Page 224 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

202 OUR VANISHING WILD LIFE
region. And ever-extending roads for the increasing motor cars are widening the cleared zone, mile after mile to the north and south.
In this region, as we pushed on over the mountains into the wilderness of Pahang, we saw little of the actual destruction of the primeval native growth, but elsewhere it became a common sight. Once, for many days we studied the wonderful life of a jungle which stretched up to our very camp. Troops of rollicking wa-was or gibbons frequented the forest;
squirrels, tupaias, birds and insects in myriads were everywhere during the day. Great fruit-bats, flying lemurs, owls and other nocturnal creatures made the evenings and nights full of interest.
And then, one day without warning came the sound of an ax, and another and another. From that moment the songs, cries, chirps and roars of the jungle were seldom heard from our camp. Every day saw new phalanxes of splendid primeval trees fallen, or half suspended in their rigging of lianas. The leaves withered, the flower petals fell and we heard no more the crackling of bamboos in the wind. Then the pitiful survivors of the destruction were brought to us; now a baby flying lemur, flung from its hole by the falling of some tree; young tupaias, nestling birds; a few out of the thousands of creatures from insects to mammals which were slain so that a Chinaman or Malay might eke a few dollars, four or five years hence, from a grove of rubber trees. Idonotsayitiswrong. Manhaswonout,andmightisright,assince the dawn of creation; but to the onlooker, to the lover of nature and the animal world it is a terrible, a hopeless thing.
One cannot at present leave the tourist line of travel in the East without at once encountering evidence of the wholesale direct slaughter of wild life, or its no less certain extermination by the elimination of the haunts and the food plants of the various beasts and birds.