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he said abruptly.
    Rather a cheeky sort, MacAlister thought. Well, he’ll get all that beaten out of him. He had watched them withdraw and grow cruel and cynical by the month, once they realized the unthinkable situation.
    “A bit of advice from an old Borneo hand. Don’t try to change things here. The people down the river will thwart you on every turn. They’re only just a generation or two removed from being head-hunters and cannibals. Life is hard enough here, so take it easy on yourself. Enjoy our meager comforts. After all, you’ve brought a woman and child to this place.”
    “Thank you,” Adam said, not really thanking the man at all.
    Stinking Sarawak. Hidden from humanity in a corner of Borneo. It was peopled by a conglomerate of Malayans who were the Moslems and there were Kayans and the tribes of Land Dayaks and the Ibans, who were the Sea Dayaks, and, of course, the omnipresent Chinese, the shopkeepers of the Orient.
    Its modern history came about a bit over a century ago when trade over the China Sea between the British colony of Singapore and the Sultanate of Brunei on Borneo increased to such an extent that it became a prime target of pirates.
    The Sultan of Brunei was not only raided by the pirates but constantly plagued by uprisings within his own kingdom. Law and order arrived in the person of James Brooke, a swashbuckling English soldier of fortune. Brooke stamped out the rebellions and sent the pirates packing. As a reward, the grateful Sultan ceded to him the province of Sarawak and James Brooke became the first of the fabled “white rajahs.”
    Brooke ruled his domain as a benevolent autocrat. It was a steamy little state, with but a few miles of dirt roads. Its highways were the rivers which poured down from the hilly thick forests into the deltas of the South China Sea. It was a land blanketed in tropical foliage, inundated by two hundred inches of rain a year, and co-inhabited by crocodiles, rats, snakes, bats, and wild pigs. Its natives were beleaguered and decimated by leprosy, elephantiasis, worms, cholera, smallpox, dropsy.
    Oppression was their lot. With pitiful little farm land, their meager crops were under constant attack by pirates and neighbors or taken by taxation.
    They made war on each other and went into battle resplendent in feathered dress, and the head of the vanquished hung in the home of the victor. Those who were not murdered were sold into the slave markets.
    Over a period of time, James Brooke and his nephew, who succeeded him as rajah, established some form of order so that one merely had to concern himself with the task of survival against the land.
    The third and final white rajah, Sir Charles Vyner Brooke, ended the hundred and five year reign of his family after the Second World War. During the war the Japanese occupied Sarawak for its oil fields at Miri and when the war ended, Brooke ceded the state to the British crown and Sarawak along with Brunei and North Borneo became crown colonies.
    Sir Edgar Bates, the first governor of Sarawak, was to take over a state that had grown to fifty thousand square miles and held a half million people. Most of these were the Ibans or Sea Dayaks, the former head-hunters of uncertain origin. Some say they were seagoing Mongols.
    Sir Edgar, from the upper middle civil servants, did his best toward education and eventual self-rule. But all of those things passed over in the time of the white rajahs had taken its toll. The new Sarawak-Orient Company explored for oil and minerals and attempted to exploit the unending forest. Yet, progress was measured as the snail crosses the land and bogged in a quagmire of ancient pagan taboos.
    When Adam Kelno arrived in 1949, he became the thirtieth doctor in Sarawak. There were five hospitals. This was the facility for a half million persons.
    He was assigned to Fort Bobang in the Second Division of Sarawak, in the land of the Ibans, the tattooed head-hunters of Borneo.

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    A DAM K ELNO’S BOATMEN