material without a vast amount of labour--palms and other
substitutes requiring much cutting and smoothing, and not being
equally good when finished. When, however, a flat, close floor is
required, excellent boards are made by splitting open large
Bamboos on one side only, and flattening them out so as to form
slabs eighteen inches wide and six feet long, with which some
Dyaks floor their houses. These with constant rubbing of the feet
and the smoke of years become dark and polished, like walnut or
old oak, so that their real material can hardly be recognised.
What labour is here saved to a savage whose only tools are an axe
and a knife, and who, if he wants boards, must hew them out of
the solid trunk of a tree, and must give days and weeks of labour
to obtain a surface as smooth and beautiful as the Bamboo thus
treated affords him. Again, if a temporary house is wanted,
either by the native in his plantation or by the traveller in the
forest, nothing is so convenient as the Bamboo, with which a
house can be constructed with a quarter of the labour and time
than if other materials are used.

As I have already mentioned, the Hill Dyaks in the interior of
Sarawak make paths for long distances from village to village and
to their cultivated grounds, in the course of which they have to
cross many gullies and ravines, and even rivers; or sometimes, to
avoid a long circuit, to carry the path along the face of a
precipice. In all these cases the bridges they construct are of
Bamboo, and so admirably adapted is the material for this
purpose, that it seems doubtful whether they ever would have
attempted such works if they had not possessed it. The Dyak
bridge is simple but well designed. It consists merely of stout
Bamboos crossing each other at the road-way like the letter X,