage they left behind them. In the morning I caught a few butterflies and beetles, and my friend got a few land-shells; and we then descended, bringing with us some specimens of the ferns and pitcher-plants of Padang-batu.
The morning sun brought us to our feet long before it was light in the vast spaces beneath our eyes. The jungle held its reddening rays for a moment; they flamed along the course of a half-hidden river; we stood out clear and distinct in their glorious effulgence, and then the broken, denuded crags and ragged ravines of the padang-batu absorbed them in its black fastnesses.
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