The afterwards flourishing Sambir was born in a swamp and passed its youth in malodorous mud.
The houses crowded the bank, and, as if to get away from the unhealthy shore, stepped boldly into the river, shooting over it in a close row of bamboo platforms elevated on high piles, amongst which the current below spoke in a soft and unceasing plaint of murmuring eddies.

There was only one path in the whole town and it ran at the back of the houses along the succession of blackened circular patches that marked the place of the household fires.

On the other side the virgin forest bordered the path, coming close to it, as if to provoke impudently any passer-by to the solution of the gloomy problem of its depths.

Nobody would accept the deceptive challenge.

There were only a few feeble attempts at a clearing here and there, but the ground was low and the river, retiring after its yearly floods, left on each a gradually diminishing mudhole, where the imported buffaloes of the Bugis settlers wallowed happily during the heat of the day.