As I approached the shore the glamor lent by distance disappeared. The river-bank, which had looked so alluring from the cutter's deck, proved on closer inspection to be as squalid as the back-yard of a Neapolitan tenement. It was littered with dead cats and fowls and fish and castaway vegetables and rotten fruit and tin cans and greasy ashes and refuse from fishing nets and decaying cocoanuts by the million and sodden rags. This stewing garbage was strewn ankle-deep upon the sand or was floating on the surface of the river, not drifting seaward, as one would expect, but languidly following the tide up and down, forever lolling along the bank. Above this putrefying feast swarmed myriads of flies, their buzzing combining in a drone like that of an electric fan. The sun struck viciously down upon the yellow foreshore, its glare reflected by the hard-packed sands as by a sheet of brass; the heat-waves danced and flickered. Sending the launch back to the cutter, I picked my way across this noisome place to the shelter of the trees along the road. But the shade that had appeared so inviting from the river proved as illusory as everything else. Grass? There was none. The earth was baked to the hardness of asphalt.
To make matters worse, I found that I had landed too far down the beach. The building that I had assumed was the Residency proved to be the Custom House. The Harbor Master, whom I encountered there, seized the opportunity to present me with a bill for a hundred guilders--something over forty dollars--for port dues. It seemed a high price to pay for the privilege of lying in the stream, a quarter-mile off-shore. In all the Dutch ports at which we touched I noted this same disposition on the part of the authorities to charge all that the traffic would bear--and then some. Foreign vessels are rarely seen at Samarinda, and one would suppose that they would be welcomed accordingly, but the Dutch are a business people and do not permit sentiment to interfere with a chance to make a few honest guilders.
The Residency, I found upon inquiry, was two miles away, in the outskirts of the town. And, as there are neither rickshaws nor carriages for hire in Samarinda, I was compelled to walk. It was really too hot to move. In five minutes my clothes were as wet as though I had fallen in the river. The green silk lining of my sun-hat crocked and ran down my face in emerald rivulets. When I had covered half the distance I paused beneath a waringin tree to rest. A breath of breeze from the river, sighing through the palms, brought to my streaming cheeks a hint of coolness and to my nostrils more than a hint of the garbage broiling on the beach. Anyone who could be romantic in Borneo _must_ be in love.