We have said the banks, but in truth the mouth of that river had no distinguishable banks at all, for it is the nature of the mangrove to grow in the water--using its roots as legs with which, as it were, to wade away from shore.

When darkness fell suddenly on the landscape, as it is prone to do in tropical regions, the gnarled roots of those mangroves assumed the appearance of twining snakes in Nigel's eyes.

Possessing a strongly imaginative mind he could with difficulty resist the belief that he saw them moving slimily about in the black water, and, in the dim mysterious light, tree stems and other objects assumed the appearance of hideous living forms, so that he was enabled to indulge the uncomfortable fancy that they were traversing some terrestrial Styx into one of Dante's regions of horror.
In some respects this was not altogether a fancy, for they were unwittingly drawing near to a band of human beings whose purposes, if fully carried out, would render the earth little better than a hell to many of their countrymen.
It is pretty well known that there is a class of men in Borneo called Head Hunters.

These men hold the extraordinary and gruesome opinion that a youth has not attained to respectable manhood until he has taken the life of some human being.
There are two distinct classes of Dyaks--those who inhabit the hills and those who dwell on the sea-coast.

It is the latter who recruit the ranks of the pirates of those eastern seas, and it was to the camp of a band of such villains that our adventurers were, as already said, unwittingly drawing near.
They came upon them at a bend of the dark river beyond which point the mangroves gave place to other trees--but what sort of trees they were it was scarcely light enough to make out very distinctly, except in the case of the particular tree in front of which the Dyaks were encamped, the roots of which were strongly illuminated by their camp fire.