The old men with the tattoos sat in a rain shed above the river, with one eye watching the occasional traffic on the dusty street, and with the other the cluster of canoes at the landing stage below. Tiny Iban women, their earlobes distended almost down to their shoulders, sat on rattan cargo baskets at their feet. To the south, a wall of darkness from the tail end of the monsoon hung above the jungle's horizon. A rainbow flashed, and then was gone. The heat was stifling, overwhelming....

The old men sat there loosely, relaxed and not smiling. Some of them were simply dressed in shorts, and across their torsos played a panoply of tattoos; sunflowers, stars, bizarre tribal arabesques, and on their throat, an unimaginable little tattoo that meant they had taken a head. One old man swiveled around and goggle-eyed me, the dreaded black tattoo like a brand on his adam's apple consuming my entire attention. I turned away, ashamed. How could it be? I thought headhunting died out in the early 20th century. Either these guys were somewhat older then they looked or else they had been getting in a little action on the side. Either way, it was plain there was alot I didn't know about Borneo.

We had come to Malaysia on a whim, and a cheap flight from Penang to Kuching had quickly brought us to Sarawak. A bus ride later and we were on an express boat ascending the Rejung River for the frontier town that bills itself as "the gateway to the heart of Borneo," Kapit.

And what an ironic gateway it was! Dozens of large timber freighters with names like the Transveener Pearl or the Mineral Harvester fought for space along the impossibly crowded waterfront with express boats from Sibu and hordes of local canoes. The center of attention, the Battang Rejung, a half a mile wide and muddy from the erosion of a thousand lumber camps, rushed down from the mountains of the interior. It felt like Dawson Creek in the 1890's. Except here the gold had been replaced with timber. But just like Dawson Creek the wealth here was flowing downstream as fast as it could go.

Later, after the old men had come and gone, Rumpang sat down beside me.

At first sight, it would be hard to find anyone as un-Iban as he. His pants were freshly pressed, while his salmon-colored button-down shirt bore none of the enormous sweat stains that characterized everyone else in this little frontier town. Yet his brown smiling face said that he was all Iban. We chatted briefly. Then when he offered to take us to his longhouse - some three hours upstream on a tributary of the Rejung - at a fee to be discussed later - we jumped at it.

Perhaps we should have looked a little closer before we leapt, yet our time in Sarawak was extremely limited and so too, ultimately, were our choices.

We met Rumpang the following morning on the waterfront. He had lined up his brother's longboat and a 30 horse Honda outboard; but fuel was expensive and we still needed food, so perhaps we should just give him 700 ringgits now?

That was like a gut-check; we didn't even have that much cash on us. The bank turned out to be a further adventure, with back country chinese tellers holding up our travelers check to the light as if it was a mysterious cypher from outer space.

It wasn't until the early afternoon before we finally left Kapit, and by then the heat was heavy on the waterfront. We drifted down to the fuel barge to take on 15 gallons of gas, then we were off, cruising upstream past giant gravel barges, plywood factories and lumber camps. Finally - and why not - we sighted Sarawaks pride and joy... the loading dock for Borneo's only open pit mine!

Fortunately Sarawak hasn't always been this way. When James Brooke appeared off Borneo's shores in his armed yacht The Royalist in 1834 Borneao was a pristine tropical wilderness with a smattering of Malay kampungs along the South China Sea. Vexed by marine piracy, the Sultan of Bunei offered Brooke a portion of his kingdom in return for ridding the Sultanate of this sea-borne scourge. When Brooke succeeded, he became the first "White Raja".

It was an unlikely rule, yet today it is considered by many to be the golden age of Borneo.

Complicating Brookes' rule was the continuous migration of a sizable group of indigenous peoples from Kalimantan into northern Borneo. The Iban today are considered the prototypical headhunter. Walking for five days, then camping for two years, then walking again, they slowly came into conflict with more established groups in Sarawak. The Iban drove all the weaker tribes before them, attacking resident longhouses and slaying those who resisted. Headhunting eventually became a cultural activity, a cult of masculinity, a reason d'etre for any young man wishing to prove himself and add to the harvest of souls hanging in the rafters of the longhouse. By Brookes' time headhunting groups criss-crossed Sarawak, driving some tribes into extinction while playing havoc with any concept of trade or of an orderly society. All walks of life were affected. It was left to James Brookes' successor, Charles Brooke to forge peace between the warring groups. Fifteen years later the Japanese invaded and a new horror began.

The end of the war and the integration of Borneo as Sarawak into the Federation of Malayasia brought about a new era. Sadly, this era has been characterized by resource exploitation at the hands of the Sarawakan government, aka the Sarawak Forestry Corp. Today this exploitation continues unabated.

An hour out of Kapit we left the Rejung and entered the Baleh, a tributary descending from the mountains to the south. Both rivers are immense, more than a kilometer wide, and drain vast swaths of the interior. Rumpang waved his arm at a small church high on a bluff above the river. He had spent his childhood here at boarding school, the ward of an African-American missionary from Des Moines. Like most Christians in Sarawak he was a Methodist. We turned again, and finally entered the Mujong.

Gradually the devastation eased. The river flowed pure and clean and trees arced over the water like the upraised fingers of a hand. The whirr of cicadas swelled and we raced into a world of shadow and light.

The river became shallower and soon we were fighting our way upstream through rapids. Sometimes we would shoot up a flume like a salmon going home to spawn, other times we sped in a back-eddy along the shore, ducking as epiphytes and vines swept above our heads. It was delightful. Then, as the light began to dim a longhouse loomed on a bluff above yet another set of rapids; Rumpang swerved the canoe towards shore, cut the engine, and we were there.

A visit to a foreign country, especially if you dont speak the language, is somewhat comparable to a blind man making his way down a foreign street without a cane. He can tap something with his foot to try and surmise what it is, but in the end its all just guess work. Of course one could say that life itself is no different. But in a foreign country all the usual clues - verbal, cultural - are missing. Its hard not to look like an idiot.

Our time in Rumpang's longhouse, Rumah Liok, was like that. We climbed up the mud bank from the river in the gathering twilight and immediately encountered a group of bare breasted women sitting on a mat and culling through a large pile of nuts. Yasha asked, "Is it ok to take a picture?" and Rumpang quickly replied, "Sure, no problem!" But the look the women gave us said that it was a problem... a big problem. Yasha and I quickly moved off, confused.

We were never able to reconcile the inconsistancies in the behavior of Rumah Liok's inhabitants. Some people were friendly, some weren't, and some were merely neutral. And what about Rumpang? Perhaps he was the real problem. Perhaps there were resentments between him and all the neighbors that he had left behind. Our presence there, uninvited by the longhouse itself, may have just been the final straw. We were like a pair of sightless pilgrams tapping our way down a darkened street.

Essentially a longhouse is a single family dwelling divided up into individual apartments. A covered verandah is a common meeting ground, workplace, and cultural center. In the old days, all longhouses were elevated as protection from raiding headhunters. Today many of them, like Rumah Liok, were constructed in the 1950's. The verandah, as well as the longhouse itself, sat on the ground on a concrete base. Some modern longhouses are entirely built of concrete and look like some sort of bizarre old age home. Some are so long that the express boat has to make two stops to drop off passengers.

While musing over our rejection by the bare breasted women Rumpang called us to dinner. We had heard before how the Iban liked fat, pig fat, and how a feast is primarily composed of what is for us uneatable portions of the wild boar. So I shouldn't have been shocked by the cubes of white pork fat fried in oil, nor the bony fish fried in oil, nor the tapioca leaves fried in ? I wasn't shocked, really, just a bit concerned. Rumpang had told us that after eating we would be drinking, and I knew that what went down greasy could come back up just as easily. And Rumpang was right; after dinner we retired to the verandah to drink...

We sat in a circle of men with the head man, Tioh Liok, in the middle. Multiple tattoos, sunflowers, stars, eagles, rippled across his shrunken chest. With a flourish he ripped the metal cap off the first bottle of arrack with his teeth. I winced. He poured himself a full glass of the evil smelling stuff and drained it in one gulp. Pouring another he handed the glass to me and said "One go! One go!" Rumpang commented, "He means you should drink it all at once, just like him.!" But I already knew what he meant. He meant I was in big trouble.

Sometime later I found myself staggering through a rice field on the edge of the longhouse. A half moon floated distantly overhead. I was beyond drunk, and before long I sunk helplessly to my knees and vomited. Then the dogs who had been following me gathered around, seeking the pork chunks. "Oh" I thought as I settled to the ground, "It doesn't get worse then this!"

Needless to say, it does.

I was woken early by loud and sarcastic cries of "One go! One go!" Fortunately the humiliation was muted by the pounding in my head. We immediately set off downstream through a landscape of mist and quietude. I hung on as best I could until a barking deer, trying to swim the river, attracted our attention. Rumpang and his sister drew their knives; turning the longboat into the current they took up the chase. To the deer this was like a death sentence. Crying out with a strangely human voice of fear and horror it floundered at the water's edge. In my befuddled state it reminded me of all that was wrong with this place, and with me too for that matter. For a long moment it scrambled on the bank. Then, as we came up on it, it fled to the safety of the forest. I almost wept with relief.

By noon the sun had burned away the mist and we had turned into an even smaller tributary of the Mujong, the Pakuh. Shallow water flowed beneath giant trees that buttressed the stream bank. These were 'enkabang' trees, the elephant nut tree, a giant of the forest. Flowering only occasionally, and then in unison, they produced a nut as large as a hens egg. With its fluted wings the entire nut was over six inches long; for days we had seen them riding the currents of the Mujung. In the eddies they collected like cord wood. In turn, the Iban collected them. Dried and packaged in 100kg bags they fetched 2.50 ringgit per kg and were, at times, a major component of the Iban's economy. Tethering the canoe to the bank we went in search of the elephant nut.

I really cant remember a day that started out so miserable ending as enjoyable as this. The forest, an incrediable mixture of hardwoods and softwoods, seemed to extend forever. Here and there we stopped to climb a tree and harvest 'monkey apples', or while eating them getting down to examine a giant centipede, armored with black shoulder plates like a samuri of old, slowly clambering through decaying leaves. Everything spoke of great age, and in turn of mutual dependence. It was plain that we all had a common ancestor, and that it was this common parentage of DNA that allowed us to sample the fruit without harm, or to utilize the bark of the Bintangor tree for its anti-AIDS properties. By the late afternoon we had several rattan baskets full of elephant nuts and had experienced the jungle, not as a commodity, but as an organic whole. Strangely, I also felt relatively happy and sober. We untethered the canoe, now heavy with elephant nuts, and pushed it out of the shallows. Slipping through sunlight and shadow we began polling downstream.