Borneo’s White Mountain
Photographs by Stephen Alvarez
Text by Donovan Webster
"It rises like a dagger above one of the oldest rain forests on Earth, a peak of pale limestone cloaked by vine-throttled trees. Called Gunung Buda—White Mountain—the 3,161-foot formation deep in the jungles of Borneo holds a secret within. Rainwater has been trickling through the rock for eons, dissolving the peak’s interior into sprawling systems of voluptuous grottoes and uncharted pits. And somewhere in one of these caverns, breathing air reeking of bat guano, coated in slick mud, I sit alone and lost."
Webster accompanied a team of scientists (one of whom found him) to Borneo on a mission: To help save Gunung Buda from the chain saw and jackhammer. With much of Malaysia’s old-growth forests logged and the mountain surrounded by logging and mining concerns, government officials want to protect what remains, but they need an inventory of the area’s treasures. So entomologists will collect all freakish manner of insects. Biologists will catalog everything from cave-dwelling spiders to albino crabs. Hydrologists will introduce non-toxic dyes into the subterranean rivers to study the routes water travels through Buda. Archaeologists will document sites of human habitation. And they will, they must, record it all fast.
NGM 1998/09