THE
MAGIC OF MALAYA
BY
CUTHBERT WOODVILLE HARRISON
LONDON JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXVI
|£fWATtUN
Y ADDED
3HNAL TO BE
MNED
4 1994
Printed by Morrison & Gibb Limitbu, Edinburgh
TO
MY WIFE
51'
V7
Some of these stories have appeared in the
Straits Times and in the Malay . Mail, and to
these newspapers the author is indebted for
permission to reproduce them here.
VII
CONTENTS
PACE
I. Pawang Hklai ..... I
II. The Place of Death . . -47
III. Romance is Dead . . .50
IV. The Hallucinations of Mat Palembang 57
V. Without Benefit . . . .67
VI. The Room of the Captain . . -75
VII. Ah Heng . . . . .88
VIII. The Sinking of the Schooner . 109
IX. Exceedingly Venomous . . .115
X. The Malay Servant . . .121
XI. The Bullock-Cart Driver . . .127
XII. The Shoal of the Skull . . .135
XIII. Malacca . . .143
XIV. A Beri-Beri Hospital . . .165
XV. On the Path . . .174
XVI. The Accident . . . . .207
XVII. The Tin-Stealers .... 217
Glossary ...... 239
THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
PA WANG HELAI
THOSE who are familiar with the bland
pervasiveness of the Chinese in the
Malay Peninsula will find nothing
strange in the existence of Li Wang. He was a
Chinese exactly like other Chinese. If you had
seen him in a town you had not remarked him ;
had you seen him on a lalang plain you had
seen nothing in him ; if you had seen him cutting
up timber in a jungle you had been conscious
that there was a Chinese cutting up timber in
the jungle and that was the end of it. Nothing
remarkable about him — nothing of which to take
hold, nothing to make you say," Hullo, there is
Li Wang." No, when you saw him you said,
" There is a Chinaman." Pervasive merely,
2 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
not pushing ; present, not obvious ; here, but
just as well anywhere else, he was, and his type
still is, just Li Wang. Every one accepted him
as one of the facts of life, one of the things that
one takes for granted, on a par with any other
phenomenon one meets in Malaya. Nothing
in his life made him remarkable except his
leaving it, for when he left it a gap arrived,
which was singular enough, if one considers
what an unregarded thing he was. For no one
regarded Li Wang at any time. He came and
went, whence or whither no one knew. Suppose
him asked, " Whence come you? " he answered,
" From the river," and suppose him asked,
" Whither go you ? " he replied, " To the river."
On the river itself, the same questions had been
answered, " From over there " and " To over
there," or perhaps " From upstream" and " To
downstream." But that was all. A silent,
secretive, self-sufficient personality, all he wanted
was to be left alone. On the Sungei Suang he
got just that. Upstream and downstream he
went alone, all by himself in his boat, without
kith or kin, without wife, or friend, or child,
simply Li Wang, the pedlar, a man magnificently
PAWANG HELAI 3
without imagination, trading, buying, selling,
leading a harmless life which no one envied him,
or sought to take from him.
But even Li Wang could not be always in his
boat on the Sungei Suang, and so it was his
custom to come at uncertain intervals to Kuala
Suang. He did not seek Kuala Suang for rest
and change or for amusement, but merely for
business, and probably his times and seasons
were regulated by complete irregularity, for he
was never expected at any particular time or
after any particular lapse of time. He came
when his boat was full of bark or cloth of bark,
of tuba root, of honey, of gutta, of rattan, of
wood-oil, of damar and damar matakuching,
of deer horns and skins, of all the strange things
which for ages and ages have left this quiet
middle of the world and gone East and West,
masquerading under alien titles such as dragon's
blood, cajeput oil and the like. For years his
name had appeared on the books of the revenue
officials as a trader in the comprehensive line of
" jungle produce " ; for years he had produced
annually last year's receipts and received in
exchange this year's receipts for revenue paid,
4 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
and with them the annual licence for trading.
But so infrequent were his visits, so little did
Kuala Suang mark them, that had he ceased
to make them, no one would have noticed except
Ah Tai, who was a shopkeeper of Kuala Suang.
The only reason why Ah Tai would have noticed
a continued absence was that Li Wang, whose
commercial instinct was as strongly developed
as it is in most Chinese, always left Kuala Suang
in debt to Ah Tai. Nothing much of course in
debt, but still just enough to keep his memory
green in Ah Tai's books and to leave a balance
in those books against his name. Whenever
Ah Tai happened to turn Li Wang's page, he
noted the adverse balance as a good debt, for it
had been a good debt for so long. Bad debts a
many, good debts a few, was Ah Tai's experience,
and as Li Wang sold his jungle produce to Ah
Tai at sufficiently profitable rates for the latter,
Ah Tai was content to have a little money out.
But he never knew what Li Wang did with the
profits of his trading. He would have gladly
acted as banker, but Li Wang apparently had
his own bank and did not trouble Ah Tai to keep
his money for him. What he made on sale of
PAWANG HELAI 5
the jungle produce he kept and took away
with him in his boat when he left Kuala Suang.
What he did with it afterwards no one knew.
Li Wang's customers were the aboriginal
jungle tribes, and his stock in trade was such as
appeals to the primitive all over the world. It
consisted of everything that was shoddy, glittery,
warranted useless to any civilised person. His
mirrors — and a savage loves a mirror — were little
squares of bad glass, badly silvered, badly framed
in bad tinfoil, badly beaded, and badly tacked
on to a wooden back with a white metal hinge
which carried away on use. But a Sakai bride
could see her face in them, and perhaps they
lasted as long as her beauty, for after all beauty
does not last any length of time in the jungle.
So Li Wang always carried a strong line in
mirrors. He also kept a stock of biscuits. Of
all the horrible products of a vaunted civilisation
perhaps the forged and fraudulent biscuit is the
most horrible. Packed in an inferior tin, with
a label bearing a far-off and colourable appear-
ance of something familiar, the biscuit you find
in out-of-the-way little Chinese shops in jungly
districts, on sale to the primitives of the neigh-
6 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
bourhood as a rare luxury, is sodden to the
taste, dull to the eye, provocative of thirst and
altogether abominable. But it is most emphati-
cally not " jungle produce," so in the jungle it
can be sold. Li Wang sold it. A pedlar in
other climes would have sold sweets of plaster
of Paris and poison, but Li Wang sold none such.
He did not sell them, not because of the possible
ill-effects of the plaster of Paris or the poison,
but because the children of the primitives are
not very fond of sweets. The strong, piquant,
poignant quality of the spices or vegetables in
which their food is cooked seems to unfit the
palate for sweets. But he sold other things
which took the place of sweets, such as dried
chillies, salt, little dry onions, salted and rotten
eggs, and dried herbs of various unnamed kinds.
Tobacco also he sold, the kind that is called
Javanese in the trade returns, and matches to
light the tobacco withal. Cigarettes he sold
as well, in paper packets with alluring strange
designs upon them. Why, the paper alone
was worth the money to a primitive, or worth
the gutta, or the rattan, or the various kinds of
jungle produce which were exchanged for the
PAWANG HELAI 7
cigarette packets. Occasionally he succeeded
in selling a violin, that the savage might soothe
his breast, or an accordion which may have
produced the same effect. The settled melan-
choly of the strains which for untold generations
have been known to the Sakai, but never noted
down, might at times be heard proceeding from
a fiddle or an accordion on which Li Wang
had made a profit. Iron things also he sold,
such as parangs (the cutting wood-knife of
Malaya) which cut, and knives which did not.
Sometimes he sold an enamelled iron pot or
saucepan, or teacup, or tumbler, for enamelled
iron finds its way all over the world, and even
when the enamel rusts off the primitive will
value it.
Li Wang had a regular beat on the river. He
left Kuala Suang and paddled or poled upstream,
stopping wherever he thought he could do a trade
or whenever he was hailed from the bank. He
moved during the day, indifferently affronting
the blaze of sunlight or the lash of rain, with the
result that the colour of his skin had become red,
of the bronze Redskin colour, quite different
from the faded ivory colour of the true Celestial.
8 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
The skin on the palms of his hands, from con-
tinually gripping a paddle or a pole, and the
surface of his fingers, from the same cause, had
smoothened and was without wrinkles except at
the joints of the fingers and across the palm where
the large creases lie. His eyes grew a peering-
ahead look from continually searching for sand-
banks, logs, eddies and obstacles generally. He
was a handy man at rapids, and perhaps even
the vaunted intelligence of the savage was hardly
superior to that of Li Wang when the shooting
of a rapid was in question. Civilised man, and
Li Wang came of a civilised race, will beat the
primitive at his own arts if he only lives long
enough to apply his intelligence. Li Wang had
survived many perils by water, and from each
he had learnt a little something, so that his sum
total of knowledge continually stood him in good
stead. His costume consisted of the conical hat
which the Chinese wears, apparently, all over
the world, suiting to the country in which he
may happen to be the material of which the hat
is composed. In Li Wang's case it was of plaited
fibre, and had originally had a Chinese character
or two on it in gold paint, of which faint traces
PAWANG HELAI 9
always remained visible. Also, he wore a pair
of Chinese cotton trousers, broad but not baggy,
short but not skimpy, long but not lengthy,
in short, Chinese trousers — which are Chinese
trousers everywhere and have a stamp of their own,
whoever wears them. A black cotton coat he
wore only when it rained, on which occasions it
soaked and clung to his body in wormy wrinkles,
so that it provided no protection whatever. The
figure he presented was, in fact, the typical
Chinese figure seen all over the Peninsula, and
more easily seen than adequately described, for
it is not easy to describe the commonplace. His
customers were the Sakai people who lived upon
the banks of the river, or lived up-country and
sought the river-bank occasionally, reaching it
either by some smaller stream or through the
jungle along those paths so easily threaded by
them, and so easily a snare to all others. Both
the upland and the river Sakai partly subsist on
fish, caught by the tuba poison method in
the deeper pools and backwaters. The flesh of
fish killed by this preparation of the tuba
root is not poisonous to those who eat it, but it
has been alleged that the foul skin diseases from
io THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
which the Sakai suffer are due to this food. They
are not cleanly people, and very many of Li
Wang's customers were covered with a silver,
scaly scurf, highly scratchable, and flaking off
from one to infect another, if there were others in
the tribe or camp or family yet unaffected. From
foul ulcers and spreading sores they suffered too,
especially the children and bigger boys and girls.
Altogether they were not a pleasant people from
the close personal contact point of view, but
they were simple-minded folk. Li Wang was
alone on his beat, so he had the field of trade to
himself. Their foulness did not worry him. He
might have said that their money at least was
clean had they had any, but money was the rarest
of commodities with them, all their trade being
by exchange and barter. He dealt with all of
them ; with the old men, who eked out their failing
powers and strength by stores of recollection as to
where to find the bees' nests, and how best to ex-
tract the honeycomb, or in what dark brake grew
the best cane for the manufacture of the blowpipe ;
with the women, trading the produce collected
in long expeditions by their menfolk who were
away when Li Wang passed up or down ; with
PAWANG HELAI n
the young men, who, by strength, agility and
skill killed the deer and stripped it of horns and
skin ; even with the small boys, who, no different
from the human boy in other parts of the world,
caught and tamed small wild animals, rats,
squirrels, monkeys, for all of which Li Wang
could find a market, if they did not die in his
hands. Possibly the womenfolk were his best
customers, for to them he sold at good prices the
gaudy cloths so desired of the improvident Sakai
belle, ignorant or careless as she is of the fact that
the cheap aniline dye of commerce is a delicate
tincture which does not stand ordinary washing,
let alone the unwashen wear accorded to it by
the Sakai. With all of them he traded, and with
all he kept the most elaborate accounts, for all
of them were always in his debt. Whether his
reckonings were really so elaborate as they ap-
peared to the wholly illiterate Sakai may be
doubted, but he was in the habit of referring to
blue-bound Chinese-paper books painted in each
page with fat, square-faced Chinese characters
very neatly disposed upon the paper. In case
of dispute he regarded these as incontestable
evidence, and as such he displayed them to the
12 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
Sakai. This habit and another habit were Li
Wang's only miscalculations. In the jungle, as
elsewhere, miscalculations may bring a man
to a fearful end.
Li Wang's other habit was his only recreation,
and it seems hard to say that he was a fool to
indulge in it. Yet it certainly led to his undoing.
He was accustomed, whenever he passed a certain
spot on the river, to moor his boat under a high
bank and take stock both of his goods and of his
fortune. He had chosen the spot with a foolish-
ness which did him no credit, for it was in the
immediate neighbourhood of one of the curious
salt-licks common enough in the Peninsula. To
this place, which was a spring of mineral hot
water rising a little way in from the river, the
game resorted to bathe or drink or eat the salted
earth, and it was from the game that proceeded
the strange noises Li Wang occasionally heard.
He would have been wiser to have chosen a sand-
bank in midstream on which to beach his boat,
or a sunken log to which to moor it, for there at
least he would have been protected by the water
from approach of prying eyes. But he had
chosen the river-bank in this place long ago, and
PA WANG HELAI 13
habit would not be denied. So it came about
that twice on his trip any one who crawled, in
chance pursuit of game or in evil design of robbery
and murder, along the top of the bank, could
have seen Li Wang going over his books, his
stock in trade and his money. Here was the
solution of his refusal to bank with Ah Tai, for
his boat was his bank. As he never left his boat
for any but the shortest of intervals, and as he
kept his money, in notes and a little silver perhaps,
concealed in the fabric of the boat itself, he felt
it more secure than it could be anywhere else.
Perhaps his long absences from the haunts of his
fellow-men had made him shy of trusting them.
But this hoarding habit and gloating practice
were Li Wang's undoing. One night as he sat
taking stock and casting up, the bright eyes of
Aremon the young Sakai, as he crouched through
the jungle with the peculiar bent-kneed creep
of the jungle tribes, fell upon Li Wang and a
lighted lamp in the boat beneath the bank. Turn-
ing silently, Aremon went back, and presently
reappeared accompanied by another pair of eyes,
not so bright perhaps, but gleaming with an evil
lustre and bearing a message to a brain sharper
14 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
far than that of the young Sakai. The second
pair of eyes were those of Pawang Helai, Helai
the Magician, and their presence announced a
turn in the luck of Li Wang. In the days of his
wealth, when all things were well with him, when
the return to China seemed to Li Wang quite
within the bounds of practical politics, the hand
of fate and the magic of Pawang Helai arose to
set themselves against him.
It is quite improbable that Li Wang's occupa-
tion presented any definite meaning to Aremon's
mind. All he saw was a Chinese whom he knew
well handling papers and a few silver coins. That
these papers were notes in the paper currency
meant nothing at all to him, and it is doubtful
whether he appreciated the value of the silver.
Aremon was the full type of the unspoiled Sakai,
a child of nature in a sense which is but poorly
explained by that hackneyed phrase. In person
he was most strikingly handsome, so excellent in
face and form that to meet him in the jungle was,
for the white man, a very distinct and palpable
shock. The jungle folk are sometimes of a goodly
countenance in early youth. Through maturity
and in age they assume a brutalised look, both
PA WANG HELAI 15
in face and frame. Their life is so hard that it
sears the face and warps the body. The hair,
never tended, grows matted and filthy, whilst in
some tribes the negroid, if it be negroid, element
crimps it and breaks the lustre which its length
should show. The face becomes flat, the jaw juts
forth, the lips slobber, the wings of the nose splay
out, the bridge of the nose falls inwards. The
body loses that upright carriage and lithe alert-
ness of youth, gaining instead a crouched and
creeping character. To see an old Sakai walking on
a flat road is to see a man out of place. He lifts
his legs as if he were still going delicately over
briers, logs, leaves and thorns. He carries his arms
hanging loosely from the shoulders, without the
elbow action common in those who are not
always slipping through jungle. The whole body
is lurched to a leant-forward poise, with the head
well in front. Aremon had not reached this
stage. His face was quite light in colour, with
smooth rounded cheeks and well-shaped mouth
and nose. His body was moulded with that
adolescent development of flesh and muscle which
is youth's heritage the world over. He went
upright, and though small in stature still was
16 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
perfectly formed. From his wide-spaced dark
eyes looked out a pleased wonderment which gave
to his countenance an engaging, because in-
genuous, look. Altogether he was a graceful
figure. Of his father, Helai the Magician, none of
all this could be said. He was of the brutalised
type, the far commoner type, and had all its
salient points repulsively exaggerated, for he was
old, as age goes in the jungle, and he was a wizard.
His long assumption of that character had given
him a subtle and crafty expression. Plain
savagery may be tolerable, but savagery en-
hanced by a very good opinion of one's occult
powers is not to be endured. An arrogant belief
in his own influence went hand in hand with
Pawang Helai's contempt for every one except
himself, and especially his contempt for civilised
beings. The old man had had dealings with the
various races in the Peninsula, knew something of
all of them, even of the white man, and had thrown
dust in the eyes of all. He had played on the
superstitious Malay. He had traded with Chinese
and cheated them, which is really no small
achievement ; had bargained for timber felling with
Tamil overseers and cheated them, which perhaps
PA WANG HELAI 17
is not so difficult ; had discussed boundary
questions with the white man and successfully
misled him. " Simple as tigers, innocent as
apes," was Pawang Helai's pet phrase when de-
scribing himself and the people he claimed to
represent. The picture squeness of it, the artless
jungle imagery of it, the primitive simile in it
had often served his deceitful purpose with the
white man. A horribly cunning old man was
Pawang Helai, adept in guile was he, with a long,
long memory and an intelligence keen in evil.
But he was strong-minded, and was still a Sakai
of the Sakais. He would at times indulge in
the taste of spirits and the savour of opium, but
he had quite enough sense to know that he must
always come back to his jungles and his jungle
folk, over whose lesser intelligences he held
sway.
These two then peered over the bank at Li
Wang in his boat below, Aremon listlessly, as
awaiting some order, Pawang Helai with his
brain at full stretch, marking, noting, plotting
out a design. About and around them all was
wrapped the clinging mantle of the chill jungle
night. There was no moon, there were no stars,
2
18 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
no faintest glimmer of light from any sky, but
above and below them on their bank, and along
the opposite bank, came and went the snapping
silver-point twinkles of the klip-klip, the
fire-flies, who light their little lamps as at a
signal, and as at a signal quench the gleam.
From the river rose that mysterious glint which
betrays water in the blackest night, and where
the ripple ran from the sides of Li Wang's boat
there rose, red and strange in contrast to the fire-
flies' cold glitter, the warm reflection of his lamp.
Without a sign, without a word, his tread making
no sound, his body not wakening the sleepy
rustle of a leaf, Pawang Helai turned and went,
followed, with a like stealth, by Aremon. They
faded into the jungle. The place that had held
them suddenly held them no longer, and they
were gone. Li Wang, his ciphering and his
counting over, lay down and composed himself
to sleep, for he had not seen himself as those
others had seen him.
As Aremon had faded from the dim scene, so
the scene itself faded from his mind. The stern
necessities of the jungle existence, the hard
realities of the savage life called aloud to him.
PA WANG HFXAI 19
In trapping and in hunting his mind moved.
Not so Pawang Helai. The magician, for whose
wants Aremon provided, allowed full scope to
his thoughts. In his miserable hut, built on
piles, a crazy prototype of Malay style, the
ground beneath it heaped almost half-way up
the posts with a foul litter of refuse, breeding
filthy swarms of buzzing flies, he sat, scratching
his silvery hide for inspiration. The savour of
a leg of monkey simmering in a pot on the fire
at the back roused him not. In his mind he
considered Li Wang, cursed Li Wang, coveted
Li Wang's goods. That he should owe to Li
Wang was a commonplace, for were not all the
Sakais in debt ? But that some of these foolish
ones should have taunted him with the China-
man's hold over him was a bitter thought. He
brooded for long, and, without taking any one
into his confidence, hatched a perfect plan,
thereafter arising and going about his usual
business as if his brain held no more specula-
tion than those of his neighbours of the tribe.
In company with Aremon he hunted, fished and
trapped, sought the products of the jungle and
traded them to Li Wang when that murdered
20 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
man passed upstream in his boat. When
Li Wang, after the lapse of many days, passed
down again in his boat, Pawang Helai and
Aremon were not in the hut, so Li Wang,
mercifully unconscious of his futility, made an
entry to the effect that Pawang Helai owed him
this and that article of barter and had not paid
the same. He then pursued his way downstream,
and after an uneventful passage brought up
again under the bank near the salt-lick as the
twilight died. All day long the thunder had
groaned in the distance, and some atmospheric
disturbance had given an intenser heat to the
sun, so that it blazed without any quality of
mercy throughout the afternoon. But when the
sun went down, the last restraint on the gathering
storm fell with it, and there burst upon the river
and the jungle one of those monstrous tempests
which are like the pressure of a vast hand, wide-
spread and heavy, beating, beating, beating
upon the unresisting leafy covering of a wide
extent of jungle. It was preluded by a hush,
in which all nature seemed to hump its shoulders
and shield its face. Nothing moved. Not the
lightest little air disturbed a leaf, and if one fell
PAWANG HELAI 21
it did not twirl as it might twirl at any other
time. All things waited for the storm. Upon
the hush followed a tiny breeze, a gentle, hesitat-
ing zephyr, so that the jungle looked about and
asked itself, " Can this small thing be the fore-
runner of the mighty storm ? " But upon the
tiny breeze followed a going which moved in the
tree-tops without impulse from a wind. The
banks of heavy foliage, swelling under the bands
of the creepers that would hold them, surged
like waves, heaved and swayed, strained and
panted above their trunks. Far off a hard sound
began to rise, and rapidly grew to the heavy
volume of noise made by streams of water pouring
from a height. The thunder, no longer groaning,
increased at once with rapid claps, and at the
moment when the darkness was most solid, a
crooked arrow of lightning tore the gloom aside,
raced across the heavens and hid itself again in
a rocking crash of thunder. The storm was
overhead and there it stayed. The rain no
longer fell pouring from the dark heavens ; it
hit the jungle with a fierce intent, each spear
of water darting to seek its mark upon some leaf
as if it had been deliberately aimed and shot
22 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
from above. The wind roared, howled, screamed
aloud in a passionate fury. The driving of the
water and the force of the air swung the trunks
of the trees to and fro, the bursting crashes of
the thunder set them trembling to their roots.
But this chastisement spent itself at last and
passed away in the distance, leaving behind a
milder visitation in a thick sheet of rain over
all the sky. Li Wang's kajang, covering the
stern of the boat and the crouching form of Li
Wang, had resisted the spears of the rain, for
they came down so hard upon it that they shot
off again into the river, but the steady downpour
of the last of the storm soaked the kajang
and soon rendered it a very poor shelter. Li
Wang crawled out from under it, and huddling
on his coat sat shivering and waiting for the
storm to pass. The forked lightning which had
ridden in the van of the storm was by this time
miles away, and had been succeeded by those
silver glares of sheet lightning which turn night
into day, and swallow up the kindred gleam of
the nre-nies';Tamps. Li Wang sat shuddering in
the boat, waiting for the rain to pass and wonder-
ing if the storm would raise the river on him.
PAWANG HELAI 23
As he sat, there struck suddenly upon his listless
ear a gentle rumbling sound, not unlike the
purring of a monstrous cat. The jungle is full of
noises and the Chinese mind is void of imagina-
tion, so Li Wang took no notice. But a sudden
rise in the note of the sound, changing it into a
snarl close at hand, forced his attention, and
with a quick movement he looked up to the
bank above him. He saw nothing, for so thick
was the blackness of the night that objects close
at hand were invisible except when the sheet
lightning illumined the scene. The snarl con-
tinued, to the dismay of Li Wang, who vaguely
thought at last, as a quicker- witted, mo v e timorous,
or less Chinese mind had thought long before, of
tigers. When there smote upon his nostrils a
charnel-house smell, a stench of decay and
rottenness, he knew that within a few feet of him
was a tiger. Can you at all realise the madness
of terror which rose in his mind ? Have you
ever found yourself in deadly instant peril, so
instant and so deadly that the brain will not
work for you, that you are conscious of nothing
but a catching at the heart which stops its beats
and paralyses the whole organism of the body ?
24 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
Have you ever felt that unless this tension snaps
you are utterly lost ? Do you know the impulse,
springing from habit, reason, instinct, or what
you will, which rises suddenly within you, sends
the burning blood to swell the heart to bursting
and — makes you do something, anything, every-
thing but control yourself ? Li Wang knew these
things in that moment and sprang to cast off his
rope. As he did so a sheet of electric fire lit up
the bank, and upon it, close to him, he saw the
square under jaw, the white throat, the muzzle
and the savage eyes of a tiger. The fierce
reality at hand overset his balance, he pitched
headlong into the river, and from that moment
no man saw him more.
With a self-satisfied chuckle Pawang Helai
shook himself back from the likeness of a tiger
to the likeness of a man, and grinned a sardonic
smile at Aremon.
" The Chinese will be drowned in the river/'
said Aremon. " His body will be eaten by the
fish or the crocodile or the big lizard.' '
" Good ! " said Pawang Helai, beneath his
breath in the grunted speech of the Sakai, con-
tinuing with an undertone of mirth, " This foolish
PA WANG HELAI 25
person being in haste fell into the river and is
gone to trade with the fish, leaving his gear and
goods behind."
" Why did you change to the tiger shape ? "
asked Aremon.
" Peace," replied the magician, " Am I not
a pawang ? "
Aremon, always in awe of his father, said no
more, and the old Sakai clambering down the
bank possessed himself of Li Wang's store of
notes and silver. The books he threw into the
river, where the water soon reduced the soft
Chinese paper of them to a pulp which the stream
dispersed, leaving no trace behind. The boat
they sank by the simple process of tipping her
until she subsided in the deep pool by the bank,
but Aremon, with the foolish, unforeseeing
acquisitiveness of the savage, possessed himself
of a pair of pale blue silk Chinese trousers which
he found in the boat.
• • • • • • •
" I did a considerable amount of travelling
during the month and was able to visit the Sungei
Suang and the Sakai tribes along its banks.
These people seldom see any officer of Govern-
26 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
ment or indeed any one else. The Chinese boat
pedlars do not seem to trade along this river,
for Pawang Helai, the headman of the tribe,
told me that only one Chinese came there, and
that at very irregular intervals. Even he has not
been seen for some months, and he has probably
found the locality unremunerative. I noticed,
however, some cloths and cheap goods such as
the Chinese sell these people, and asked the
penghulu whether Pawang Helai could be be-
lieved. The penghulu said that there had never
been anything against him, and that for years
he had been headman here. Pawang Helai has a
reputation as a pawang locally, and the Malays
with me were evidently somewhat afraid of him."
(From the monthly report of the District
Officer, Kuala Suang.)
• ••••••
The boat lazed down the stream, poled and
paddled as occasion served, and under the
kajang roof sweated the District Officer. The glare
from the water hit at his eyes, striking up between
the top of the gunwale and the edge of the
kajang awning. The sandflies bit him by
day and the mosquitoes by night. At no time
PAWANG HELAI 27
did the insect pest cease from troubling. The
boat moved slowly and so peacefully that the
D.O., even though he knew full well that this
was the quickest way, and that time so spent was
better spent than in writing with a pen, was, in a
sub-conscious way, feeling guilty of " wasting
his time." Flying swiftly from point to point
in a motor-car, panting along on a bicycle,
are so ingrained in a man nowadays that he
chafes at the solemn progress of a large boat and
a Malay crew. But though one may enrich
other people quickly, by administering quickly,
one does not grow wise quickly. The littlest
whisper in the slowest boat may make for know-
ledge as much as the loudest blare of horn in
the swiftest motor-car. The advantage of a boat
is that you hear the conversation of the boatmen.
There is nothing else to hear except the rush of a
rapid or some bird calling on the bank. So when
Mat Seh began to wander along a desultory
path of talk with Mat Som, the D.O. followed
them.
They yarned and yarned and at length " The
Tuan saw too," said Mat Seh.
" I also saw," said Mat Som, " and smiled
28 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
not a little in my heart. Like a monkey dressed
up ! Looked like silk, Chinese wear."
This ridiculous comment hanging mysteriously,
unexplained in the midst of uninteresting, part-
heard talk roused the D.O. to ask, " Who was
wearing what ? " to which Mat Seh replied,
" That Sakai youth wearing blue silk trousers,
Tuan."
The D.O. nodded and said nothing, but across
his mind went, " Where the devil did he get
them ? "
• ♦••...
Ah Tai was perturbed. Trade was bad.
Absurd that a financial crisis in America should
reach the Chinese Ah Tai in a Malay village in
the jungles, but so it was. There was no business
doing. Mines had closed down. Most respectable
people " were no longer," as the Malays put it.
Everything stagnated, and Ah Tai's turn-over
stagnated too. So he bethought him that Li
Wang owed him money. The depression could
not have reached the Sakai and Li Wang's debt
must still be safe. Yet it was annoying that
when Ah Tai wanted him Li Wang was not.
This, and his position in the rather large village
PA WANG HELAI 29
which was called the town, gave Ah Tai to think.
He thought for long, for days, and for weeks.
But Li Wang came not. Therefore Ah Tai
with his heart in his mouth went to the Govern-
ment Office and saw the Chinese Clerk of Courts,
a personage who was clerk of at least nine other
things as well. Ah Tai pitched to the clerk a
very burdensome tale of which the long and
short was that Li Wang owed money to Ah Tai.
" Yes, yes," said the Clerk of Courts, " I
know. Which do you want ? Summons ?
Execution before judgment ? Arrest before
judgment ? ' Konglah ! ' " the usual Chinese for
" speak up (and let me get on to something
else)."
As Ah Tai did not want to sue Li Wang, but
merely to find out what had become of him, he
prevaricated to such an extent that the Clerk of
Courts and other things asked him, " Do you
wish to see the Magistrate ? "
" Ho, ho, ho," replied Ah Tai, from which it
being inferred that he did so wish, he was thrust
with little ceremony into the presence of the
District Officer, who was Magistrate and every-
thing else that any one can ever be anywhere.
30 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
In the presence Ah Tai deserted his native
tongue and made shift with Malay, mixed with
Chinese, and horribly accented. The District
Officer extracted from him in this jargon the
main fact that Li Wang had disappeared and
that Li Wang's beat was the Sungei Suang.
" Go, and in ten days return again," he ordered,
and Ah Tai retired.
The next step in the investigation brought in
the Sergeant, a Malay named Che Dul, not un-
reasonably intelligent, but gifted with the faculty
of arresting first and inquiring afterwards, which,
after all, is what you want in the wilds. To
whom the District Officer said, " When do you
go up the Sungei Suang ? "
The Sergeant replied, " To-morrow."
" Good," said the District Officer. " Li Wang
the pedlar is lost. You can look for him. He
trades with the Sakai. Ask them. A Chinese
has complained that this Li Wang has not come
back and owes him money. But he does not
ask for a summons and perhaps he knows some-
thing. Ask him."
Che Dul saluted and went out. That night
he cross-questioned Ah Tai, but soon found that
PA WANG HELAI 31
he knew nothing except that Li Wang traded in
certain goods with the Sakai.
• ••••• •
The police-boat lazed up the stream. The
" all-eyes," as the Malays call a policeman,
lounged all over it. Their tunics were open,
and, horrible to relate, their belts were undone.
Discipline, in short, was relaxed. Even the
Sergeant was affected by the prevailing slackness
and was wearing an old helmet of civilian pattern,
which he found more grateful to the head than
the little round cap of regulations.
" How many more bends to Pawang Helai's
house ? " asked the Sergeant.
" Not many," replied a constable, with a
satisfying vagueness. " Curse the water of this
river," he went on, " for it strives with us."
Upstream they forced along the boat, and
much they regretted the ungentlemanly necessity
for such exertion.
" I am told," said the Sergeant, " that in
Singapore they use a motor-boat."
" How pleasant for the men of the police,"
said the constables, and they fell to reflecting on
the ease with which pay was earned in Singapore.
32 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
At long last, when the day had turned and
the sun began to beat less fiercely, the boat
grounded on a bank and Pawang Helai's hut was
reached.
It was with an unacknowledged diffidence that
the Sergeant clambered up the bank and called
upon Pawang Helai. But the old magician had
seen him coming and was even then, in ostenta-
tious surprise, climbing down the steps, groaning
in Malay at intervals, " I am old," followed by,
" and also feeble." He made a sketchy but
humble obeisance to the Sergeant, who regarded
him with a disgustful distrust. Pawang Helai
was so very scratchful, and the Sergeant felt
that pay was hardly earned when it meant dealing
with such a creature, removed as it was, to his
mind, from the brute creation merely by the
supernatural powers it claimed. As a Sergeant
of Police he was ex officio bound to make light
of the supernatural. As a Malay his traditions
held him to believe in them. Muhammadan
though he might be by faith, he was, by up-
bringing, by inheritance, a pagan of the oldest
school, steeped by right of race in the super-
stitions of those who believe in the elder gods.
PAWANG HELAI 33
Discomfort able thoughts rose in his mind as he
regarded this high priest of the ancient cult
of the land. How could he deny, with no In-
spector, no District Officer at his elbow, the
powers that this old filthy creature held ? But
habit came to his rescue for the time and he began
to cross-question Pawang Helai, making the
while great play with an official notebook, sup-
plied, on indent, to him for record of the doings
of the criminals of the district, jungly and other-
wise.
No ; Pawang Helai knew nothing of Li Wang ;
had not seen him for long ; wondered where he
was ; observed that Li Wang was an uncertain
person ; added that people simple as tigers and
foolish as monkeys could not be even expected
to know anything of Li Wang ; wondered that
the so intelligent Sergeant should descend to
ask of such hopeless people. In fact, he a little
overdid it, and the Sergeant, reflecting that men
do not turn into tigers by daylight, boldly sus-
picioned something, he knew not what. Yet,
had he been of a stiffer intelligence, it must have
cried aloud to him that the Sakai know the
jungles and what happens therein. How could
3
34 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
a Chinese, and the only Chinese, have disappeared
hereabouts, with his boat, his gear, his debts,
his whole pervasive personality and no Sakai
know of it ? His intelligence was suddenly
stiffened by a call from the boat, " Oh, Datoh !
Marilah saat " (Come here a moment).
With Pawang Helai in front of him, he re-
turned to the boat and saw standing by it, in
the grasp of a very wet constable, Aremon the
young Sakai — and Aremon wore a pair of blue
silk trousers 1
" I knew ! " cried the constable excitedly. " Mat
Som said so. He suspected. He told me. Silk
trousers ! Where does he get them ? " — a damning
indictment.
Aremon, seen at a short distance and smartly
captured by the constable before he knew what
was upon him, smiled foolishly, his appearance
not the less full of tragedy for the fact that he
wore Li Wang's trousers. Caught by his own
vanity and youth, he was strutting in those
borrowed plumes, and had been so tickled by
the sensation round his thighs that the accustomed
caution of his race had deserted him.
" Arrest both," ordered the Sergeant. " Hand-
PA WANG HELAI 35
cuff both," he commanded. " To-night we sleep
here and to-morrow at dawn we return down-
stream." Arrest first and investigate afterwards
is an excellent method at times.
But consider how unfortunate a thing it is to
be a policeman spending the night in the very
centre of wizardry, guarding the wizard in person.
The police grumbled as they unloaded the boat
of their rice and food-stuffs, carbines and side-
arms, belts and caps. There were so many tales
of awe about this hut, of which the chief was
that Pawang Helai's familiars, in the shape of
tigers, nightly prowled about it and held converse
with Pawang Helai. However, there the police
all were, and in numbers is courage. So they
made the best of it and boldly cursed the wizard
for not keeping a better table in a better lodging.
The sun went down in a rose and golden glory,
and night fell upon the party just as they had made
a meal. All of them crammed into the crazy
hut, and several were indiscreet enough to throw
open doubt upon its capacity to stand upright
under the load. To keep each other's courage
up, they jested and talked together, until one
after another dozed off, except the one who did
36 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
sentry. For some half an hour none spoke.
Then suddenly the sentry said, " What's that ? "
" Where ? M asked the Sergeant, with a sus-
picious readiness not at all that of a sleepy man.
" Outside," replied the sentry.
" Of course outside," said the Sergeant pee-
vishly. " How can anything get in ? There is
no room."
" That ! " ejaculated the sentry, and all heard
a distant, dim, yet distinguishable rumble in the
far jungle.
" Elephants," said the Sergeant, with the full
optimism of officialdom, " certainly elephants."
The sound rose again. It was closer. Also it
was obviously not elephant, and equally obviously
it was tiger. Not to be put down by any elephant-
crying Sergeant a tiger roared again and the
police moved uneasily.
" Load," said the Sergeant sharply.
A shuffling clatter succeeded his words as each
man's hand reached for his carbine. The hand-
cuffs on Pawang Helai clinked.
" Silence," hissed the Sergeant, and then in a
bitter undertone, " Curse the mother of this
beast I M
PAWANG HELAI 37
In a swaying rattle came the roar again and then
deep silence, cut into contrast by the " scree-
scree-scree " of an insect. The hush continued
and the lap of the river-water against the stranded
boat was plain to be heard. Then — swish, and
something passed, brushing through the vegeta-
tion outside.
" Ah, God ! " called a man, and then again
came silence.
Another sudden swish and " There are two,"
said an uncertain voice, and then, " What shall
we do ? "
I shall look out," said the Sergeant.
Don't open the door, Datoh ! Don't be so
foolish ! Wait ! Leave them alone."
" I shall look out," repeated the Sergeant, and
rising to his feet he peered through the loose
lacing of palm leaves which formed the side of
the hut.
" Is it there ? " said some one.
It is dark, very dark," returned the Sergeant.
Let me see," said another.
With a strained jollity one said, " Even let
this cat look."
As he looked there rose from the other side
< (
<t
< <
<<
38 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
a grumbling cough, and the police on that side
scrambled away from the sound.
" Don't do that," said the Sergeant, " or the
house will fall. Curse the mother of this beast,"
said he, and struck Pawang Helai with the butt
of a rifle.
A sudden commotion arose outside and some-
thing padded away.
" Another time like that," said the Sergeant
menacingly to the Sakai, " and you get your
head broken ! Send them away, miserable
beast ! "
In these alarms the night passed. As many
times as the tigers approached the hut, so many
times did the police blaspheme aloud, and so
entirely was Pawang Helai held to account that
but for their belief in his power they would gladly
have murdered him as he crouched, scratching
and whining in their midst. But the tigers
delivered no attack, and some of the police at
length slept.
When men have passed a night such as this
their nerve in the morning is shaken. Shone
the sun never so fair, hastened the mists to rise
never so quickly, morn yet came slowly to them,
PA WANG HELAI 39
and when its presence was plain to be seen
they hesitated to leave even the frail shelter
which had shaken to the tiger's roar. With
care they undid the feeble lashings of the door
and one said, gazing on it, " If last night ! "
and eloquently broke off.
" Oh, we had guns," said the Sergeant ; but it
was he who insisted that Pawang Helai and
Aremon should go down first, covered by those
same guns. The actual light of day brightening
the silver scale on the old Sakai and emphasis-
ing the young astonishment in Aremon's eyes —
for he still did not realise his predicament —
shamed them all into courage. But with courage
there came an all-prevailing haste and insistence
to be gone from this place of fear. They hustled
the prisoners into the boat and in midstream drew
breath of relief.
" To Kuala Putus," said the Sergeant, " and
we will hand over these Sakai to the Corporal,
who shall put them in the lock-up."
To Kuala Putus then they paddled, borne down-
stream easily with the rush of the river, Pawang
Helai and Aremon tied together and coupled
to the frame of the boat, lest perchance tigers
40 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
should arise from the river-bed and rescue them.
It did not slacken the pace of the boat that once
they heard a distant roar in the jungle. When
the Sergeant suggested " that is a different tiger '•
the " all-eyes " grunted merely. They had their
own opinion, and thought only of the stout
brick piers on which the Kuala Putus police
station stood, and of the satisfying strength of its
Chinese-made plank walls and doors. At Kuala
Putus the Corporal took over the prisoners,
searched them, locked them up, set a guard, and
then began to hear all about it. The tale,
strange enough in itself, lost nothing in the re-
lation, and in a short time something very like
hysteria affected the small population of the
police station and the Malay village near which
it was placed. The Sergeant placed himself in
communication with the authority, here repre-
sented by the penghulu, an old gentleman only
moderately intelligent and somewhat bewildered
with his experiences of an office which assigned to
him duties more onerous than its rights were
lucrative. The authority did not see its way
clear to do anything of much use. He suggested
" making report " to the Tuan, two days away
PAWANG HELAI 41
downstream. But what the Sergeant wanted
was counsel for the safe-keeping of the prisoners
for that one night. As he pressed this point, the
authority called in the protection of a shield and
buckler in the person of his nephew, officially
designated the penghulu's clerk. This youth's
sole idea of administration — and it is an idea
not wholly foreign to many administrators — was
to write upon paper with a pen and ink. So
he called upon Che Dul to relate the circum-
stance at length. No doubt the Sergeant, by him-
self relating a set of circumstances to a British
superior, was usually very fairly intelligible, but
on this occasion he had no one to keep him to
the point, and several zealous prompters to seduce
him from it. People of hasty tempers who want
lessons in patience and politeness are recom-
mended to take down quite a plain tale from a
Malay amongst Malays. Many years of practice
may enable one to do this with fair to average
success. The penghulu's nephew had neither
years nor practice and his success was very in-
different. However, he succeeded so far as to
exasperate the Sergeant beyond endurance, and to
impress the audience with a belief that he was
42 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
a young man who would go far if he met with
reasonable people. The Sergeant they thought
was not reasonable. He wanted to do some-
thing, whereas what the clerk wanted was to
write something. He wrote, eventually, some-
thing, and retired to write it all over again as a
fair copy. His labours were so prolonged that
his counsel did not come to the birth before dark,
by which time the Sergeant had decided to take
the usual action and follow the prescribed pro-
cedure, which is, by a convention recognised
officially all the world over, all you should ever
do in any conceivable set of circumstances —
even in tigerish magical circumstances. He
kept, therefore, the Sakai father and son in the
lock-up, handcuffed, and over them he set
the sentry. The population of the village then
barred itself in and the police shut the station
up, actions which everybody except the sentry
thought very sensible.
It is not true that in the Malayan tropics there
is no twilight, any more than it is true that the
birds have no song, only scent, or whatever be
that hallowed phrase, for there is a time between
the setting of the sun and the falling of night
PA WANG HELAI 43
when objects are difficult to distinguish. Also,
just at dark, a hush falls upon the air. The day-
light noises are stilled, and the night-noisy in-
sects have not begun their clamour. At this
hour of the day things seem to brood, and a solid
known noise is quite a comfort to a lonely man.
The sentry rather wished he had ammunition
boots on, for they make a satisfying slap on
plank floors. To him, peering out over the rails
of the verandah which ran along the front of the
police station, well-known objects took strange
shapes. He knew that the bullock lying under
the coconut palm in the far corner was a stray
bullock impounded there, for lack of the regula-
tion pound, now many days. But it loomed
mistily against the swollen butt of the palm.
No one knew whence it had strayed, or why its
yoke-fellow had not strayed with it. But it had
been remarked by some searcher after causes
that such divorce of pairs of bullocks has been
the work of tigers, sometimes. The presence of
the bullock meant more sandflies than usual,
and the sentry slapped his neck and cursed
them. He walked up and down, occasionally
looking in at his prisoners in the lock-up by
44 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
the light of an inefficient lamp, which doubtless,
in a town station, should have been reported as
unserviceable and sat upon by a board with a
view to condemnation. He sang, too, a whining
song of love and the delight thereof, but suddenly
broke off to observe that the now shadowy shape
of the bullock had risen. He had hardly noted
that fact before he heard the beast snort. Im-
mediately on its snort followed a snarl. The
bullock stayed not to make reply, but burst its
rope and rushed incontinently straight through
the bamboo fence round the compound and was
gone. The sentry tightened his grip on his
carbine and peered forth into the night, seeing
nothing. He felt very like giving the alarm,
but as he had nothing to point out except that the
bullock had departed, and as people do not expect
one to pursue after stray bullocks in the dark, he
determined to take no notice. Again he paced
to and fro and again inspected the two prisoners.
Pacing to and fro is sleepy work. The sentry
at length came to a halt, leant his carbine in the
angle formed by the rail and the post at the head
of the steps, and, as he had frequently done before,
fell into an attitude of musing. He mused into
PA WANG HELAI 45
drowsiness and drowsed into sleepiness, as many
a sentry has done and many will again do.
Finally he had a waking or a drowsing vision
in which he seemed to open his eyes and look
full into the eyes of a tiger at the foot of the
steps. The seeming passed, he shook himself
and realised that the vision was reality, for he
was actually gazing into a tiger's eyes. Like all
Malays he was more or less latah, or subject
to nerves, and he did what latah Malays do.
He stared at the tiger as the tiger stared at him,
and when the beast broke the spell by averting
its gaze, he broke into a crash of blasphemous
and obscene oaths. The tiger slipped back into
the dark and the police station and barracks
were suddenly buzzing with people inquiring
what had happened. The sentry called for
help and plenty of it. The Sergeant and
the Corporal started up from the floor of
the Corporal's room and burst out upon the
verandah. A hurried explanation took place.
With foreboding at his heart the Sergeant
strode to the bars of the lock-up, calling
sharply (t Heh ! " to the prisoners. The light
was not good, but it was sufficient to illuminate
46 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
the emptiness of the lock-up and to reveal a
hole in the floor.
Somewhere in the jungles Pawang Helai still
scratches his silvery hide, and somewhere in the
jungles Aremon hunts food for his father still.
II
THE PLACE OF DEATH
" r | ^HE children do not like to pass by
here after dark, Tuan," said the old
Malay with me; " they are afraid."
" Afraid of what ? " I asked.
M There are tigers here," said he.
" And this place, what is it ? What is this
patch of sand in the middle of jungle ? The
path runs past it, but no one's garden comes up
to it. Why does the place lie alone, set apart ? "
The old man's face worked as he replied, " It
was once the place of death."
Then I fell into a muse and into a thinking.
The sun beat down upon the patch of white sand,
some twenty yards in diameter, lying in the
midst of jungle, like a heap of white powder at
the bottom of a green cup. Each separate little
flake and grain winked back the sun at me. My
47
48 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
shadow had drawn itself together and lay around
my feet. It was high noon. Yet I shivered.
" Under that bush was the place of execution,
Tuan. There they knelt for the kris, the long kris
which the Tuan knows. Here were the women
stoned to death, as the Tuan also knows."
Full well I knew, and bade him be silent
awhile. They rose before me, all the brown
ghosts of the Malays of the old ancient days
before the white man ; all the victims of the
bitter law of those days, though perhaps many
had suffered also in our time had not their lot
been cast in the beforetimes. The murderer for
revenge, the murderer for pelf, the murderer for
woman's flesh, spilling man's blood by man
their blood was spilled even here upon the white-
ness of this sand. How could it have been ?
The place was so very lovely ; how imagine it
the scene of such a gripping horror as the exe-
cution by kris ? Yet, the longer I stood, the
deeper sank into my heart the malign influence
of the spot. Soaked with blood it was, and
blood cried aloud from the sand. The birds'
cries rang in the trees, and echoed the screams of
long ago. A squirrel chattered on a branch,
THE PLACE OF DEATH 49
voicing the ghost of a madness of fright. The
lizard rattled in his throat as so many had choked
into eternity. Would I had never come to this
place, for I can see it all as it happened. Here
is the girl who thought the world well lost for
love. Ah, fool, death grips you ! The little
hands which fondled your lover are bound with
the black ijok rope, the crescent eyebrows
which he likened to the young moon are raised
to wrinkle with the stare of terror. The eyes
that drew him, yet scorned that worthy man,
your husband, shall never glance aside again.
Call aloud upon your lover, peradventure he
will yet save you from the stones, for he has
saved himself and added another agony to death,
or, so strange is woman, by saving himself has
lightened your burden of regret.
A shriek rent the air, so that I started aside.
"It is the launch on the river, Tuan," said the
old Malay.
I thought it was the girl/* said I.
What girl, Tuan ? " said he, and looked at
me strangely. But I made him no answer.
tt
<<
A
III
ROMANCE IS DEAD
S I told you just now, Tuan, had it not
been for the old woman Timah, we
could never have managed it, and
Sman and I perhaps should not have known the
jail here. But Timah was like all our old women.
They are fond of money and, having lost their
own youth, they like to help adventure still. I
never could see much in the girl myself. That
was Sman's business, but I could see well enough
that Sman wanted her, and what could I do ?
He was my friend, and he asked me to help him.
We had to be careful, very careful. In the old
days, as I hear from the old men, we could have
done the thing with armed force to fall back on if
the stratagem had failed, but nowadays, well, we
each had a knife, but it was not meant to be used.
People have grown cowards since the white man has
So
ROMANCE IS DEAD 51
been in the country, and the flourish of a kris
will do more now than three ill-directed stabs in
the old days. They guarded her well, that girl,
and how Sman first managed to see her, he never
told me. He said that he had heard that she was
worth the attempt, had heard that there was a
girl whom they kept guarded, and besides, he
had a rivalry with her men, and the abduction
would be a deed to cover their faces with shame.
So he said ; but there was something deeper than
mere love of adventure, though, as I say, I could
not see much in the girl. The old woman was
some relation of mine, though I did not remember
that until we came to think of the plan. As
the girl's guardian, she lived in the palace, and
had to stay behind when we had succeeded. She
wanted to be paid for that, and I am not surprised
that she did, but she would have been wise to have
come with us. They do things there, Tuan, still,
when they are angry. You do not hear, but
they do. Still, the old woman cost us much, and,
after all, she was old. I am more sorry that they
beat us in the end than that she remained there,
where they did things to her. We planned it all
in Raja Kechil's house, under their noses as it
52 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
were, for he was a friend of theirs. But he never
suspected anything. Had we not long been his
followers and servants ? Our greatest point of
safety was the number of people there. All round
were, as you know, Tuan, little houses of wood and
atap, where all his hangers-on lived. It was a big
place, his kampong, and planted with fruit-trees,
paths from house to house running between them.
At night it was very dark, and, like all our kam-
pongs, the place was neglected. It was nobody's
business to see it kept clear of undergrowth, so no
one troubled, as long as you could get about it by
the paths. Sman met the girl first of all as she
was coming from one of the small houses in the
dark. The old woman Timah was with her, and
they were coming back after visiting the girl's
aunt. I could hardly see what happened, but
the girl must have been prepared by the old
woman. The three stood close together, and
talked for only a moment, but that was enough.
" We love quickly in this country, Tuan, and a
girl shut up by herself — of what else should be her
thoughts ? When Sman came back to me he
seemed dazed, and I got him out of the place as
quickly as possible. Where do they get the power,
ROMANCE IS DEAD 53
these women ? She made Sman quite foolish, and
yet I hear now that she has not waited for him
after all. I wonder whether this is true, and if it
is, I wonder what Sman will do when he gets out ?
Perhaps he is less mad now, but he was mad then.
It was madness, all of it. But well planned it was,
and so successful. We should never have been
caught had it not been for the white man's police.
Yet I hold them guiltless, for how shall they
not believe a man who swears his attendants have
fled up to the Protected States with his watch and
much money in dollars and notes ? If he swears
it on oath and others confirm the same, how shall
they not act on the information ? And if the
watch was found on Sman, who knew the truth,
that Raja Kechil gave it to him ? They would
not believe that, and of course Raja Kechil denied
it. We chose a dark night, and the old woman
arranged for the girl to visit her aunt again.
No one there ever thought that on such a short
journey, and within the precincts of a palace
kampong, a girl could be spirited away.
" It all turned out successfully. They went to
the house, and sat there talking for an hour, we
listening outside. Sman muttered to himself, so
54 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
that I was ever nudging him to keep silence. At
last we heard them rise to go, and then we thought,
" What if some one accompanies them back ? '
If so, we should have put it off to another night.
The old woman came down the steps first. We
saw her ugly feet on the rungs of the wooden steps.
Then came the girl. Her feet were very small and
she had gold anklets, and Sman clutched me by
the arm till it hurt me. Her aunt stood on the
top of the steps, and said something about the
darkness and there not being very far to go. As
they went, we took another path, and met them at
the crossing. Sman was first, and the girl flung
herself at him, sobbing hardly, and there was
some ado to get the two along the path to the out-
side. I think they had forgotten the old woman
and myself. At the road we left the old woman,
and she ran back, and getting to the path, began
to scream that the girl was gone. That was part of
the plan. We saw lights flashing behind us, and
fled along the road till we got to where the gharry
was waiting, and we drove into the town without
pursuit. They had no idea which way we had
gone, and the old woman was half hysterical
when they found her. The steamer sailed the
ROMANCE IS DEAD 55
next morning, and it took a day to get up the
coast to the port for which we aimed. During the
night we stayed in the town, and I hear that Raja
Kechil never thought of inquiring where we were.
We got on board safely in the morning and the
vessel started. We thought ourselves safe, but
we forgot the telegraph. The police were waiting,
and they arrested us. The girl came too. They
kept us in the lock-up that night, and the next
morning they let us go. They said they had
no grounds for keeping us longer. So we went
to the house of Sman's friend and were there
two days, thinking we were safe. But one of
Raja Kechil's servants had been sent up to
identify us, and they arrested us again. You were
the Magistrate that time, Tuan, and you sent us
back. What could you do, you did not know
all ? I wonder how Sman felt when the girl
clung to him in the police station, and the two
were forced apart for him to be taken back ?
She loved him then, and yet they tell me she
has forgotten. It is six months since then.
Can they forget in six months ? I pray Allah
that I be not struck with Sman's foolishness, but
he was my friend, what could I do ? I am glad
56 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
you came to see me, Tuan, for now you know the
truth. But Sman will not trouble to prove it.
1 ' You know our saying, Tuan :
" High are the rushes, but higher the corn,
Grains from the ear by the birds are torn,
Long though the month and long though the year,
Longer the memories I hold dear.
t(
And the other :
" Let not the plant be overgrown, but early prune it back,
'Tis better it be branchless, lest heavy boughs do crack ;
Let not my love be long away. The proverb says aright,
' Where'er you see fruit ripening the birds will be in sight.' "
IV
THE HALLUCINATIONS OF MAT
PALEMBANG
MAT PALEMBANG is a coolie on a
coffee estate, and was found one day
a quarter of a mile from the road at
the foot of a kompas tree, with his right thigh
fractured and severe cuts on his head.
What follows is his account of how he got
there :
" Two days ago I finished my work at two
o'clock in the afternoon, and I went to the
coolie lines with the rest of my gang as usual.
When we got there we found the midday meal
prepared, and all of us took rice. Afterwards
we lay down and went to sleep. I had not been
long asleep when I heard the door of the lines
open, and, looking up, I saw my father standing
in the doorway. My father died in the month
57
58 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
of Ramthan three years ago. He was an old
man, and, having nothing to do, he insisted on
keeping the fast that month with more severity
than any one else thought necessary. So strict
was he in his fasting that he became very ill,
and at length returned to meet the infinite
mercies of Allah. Knowing, then, that he had
died in the full promise of everlasting bliss, I was
not afraid when I saw him standing in the door-
way of the coolie lines, and I spake to him, saying,
' father of mine, what is thy desire, and what
may thy son do for thee ? '
" He answered, ' My son, I have been per-
mitted to return and hold speech with thee,
seeing that I died during the performance of a
just act and one imposed on all true believers.
The one God, of whom Mahomet was the prophet,
has allowed me to come and visit thee in order
that thou, being the son of a just man, mayest
be yet more desirous of following the precepts.
Come therefore with me, and we will again
partake of food together, as we did while I was
yet upon the earth.'
" Hearing, then, these words of my father, I
rose up from the mat on which I was lying, and
MAT PALEMBANG 59
passed through the doorway, arousing none of
the others who were sleeping. Sound they slept
and heavy, for the eye of the white man had been
upon them during the day, and did one so much
as miss a single weed below the coffee bushes,
greatly would the white man swear at him.
Strange it is that the white man, though he be
not able to speak our language well, can yet use
hard words in our tongue with fluency as great
as any of our own people. But of the white man
it is not well to reason, seeing that Allah has
afflicted all his race with madness.
" I followed, then, my father, and he led me
through the coffee, following no path, but ever
walking onwards. And at length, weary of
much walking, I spake to him and said :
" ' O my father, whither art thou leading me,
and where is the house of that man with whom
we shall eat rice ? '
" Then did my father turn upon me, saying,
Is it not enough for thee that thou shouldst
have been called to follow me, and yet dost
thou desire to ask me whither I am going ? Do
thou follow and I will lead/
" Then was I silent, fearing my father. So at
60 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
length we passed through the coffee and came to
the jungle. Now this was high jungle, never
yet cut, and thorns were many in it. Yet my
father passed through it, caring not for the
thorns, nor for the long creepers, nor for the
marshy places. And where he passed over
lightly, my feet sank in, yet never did I lose sight
of him, nor did he ever seem to be at a loss to find
his way. And when we had gone some little
distance, I saw that my sister had joined him, she
who was Haji Nor's wife and died in childbirth,
in spite of all that the doctors of our people could
do with prayers and incantations.
" It was of her that the white man, my master,
said that if she would have consented to see the
white doctor who lived in the town, both she and
the child had certainly lived. Allah is all-great.
It was her destiny to die in childbirth, and how
should the white man's doctor have helped her ?
" As she walked beside my father, with the
child in her arms, I spake to her and said, ' Sister,
knowest thou that thy husband has married
another ? '
" Then said she, ' Nay, I knew it not ; but let
him marry four wives, never will he get a man-
MAT PALEMBANG 61
child fair and strong as this which I am carrying
in my arms.'
" Whereat I marvelled, seeing that the child she
bore with her was small and had never sucked the
breast, and both had been dead ten years. But
I said nothing, knowing that it was not well to
come between a woman and her children. And
having gone a space farther, there joined us my
brother, he who fell into the river and was caught
by the crocodile. To him I spake, saying :
" ' Brother, how is it that the crocodile seized
thee in the presence of many, and yet upon thy
body are no marks ? '
" Then said he, ' Brother, knowest thou not
that the crocodile killed me not ? And knowest
thou not that having seized me in the water and
dragged me below, he raised me again above
the surface, to testify that it was not he
who caused my death but the water of the
river ? '
" Then I bethought me of the ancient saying
amongst our people that the crocodile which
seizes a man will ever bring him again alive to
the surface, as evidence to all men that blood-
guiltiness is not upon the crocodile but upon the
62 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
water. Yet spake I again to my brother, say-
ing :
" ' How is it that I see no marks of teeth upon
thee, seeing that the crocodile seized thee with
his great teeth ? '
" Then said my brother, ' Very gently did the
crocodile seize me and hurt me not at all, and
having lifted me again to the surface, he sank
again below, and bore me away to his haunt,
wedging my body beneath a holt deep down
below the bank of the river. There did I die,
gasping for breath, yet not dying from the bite
of the crocodile. And after many days did the
crocodile come, and chasing away the fish that
gnawed at my body swallowed it in pieces, and
thereafter lay ten days taking no food. Yet at
the end he incurred misfortune, being taken on
a bait and dragged to the bank, and his limbs
being bound with rattan, he was put into a boat
and was brought to the white magistrate, who
shot at him with a gun, wounding him in the
head so that he died.' Then I knew that the
words of my brother were true, for it was I who
obtained the reward from the Government, paying
therewith my debt to the mandor, and the rent
MAT PALEMBANG 63
of my land to the Government, and buying a
new sarong with what remained.
" Now when we had gone some way within the
jungle we came to a large tree, a kompas tree
of great girth, standing by itself. Beneath it
the jungle grew not, for it had killed all lesser
things. Below this tree stood my father, and
turned to me, saying :
" ' Son, we are now at the house wherein thou
and I and these others will eat rice. Follow me,
therefore, up the steps of this house, for those
within await our coming.' But I, seeing the
great tree only and no steps, knew not of what
my father spake, yet because he was my father I
said nothing. So he moved towards the great
kompas tree and set foot upon it, and so, one
foot above the other, and one hand above the
other, he stepped up the trunk of the tree, as one
climbs a coconut palm. From the top he called
me and said :
" ' Son, do thou also come up hither, staying
not for an invitation, since this man is a friend
of mine, and has prepared rice that we may eat.'
" So I set myself to the climbing of the tree,
little doubting that I could not climb and should
64 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
fall to the ground again. Yet I went up as my
father had done, and my brother and my sister
followed, she coming last with the child.
" At the top the great branches spread, and
upon them was a house, and in the midst of it
bowls of rice and food prepared, and many
strangers seated thereat. So I took my place
among the rest and sat down. The women
amongst them handed us water and we cleansed
our hands, and the rest set themselves to eat.
Then came a great fear upon me, and I thought
within my heart :
" ' How shall I eat with these people, and are
they not all ghosts of those who are long returned
to the mercy of Allah ? Surely if I eat with them,
I also am but a ghost, and can never more return
to earth, but must live here upon the tops of the
jungle.'
" Thus I ate not, but sat staring upon the food,
fearing greatly. So one called upon my father,
saying :
" ' Thy son eats not. Doth he fear poison in
the food, or what is it that he will not eat ? '
" And my father questioned me and said,
' Hast thou indeed no desire for food ? '
MAT PALEMBANG 65
" I answered, ' Truly, my father, I am not
hungry, and desire not food/
" Then said he, ' Evil, worthless son ! Shall I
bring thee to eat rice within the house of this my
friend, and wilt thou shame me by refusing ?
Eat, then, lest I be angry with thee.'
" Yet I would not eat, saying, * Nay, my father,
I am not hungry.'
" Then said he, ' Eat, evil son, but a handful
of rice, and it is well, and if thou wilt not eat,
I myself will hurl thee from the house, so that
thou shalt fall heavily to the ground below.'
" So I looked upon the faces of the company,
and was afraid. For now they were not as when
I entered the house ; but my brother's face was
gnawed by the teeth of the fish, and his body
was scarred by the marks of the teeth of the
crocodile. My sister was white, and deadly to
look upon, and the child was as if it had never
breathed. The body of my father was thin, and
his face was drawn, and there was no substance
of flesh upon him. Old and feeble was he when
he died ; old and feeble looked he now. Moreover,
the company sitting round the food I feared,
seeing that one was marked with the tiger's paw,
5
66 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
and the flesh of his face hung in strips, and the
head of another was crushed as if a tree had
fallen upon him. None were there who did not
glare upon me, so that I screamed aloud and
cried :
" ' Never will I eat the food of the dead, by
dead hands prepared, and deadly in the taste,
lest I too become as ye are, and never walk upon
the earth again.' Then they with one accord
rose upon me, seized me with their hands, and
pushed me screaming from the edge. Falling,
I saw them gibber from the tree-top, mouthing
and cursing at me, and I struck the ground, lying
as dead. Two days I lay beneath the tree, and
ever they threatened me, and at length by chance
came woodcutters, who bore me away, so that
now I lie in the hospital and the white doctor
will cure my leg."
V
WITHOUT BENEFIT
IT had been arranged that the local head-
man and I should go up the river on a
certain day to see a distant settlement,
most easily reached by water. The arrangements
for our transport were left to him, and a few
days before the proposed excursion he told me that
a certain sampan owner had agreed to take
us. The matter being thus settled, it was with
surprise that I heard the headman re-open the
subject later by the brief statement, " We
cannot go on Wednesday.' ' Inquiry elicited the
information that the owner of the sampan being
dead, another suitable boat could not at present
be found. The manner of the man's death was,
of course, irrelevant, the fact of its occurrence
being alone of importance ; but an idle curiosity
into this sudden taking off prompted the question,
6 7
68 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
" How did he die ? " For answer came the
very sufficient explanation, " A crocodile has
eaten him." The correlations of the East are
constant ; and though the Malay Peninsula is
hardly within a hail of Gilead, there is still in
this, a common explanation of a sudden death,
a flavour of the old Biblical phrase, " An evil
beast hath devoured him ; Joseph is without
doubt rent in pieces." There was nothing very
remarkable in the happening : people are fre-
quently taken by crocodiles in this river, and it
does not even bear such a bad reputation in this
respect as other streams in the Peninsula. The
man had just been knocked out of his sampan
as he sat in the stern thereof paddling ; the
occurrence did not lack witnesses, who averred
that he was twice lifted out of water by the
crocodile, as one has seen a pelican shift a captured
fish. But such a death never fails to evoke
what may be called a local fury ; not alone the
dead man's relatives, but all the neighbourhood
express themselves in no measured terms when
speaking of the evil man-eating beast, and the
chase is ever hot for a few days. Sampans,
their occupants braving a like fate, shoot out
X
WITHOUT BENEFIT 69
upon the surface of the stream, and a prolonged
search is made both up and down its course, if,
peradventure, the corpse has been insecurely
wedged below the surface, or has been carried
away to float with the tide. If recovered, it is
buried with due rites, to the satisfaction of a
simple piety ; even if the search is unsuccessful,
all that is possible has been done.
But, as apart from the recovery of the murdered
water-sodden corpse, there is the punishment
of the murderer to be considered. To this end
it is usual to call in the services of a pawang,
the harmless, necessary wizard of Malaya. He
sets the alir, the bait and hook so often
deadly to the greedy crocodile, and if it is taken
he gets the credit ; if it is contemptuously dis-
regarded by the beast, he does not appear much
disconcerted. In this particular instance the bait
was duly taken by a crocodile, and there was
little doubt in native circles that the magic of
the wizard had arranged that the right crocodile
was caught. That there are many crocodiles in
a river was acknowledged, but your wizard will
not allow that any chance, common, or wander-
ing crocodile takes the bait set for the murderer.
70 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
It is not hunger that moves the beast to gorge
the fowl or its hook ; spells have their power, if
properly applied by the initiate ; and it is not
becoming to treat the science of magic with
disrespect.
Moreover, once make fun of Malay beliefs, and
you will know no more about them for ever.
So when this crocodile was caught, a mile up the
river, there was not a little curiosity to see him
when he had been towed down to the ferry where
the river is crossed. He arrived there, of course,
three-parts drowned, for when a crocodile is
suspected of murder, it is not necessary to
treat him with care. The brute had fought
with his captors, even at that disadvantage,
so that they had hacked him with parangs
and severed the more important sinews. When
they called me to go down and see him, the sight
of the captive brute, now so helpless, formerly
so dreadful in his cunning hunger, gave me
distinct pleasure. It is seldom that civilised
man nowadays confesses that he is glad to see
an animal in piteous case ; but it requires a
peculiar delicacy of sentiment, and an overflowing
wealth of humanitarian impulses, to make a
WITHOUT BENEFIT 71
man who lives on a river in Malaya feel pity for
a crocodile. So many human lives already to
the count of the race, so many feeble old men
knocked off logs whilst bathing, so many a
woman, so many children caught and killed in
small backwaters, ay, to my knowledge taken
from the bank, so many young and lusty fellows,
in life's prime, as was the sampan owner,
swept from their boats, all these suddenly cut
off from the bright light of day, the sad remem-
brance of them rouses me to a hatred of the
crocodile. The sight of a crocodile tied and
bound will always bring trooping into present
memory the pale shades of those who have served
to provide the hurried meal of the prisoner's
family, a meal in which he himself has probably
participated, for few crocodiles have the luck
to dine alone. They are like sharks in that
respect, of a horrible gregarious voracity.
The little life and power for harm left in our
present capture was soon shot out of him by a
police rifle, and as soon as the body had been
dragged up from the water a solemn dissection
was begun. The operator, or investigator-in-
chief, was a Chinese pressed into the service
72 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
from the neighbouring market. He was a pig-
slaughterer by trade, and handy with his tools.
With the cultured precision of a master-hand,
the slaughterer of pigs began his work. The
day was hot and breathless. The sun beat
down upon the river- water, and the river threw
the rays up into our faces. A crowd surrounded
the crocodile, and at least five nationalities had
contributed to swell the gathering. The babel
of tongues would have been strange had one not
been accustomed to hear people speak and not
wonder what they were saying. Such is the
incurious attitude which must be of necessity
adopted in the more populous parts of Malaya.
The first incision made, there smote upon the
nostril the dead crocodile smell. The Chinese
pig-slaughterer, with the callousness of his
trade, produced and held up something which
looked like human hair. The question was
decided against the realists by a Malay, who
declared it to be the fibre of a certain jungle
palm. Why the crocodile should have eaten
such stuff can only be explained by reference to
the known voracity of his kind.
The edge of expectation had been whetted
WITHOUT BENEFIT 75
by this disappointment, and the Chinese was
eagerly watched. This time he fished up a
rounded, thin piece of something. " That is
Dolah's skull," confidently declared a Malay
spectator. What intimate acquaintance with
Dolah prompted him thus to recognise the piece
of skull did not appear ; and when some one
else, after handling the relic, declared with
authority, " This is a piece of tile," the identifier
of Dolah's skull retired in some disorder. Next
came to the light of day a handful of bones, and,
horror of it all, white and shining teeth. My
nerves began to fail me ; I could not longer
stand and see the frail relics of a fellow-man
thus loathsomely exhibited. The exclamations
of the crowd recalled me to myself : " Certainly
these are the bones, and also are these the teeth,
of Dolah. Let them be collected." Some one
tendered a handkerchief, which the Chinese
refused to use. Then the crowd and the dead
man's relatives became annoyed. " Why should
this Chinese person thus wantonly refuse to
gather up the poor remains ? " Interrogated,
he smiled inscrutably, yet with a superior air,
and he continued to hold the bones and teeth in
74 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
his hand. At last, forced by insistent clamour
into action, he rose from his knees and said,
" These be not bones of man, but pigs' bones."
With an open and a natural incredulity, the
crowd howled at him that he knew nothing of
such things, and it took some time to get the
man a hearing ; when, with a strong insistence,
a final clinching of his former statement, he said
simply, " Am I not a pig-slaughterer by trade ? "
Then we were convinced. To the Malays, had
they had the European susceptibility of senti-
ment, it should have been most horrible thus
hastily to have committed themselves to such
an identification, to have claimed as the bones
of a follower of Islam the foul remains of a swine.
But they have not yet had such delicacies grafted
into their present system, and no one felt more
than a desire to laugh, and no one resisted, so
that the place, lately full of protesting sounds,
echoed with their cachinnation. With this still
ringing in my ears I went away, not a little
thankful for the relief of feeling.
VI
THE ROOM OF THE CAPTAIN
THIS strange loss, in calm weather, seem-
ingly about midnight, gave to Mr.
MacKenzie, the first mate, or, as our
latest use prefers to call him, the Chief Officer,
the command of a ship. A Scot well on in years,
with grown sons and daughters, MacKenzie,
though of good report and deemed worthy to
command by all who knew him, had never
captained a ship. He had been three years in
the City of Fortune, bearing with the humours
of her commander as discipline enjoined, and
now, following on the self-slaughter of his
superior, the command came to him. It was
his first. The post for which, through long
years, he had hoped, worked, maybe prayed,
could not have come unwished, but the manner
of its coming was startling. Few sailors would
75
76 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
view without some natural misgiving the out-
look forced on him. To take the place of
a man who had left it without a sign was
to him, as it might be to many, a troubling
thought. Had the Captain cut his throat, leaving
bloodstains on the deck not readily to be rubbed
away ; had he hanged himself in the dark, and
so given a shock to who first switched on the
light ; had he even gone mad openly, flung over-
board, sinking before a boat could reach him —
any or all these would have left a very different
impression on the minds of MacKenzie and the
ship's company. But the Captain had done
nothing of these. He had gone, leaving no trace.
No clay-cold body lay behind to betray the
manner of his taking off. He had gone in the
flesh, as it were. Spirit and body had together
taken leave of his shipmates before they were
aware of the loss. While the body was not to
be found, could the same be said of the spirit ?
So at least was how they all looked at it.
The ship was searched, fore, aft, and amid-
ships. Her dark caverns and her lighted spaces
were fruitlessly reviewed. Nothing bettered the
first belief that the Captain had gone overboard.
THE ROOM OF THE CAPTAIN 77
The mate, certain, by search, that the Captain,
whether dead or alive, was no longer on board,
took command, yet with misgiving. Struggling
with his common sense, with his religious up-
bringing, with the mental result of the trials of
a hard life, came and went the nickering thought
that the Captain might be back again. It was,
as he said to himself, time and again, "fair
ridiculous" to harbour such a thought, and he
put it from him strongly. It came back. With
it came seven devils worse than itself in the
shape of all strange stories of men who had died,
yet walked to vex the living. The ship wanted
some weeks to port, and he had to command
her. There was no way out of it. But what he
called respect for the dead did not allow Mr.
MacKenzie to take the Captain's cabin at once.
He retained his own for two nights. But at the
end of that time he gave orders to have the
Captain's belongings shifted and himself took
the empty room. The change was made, and,
after his watch was relieved, MacKenzie stood
in the Captain's room before turning in. Looking
at the bunk, he could not hold the foolish thoughts
flitting through his brain. He tried, against his
\
78 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
will, to recall how the Captain slept. Was it on
his right side, or left ? Did he use a bolster and
pillow, or pillow only ? Why was the switch for
the light at the foot of the bunk ? What was
the Captain thinking when he last laid him-
self down to sleep ? What when he last rose
up ? Was there anything in the room which
made people walk in their sleep ? Would he,
MacKenzie, walk in his sleep — overboard, per-
haps, like the Captain ? The useless, yet
troubling triviality of these thoughts was with
him as he lay down, and that night he had no
sleep at all.
But he saw nothing of the Captain.
The habit of being commanded had been driven
into MacKenzie through all his sea-faring life ;
and other life, save as a small boy, he had had
none. There are some will envy the life of a
sailor who sees so much. Alas ! and many of
them feel it, they see so little. Big and large,
all ports are one to their view. The entrances
alone are not alike ; some are easy, some diffi-
cult ; but once alongside, or riding at anchor, or
swinging to a buoy, the last port is like to the
first. Indeed some sailors will tell you that the
THE ROOM OF THE CAPTAIN 79
only change is in the colour of the people who
work the cargo. And this is the more true of
the great ocean-going steam-vessels which run
to time, which must be at Colombo this week,
at Singapore the next, and on again elsewhere
the week after. Laziness and lying long in
harbour are not for them. They must run to
time, haste being no virtue and delay a vice.
The time of the officers when in port is the ship's,
not their own, and this is most the case with all
below the rank of Captain. MacKenzie, then,
had little knowledge of aught save his ships, on
which he had ever been the commanded. Now
he was in command. He had thought over it
often, distrustfully wished for it. Here it was
his, the ruling of others. MacKenzie, not the
first man of his kind, would have been fit enough
to command if he had never been a captain of a
ship. And if the thought of responsibility in
being so weighed upon him, how should he com-
bat ghostly terrors ?
Also he was getting on in years, so that the
weight of the charge now his was not lightened
by the spring of youth, or carried easier by the
Steadied habit of middle age. But as he said
80 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
to himself, he had to go through with it, and he
was aware that the eyes of the others, his officers,
were upon him to see how he should acquit him-
self. Not that they envied him. He might
sleep in the " old man's " bunk for them ;
indeed, for them he was kindly welcome to it ;
for not a man amongst them but would have
preferred his own. Their behaviour showed it.
The would-be careless asking, " Slept well, Sir ? '
in other times the mere politeness of usual
inquiry, took on a sinister tone, as of who should
follow on the answer, M Quite well, thank you,
Mr. Jexsom," with " More than I should ! " if he
dared. The talk amongst them set steadily
in the direction of strange takings off. Each
capped the story of other with story more dis-
turbing still, but in the company of their Captain
out of due season other topics were broached.
So that MacKenzie's mind rested not from
following the one train of thought, " What had
become of the Captain ? " or rather, seeing that
this was fruitless, all possible search having been
made, the question in his mind was, " Would the
Captain be back again ? " The mere folly of
such a haunting thought gave it power, for it is
THE ROOM OF THE CAPTAIN 81
of the essence of superstition that it should have
rule over the impossible, making the " not -to-be "
into the " to-be."
The ship ran on ; all worked together as usual ;
the screw churned and watches were relieved,
time bringing, for three days, no incident to vex
MacKenzie. So that he took courage and said to
himself that it was reasonable enough for a man
to feel queer at first, and the feeling had worked
off. But this did not last. On a night of calm,
about two in the morning, MacKenzie woke with
a start, and putting hand to shoulder felt a damp-
ness. He rose and, switching on the light, took
off his flannel jacket and looked at it. It had a
patch of wet just on the shoulder, seeming as if
some one with a wet hand had gripped him as he
lay sleeping. He hurried out and, calling the
officer of the watch, inquired whether all was well,
receiving in reply, " A calm night, Sir, and no
lights in sight." MacKenzie went back and,
sitting on the edge of the bunk, thought. Now
that he was thoroughly awake, he was sure that
he still felt a grasp, or the feeling left by what
had been a grasp, on his shoulder. A grasp by
a wet hand ! " And who should it be," thought
82 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
he, " save " But he put that thought from
him, and cutting off the light again retired to
bed, not happy in his mind. Yet he said nothing
about it.
The next night the same thing happened, and
on his again springing out of bed his feet lit in a
pool of water on the floor, gradually spreading in
the dark stain on the carpet. Beside it was
another pool, " for all the world," he thought,
"as if some one dripping wet had stood there."
His jacket was wet. He looked up at the ceiling,
wondering what, of things of this world, might
have caused it. Rain ? But the decks were
dry. A bucket of water upsetting overhead ?
But there were no buckets above him. Moreover,
there was no drip on the ceiling. He changed
the jacket, and next day, feeling that the mystery
was too much for him, he took the new Chief
Officer aside and entrusted the matter to him.
" You might," said that worthy, " have been
a-dreaming."
" How could I have dreamed ? " said Mac-
Kenzie. V Why, when I got up, there was the
jacket."
" Was it wet ? " said the chief.
THE ROOM OF THE CAPTAIN 83
M It was that," answered MacKenzie.
" Sweat, perhaps," ventured the chief.
" Sweat ! " said MacKenzie scornfully. " This
is not the Red Sea nor yet the Indian Ocean."
" Ah ! " said the Chief Officer ; and being a
man of one idea at a time held off from further
ventures.
" I don't understand it at all," pursued Mac-
Kenzie.
" He never had any grudge against you, had
he ? " asked the chief.
" Who ? " said MacKenzie.
" Why, the Captain," replied the chief.
" The Captain's dead, man," said MacKenzie.
" Just so," said the chief.
MacKenzie turned on his heel and left his
officer feeling that he had said the right thing
at the wrong moment, or, as he said afterwards,
hit the right nail on the wrong head.
MacKenzie stumped up and down the deck,
raging inwardly. So that was what they were all
thinking, and the chief had the nerve to put it
into words ! He would show them that he
would have none of it. Getting his officers
together, he told them that he would not have
84 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
the late Captain mentioned. One more courageous
than the rest ventured, " But we never have
mentioned him to you, Sir." " Well, see that
you don't," answered MacKenzie, and let them
go. Then he raged again to himself, knowing
he had betrayed a weak man's bearing. His
officers scattered, but met each other later with
grins, when the third told a funny story of how
he had known a dog betray a theft of meat " by
looking as if he hadn't."
Thus every night MacKenzie suffered, for
custom bred no measure of contempt. Rather
the eeriness of it grew upon him. The Captain,
or what he had every reason to suppose the
Captain, materialised slowly. The wetness on
MacKenzie 's shoulder grew wetter, the pools on the
floor more pronounced. Besides these outward
proofs, his shoulder ached after a while from the
growing strength of the grasp. One night he
thought he heard a voice, leapt up, ran to the
bridge, and asked if any one had called him.
But no one had called. He retired cursing, and
mopped up the wet stains as well as he could,
not wishing the matter to get abroad in the ship.
The night after that he clearly heard a voice,
THE ROOM OF THE CAPTAIN 85
and the words were the prosaic order, " Come
out of that ! " To the voice he could not, on
that night, have sworn, but the next night it was
clearly the voice of the Captain. MacKenzie
cursed his luck, his senses, his ship, and his trade,
chewing with bitterness the cud of the sailor's
scoff, " Who wouldn't sell a farm and go to sea ? "
His nerves fell to pieces. One night he roared
out, " What in hell do you want ? " which brought
down a quartermaster with, " Did you call, Sir ? '
MacKenzie swore at the man. Afterwards he
thought upon the sin of foul swearing and cursing,
wondering whether the provocation would excuse
him. He took to reading the Bible before he
turned in, but this made no change, nor was
it a salve to the bruise on his shoulder, neither
did it dry up the wet stains on the floor. At last
he could stand it no longer, so that, confessing
defeat, he left the Captain's room and slept a
night in his own cabin, saying, as if by chance,
that the rats were bad in the Captain's room.
The next morning curiosity drove him thither.
The place showed no sign of a visit from the
spectre. The bunk had not been slept in. So
the following night he enticed the ship's cat into
86 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
the room, where he locked it in. In the middle
of the night a quartermaster let it out. Mac-
Kenzie, not finding it the next morning, asked
who had let out the cat he had locked into the
Captain's room to catch the rats with which it
swarmed. He happened to ask the quarter-
master, and the man replied :
" That cat, Sir, 'ee made sich a noise with a-'owl-
ing and a-screaming, as we couldn't 'ear nothin'
on the bridge, so I let the brute out, Sir. An'
beggin' your pardon, Sir, I never 'eard the
Captain speak of rats in his room either."
" Damn the Captain," swore MacKenzie ; " you
are all crazed on the Captain."
" Yessir, certainly, Sir," said the quarter-
master, and withdrew.
The end of it was that MacKenzie gave up the
attempt, and when the ship reached Liverpool
he refused the offer of the owners to make him
Captain " in the room of " the dead man. That
was the turn of speech they used, and it put an
edge on MacKenzie. He answered :
" Thank you, gentlemen, but I have always
been the chief, and I don't know that I want the
command."
THE ROOM OF THE CAPTAIN 87
The owners looked surprised, but, supposing
he had reasons of his own, they put in another
man. They were right. MacKenzie had reasons,
but did not wish to show them. The new man
came aboard and took over. When MacKenzie
told the story to him :
" Well," said he (he was a youngish man),
" I never saw the man and he never saw me,
and I shan't worry over his loss, seeing that I
have a family to keep."
Nor did he, and MacKenzie — well, MacKenzie
does not know what to think, save that he is
more comfortable as chief than he ever was as
Captain.
A
VII
AH HENG
ROLLING waste of plain, covered
with the stiff and useless lalang
grass, the air above it dancing in the
shimmering haze, the soil below it wretchedly
unproductive — such was the place where Ah
Heng elected to make his garden. He was three
miles from the town, and any produce had to be
carried in two Chinese baskets, slung at the ends
of a carrying-stick, balanced on Ah Heng's
shoulders. But the land was cheap. He squatted
on it and no one said him nay : only a very weary
and very white Government official came once a
year, and took two dollars from him as the price
of his tenancy. Ah Heng always made him
welcome, smiled a Chinese smile at him, pro-
tested that he had no money, offered him a
Chinese cigarette, wore him out with protesta-
88
AH HENG 89
tions, watched him go away, allowed the white
man's followers to take a few sticks of sweet
sugar-cane, and then ran after the party with
the two dollars taken from the thatched roof
whilst no one was watching. With the receipt
for the two dollars, which was also a permit for
another year's occupancy, together with many
Chinese curses freely offered by the weary white
man, Ah Heng returned smiling to his hut.
The permit of occupancy he stored with last
year's permit in a tobacco tin with his money,
and hid both in the thatch. Then he wondered
a little as to how the white man had learned no
more of the great Chinese language than a very
few of its curses, took a draught of weakly warm
tea from the ever-ready pot, smoked a pinch of
tobacco in a long and very foul pipe, and then
turned again to his tilling of the ungrateful earth.
He had about an acre of it under cultivation,
and he made money out of that acre. Not a
foot of it was wasted. The land was thin, and
in the dry season he had to water it by hand,
but his well never failed him, and the vegetables
grew as they will grow when a Chinese tends
them.
90 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
His only companions were the pigs. Of these
he had several by now, all the produce of one
specially beloved sow, a fertile member of her
race. She had been bought on credit, and paid
for on sale of her progeny. Buying the sow had
been a risk at first, but it had all the elements of
a gamble, and a gamble appealed to Ah Heng's
national instincts. The raising of hogs is, in a
small way, very remunerative, and Ah Heng
trusted to them more than to his garden. This
latter, indeed, was more useful in feeding the
pigs than in providing vegetables for human
food. Ah Heng had a contract with a large
Chinese eating-house in the town. This he
supplied with a few fresh vegetables every day,
and took away from it the refuse of the food.
The refuse, mixed with chopped vegetables,
formed the food of the pigs, and mightily they
throve on it.
For some years Ah Heng lived alone in his
little hut. His neighbours were few, and all,
like himself, occupied in tilling ungrateful soil.
He saw little of them, having no time for the
idle enjoyment of society and little inclination.
He had fallen into a groove and become self-
AH HENG 91
sufficient, fond of living alone, and hopeful of
saving enough money to go back to China and
stay there.
At the beginning of the Chinese year it is
customary for great rejoicings to take place
amongst the Chinese community. Those who
live in the country come into the town at this
time and make merry with their fellows. Ah
Heng had done this year after year, and had
hitherto always returned to his hut in the plain,
glad to be rid of the crowd and noise, for he was
little accustomed to them. This year his fate
was otherwise, and he happened upon the woman
who became his wife. She was, by trade, one of
those unfortunates who are sardonically said to
increase the gaiety of nations. Her profession
was to please, and — God knows — to suffer, but
the latter in silence. Sold by her parents in
her youth, there had lain before her all her
life, happily perhaps little understood, no other
prospect than this. In her youth she had perhaps
some taste of happiness, but this left her with
her beauty, and at length she became, with
hundreds of her kind, a mere unit in a crowd of
women, without hope of relief save in attracting
92 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
the permanent attention of one amongst her
patrons. Excepting this only and remote possi-
bility, she was dependent on those who clothed
her, housed her, fed her, and lived upon her
earnings.
The coming of Ah Heng to her place at the
Chinese New Year proved the turning-point in
that monotonous existence. He came at first
with a friend, little thinking that here was the
woman who was to share the little hut on the
plain. What her attractions were, or how they
appealed to him, who shall say ? It is enough
that Ah Heng determined to acquire this chattel
and take it back with him to his house. The
negotiations were protracted, since Wee Neo
suddenly acquired an artificial and enhanced
value, now that he had appeared on the scene.
She had never been of much account before ;
for her beauty, such as it was, had begun to leave
her, but now that a would-be husband had ap-
peared, her value went up. Yet Ah Heng was
persistent, and with the strong patience of the
Chinese he adhered to his resolve. Were there
not in this town, he argued, many such women ?
Ought not the proprietor of the house to be
AH HENG 93
thankful that some one should appear ready
to take her away, now that she was no longer
young, seeing that she must inevitably earn
less money month by month, and she would not
eat the less or cost less to clothe ? The pro-
prietor at last allowed himself to be persuaded,
as he insisted on regarding the transaction, and
one day Ah Heng and Wee Neo left the house
in the town for ever, and set out for the little
hut upon the plain.
It may be wondered what Wee Neo's first
impression of her future home was like. The
place itself was not attractive, or even comfort-
able. It was little more than fifteen feet square,
and the earth itself had been rammed hard to
provide a floor. This had grimed with the dirt
of years and presented an uneven surface, hard
where the feet of the occupants trod, but looser
under the rough tables and beds. Indeed, the
fowls found their favourite dusting bath under
the tall table that stood in the middle opposite
the picture of the joss.
The walls of this hut were of thin sticks, laced
together by the ingenious Ah Heng. Some of
them had rotted out, and their place had, or had
94 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
not, been supplied by others, according as to
whether they faced the rain quarter or not.
There had never been any attempt at lashing
them tight together, and from the inside of the
house a spreading view could be obtained through
the walls. The roof was perhaps the best part
of the whole construction had not its supports
been so faulty. The four posts at the corners had
originally been sound timber enough, but the
white ant had sought them out, and now they were
propped from the outside by long poles with a fork
at the end. The roof itself was made of the
lalang grass laid as thatch is laid in England,
and a leak was easily mended by the addition of
more thatch. It was inflammable but had never
caught fire yet, and it was a handy place for
storing valuables. The furniture of Ah Heng's
mansion was not remarkable. Three or four
stools of home construction, a bed of the same,
provided with a grass- woven mat, a skimpy
and remarkably dirty mosquito curtain, a kitchen
range, and a shelf for burning joss-sticks com-
prised practically all the furniture. The kitchen
range, ingeniously constructed of clay, was
capable, under Ah Heng's skilled supervision, of
AH HENG 95
turning out a savoury, if Chinese, meal. The
cooking arrangements are those most carefully
planned in a Chinese house, and Ah Heng's were
no exception to the rule.
The fact that the pigs lived under a lean-to
built out at the back, and that the drainage
therefrom collected in a green and fetid pool at
one corner of the house, was no drawback to the
site from the point of view of the occupants.
Pigs kept any distance away from their owner's
house are so likely to be hooked out of their sty
by tigers, or even deliberately driven off by evil-
disposed Chinese of marauding tendencies. If
kept close to the house, they grow fat under the
master's eye, and thieves of whatever kind are
less bold to touch them. The cesspool, too, in its
position at the corner of the house, was positively
most conveniently situated. All the cooking
slops drained into it, and the whole formed the
most excellent manure for the vegetables in the
garden, and had not to be carried far. Ah Heng
had grown accustomed to the smell, if, that is,
he ever recognised that there was a smell, and
pigs are always kept in this way by the Chinese
cultivator — which is a very good reason for Ah
96 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
Heng's keeping them so. True, he did at times
clean out the cesspool when it overflowed, and
then he carried the contents to a deep clay tank
in the garden, where it remained until wanted for
agricultural purposes.
Such was the home to which Ah Heng brought
his bride, and indeed, unpleasant as its descrip-
tion may appear to those of fastidious taste,
it was a better place to live in than that to
which she had been accustomed. Better it was
to live in the open plain, amidst the sun and air
and rain, than in the little narrow room where
most of her life had been spent.
So these two lived together, and if love, as
Europe knows it, had not brought them together,
some feeling not altogether dissimilar to it grew
up between them. The presence of a woman
certainly made things brighter, and, moreover,
Ah Heng had now greater opportunity for labour.
As a bachelor he had had to devote a certain
amount of valuable time every day to cooking
his food, and, though he cooked well, it was a
pleasant change for him not to be personally and
intimately acquainted with his victuals before
he arrived at the point of eating them. The time
AH HENG 97
saved from cooking he devoted to cultivation,
and set about taking in more land. Before doing
so some consideration was necessary. If he took
in that extra patch and made his garden four-
square, would the addition be too noticeable ?
Would, that is, the white official keenly spy it
out and demand an extra twenty-five cents for
occupancy ? Fifty cents, perhaps, would even
be asked, and fifty cents was a round sum of
money, a matter to be considered before taking
hasty steps.
So he and Wee Neo talked it over, and the
woman's wit evolved a plan. Let him not take
in that extra patch. Rather should he take in
five feet or so all round the ground already culti-
vated, that extra five feet which, though not
under cultivation, he had always kept hoed up
and under control to prevent the ever-imminent
inroad of the greedy lalang grass. The work
would be easier than fighting a whole new patch.
Had he not often told her that even five hoeings
could scarce break the spirit of that noxious
weed ? Had she not herself seen gardens in
little less than a month overwhelmed and eaten
by lalang when the occupant had neglected
7
98 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
it ? No, not the extra patch, but the half-
tamed belt of land should be taken in, and she,
even she, would help in the work. Ah Heng
deliberated. This certainly was an idea, yes, and
a good idea. The white official came but two
months ago ; for another ten or more he was
not likely to appear again ; by that time the
new land would be under close cultivation. The
addition to the area would need a keen eye to
detect, and though Ah Heng had learnt from
experience that the white man had a shrewd
glance, still, a decent lie well conceived and
brought forth at the moment would lull suspicion.
And again, perhaps, it would be a new white man.
All white men looked alike to Ah Heng, more
or less, but it was possible to distinguish differ-
ences, in height, for instance, even in manner.
But he rather dreaded the white man's attendants.
The clerk who interpreted for him was a fairly
constant factor. He seemed to come year after
year. Ah Heng could see his straw hat bobbing
above the lalang as the white man and his
clerk threaded their way towards the patch of
land. Ah Heng's mind's eye figured that too
acute Chinese sizing up the garden, com-
AH HENG 99
paring it in his thoughts with the garden of
last year, and if, if it struck the clerk that the
patch was larger, would he not inform his superior,
and doubtless receive compliments upon his
sagacity ? The clerk was the disturbing element,
but the peon was worse. Did not Ah Heng
remember that boy ? A half-breed of sorts, a
friend had told him, half a Malay and half a
Kling, but anyhow a brown foreign devil, a small
person with a red cap, and a leaf stuck under it,
a shoe-wearing little creature, clad in brown
cloth, and with a positively vicious sugar-cane
habit. One stick contented him not, nay, three
were not enough for him ; and the last time Ah
Heng had complained of his raids ; but the white
man had laughed, and taking one of the canes
from the little robber, had driven him ahead, and
cast the rest back to Ah Heng, who gathered
them up gratefully. Perhaps that had been a
mistake. That too precocious child wore a red
cap, and had ideas as to his position as a Govern-
ment servant possibly, and next time he would
certainly remember Ah Heng, to Ah Heng's
possible undoing in the matter of the extra
cultivation. But he could placate the little
ioo THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
ere at lire. Yes, he would invite him to take
sugar-cane, and perhaps the papau tree would
be in fruit. Wee Neo should offer him tea,
and chatter Malay to him. Surely Wee Neo
spoke Malay.
Ah Heng reflected over these matters, and took
courage. As for the clerk, he would address
him in a servile manner, taking off his broad
hat, and making himself little before so important
a personage. Of the white man he could not
reason. Sugar-cane charmed him not, nor did
the lifting of a hat disarm him, for that was due
to him. Well, the possible discernment of the
white man was the last uncertain factor, the last
turn of the chance. The whole arrangement
seemed good to Ah Heng, and, with Wee Neo,
he took in that belt of land.
But the collector of licences for temporary
occupation arrived untimely, before the year had
really expired, before, that is, twelve months
had elapsed. Ah Heng, grubbing and gardening
at midday as usual, had straightened his back
an instant, and discerned, bobbing up and down
a quarter of a mile away, a white helmet and a
straw hat above the sea of lalang grass. And
AH HENG mi
he saw — could he believe his eyes ? Yes, he did
see a red patch behind them. Certainly it was
the cap of the triply accursed little attendant.
This was dreadful. Why had they come so early ?
Had Ah Heng made a mistake ? He flung down
the hoe and ran across his precious garden produce
to the house. There he consulted the missionary
almanac, drawn up in Chinese for the better
reaching of the heathen. No, he had made no
mistake. The day upon which last year they had
come was far distant. Yet his Philistines were
even now upon him. Wee Neo inquired the cause
of this agitation, and he told her. She said
nothing, but put more hot water into the tea-
pot, and Ah Heng went out to confront the
enemy.
He took up the hoe again, and bent himself
to the gardening. The enemy came on. They
wound in and they wound out, they took the
wrong path and retraced it. At length they were
so close that Ah Heng could hear the peon
rending sugar-cane with his strong white teeth.
A pang shot through Ah Heng's heart. Yes,
he would infallibly lose all. Certainly luck was
against him. Sugar-cane would be taken, and
io* THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
the extra fifty cents for certain. How new that
belt looked ! Why had not the ubi grown
thicker ? And then — the white man said some-
thing to the clerk, and they moved past Ah Heng
to the house. The peon gazed upon Ah Heng
with a lack-lustre eye, but an evil gleam came
into it. The memory of those sticks of cane
came across the boy. Would he not make it hot
for the accursed pig Chinese ? But he followed
his master, and Ah Heng trailed after them.
The procession stopped at the door of the house
and Wee Neo came forth, smiling all over. She
had a pleasant, comely look, and the white man
asked her for a chair, and said he would stop
and take his food there. Wee Neo offered him a
sticky Chinese cake, which he firmly declined ;
tea, and he waived it aside ; water, and he
appeared to shudder. But he sat down on the
chair in the shade of the house and spoke to
the clerk.
Wee Neo and Ah Heng watched him producing
a jargon of barbarous sounds and knew nothing
of what he said, but it was as follows : " Which
one is this ? Have you the number ? ' The
clerk turned to Ah Heng and asked for last year's
<<
((
tt
tl
AH HENG 103
permit. Ah Heng produced it. " Well, how
much does it show ? " queried the white man.
Two dollars," said the clerk.
Tell him to pay it then."
Boh, boh, boh," said Ah Heng.
Ask him what he means by saying ' boh '
(no)," said the white man.
Wee Neo hastily interpreted in Malay, " Belum
bulan lagi."
" What does she mean ? " the white man said.
" Not yet one month ? I came to collect two
dollars, not to talk about it."
" She means," stated the clerk, " that the
month in which we came last year has not come
round again."
" Tell her I don't know anything about
months," said the white man. " Their rent is
due from the beginning of this year. Tell them
the Government year is different from the Chinese
year. Tell them I want the money paid. They
always say the same thing, and never seem to
learn anything. I seem to remember this man
before."
The clerk translated to Ah Heng, who beamed,
pretending great satisfaction at being recognised,
104 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
and talked long and learnedly about months
and years to the clerk. Meanwhile the white
man munched his sandwiches. The peon had
not been idle, and, under cover of the discussion,
had wandered round the house. A chopping
sound struck upon the white man. He listened.
" That little waster, Babujee, at it again ! I
believe he would eat an acre of sugar-cane.
Babujee ! "
" Tuan ! " answered Babujee innocently.
" Come here ; what are you doing ? "
" Nothing, Tuan."
" Nothing ! " ejaculated the white man ; " you
were cutting sugar-cane. How often have I
told you to leave it alone ? Go inside and sit
down."
Babujee, looking sulky, retreated into the
house, but Wee Neo had noticed what had
happened and she offered him tea, also a cake.
The peon deigned to accept these, and Wee Neo
said she did not mind his taking sugar-cane.
'* It's only one cent a stick," growled Babujee.
" Orang China saiang duit. The Chinese are
fond of money."
Meanwhile the wrangling between the clerk and
AH HENG 105
Ah Heng had proceeded, the white man paying
little attention to it. Ah Heng always protested
like this, and now the white man began to re-
member the place. " There was no woman,
though, last time I came," he said to himself,
" and somehow the garden looks bigger. Ah
Heng has been taking in an inch extra of land,
I suppose." The sandwiches were finished, and
the white man prepared to make a move. He
had started at seven, and was getting a little sick
of it.
" Have you got the money ? " he asked.
" No," said the clerk, " he says he hasn't got
it."
" Tell him I know he has it, and I have not
come all this way for nothing. Tell him I am
going now, and I want those two dollars."
Stretching himself and putting on his sun
helmet again the white man went forth and the
peon followed. "This garden is bigger than it
was last year," remarked the peon ; and meeting
no answer, he continued, " This is a larger
garden now."
The white man smiled to himself, and turning
to Babujee said simply, " Don't talk so much."
106 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
The plain upon which stands Kuala Lumpur,
the capital of Federated Malaya, danced shim-
mering in the heated air before the white
man's gaze. Ah Heng and the clerk chattered
Chinese behind him ; in front stretched a great
waste of stiff, high lalang grass. On an extreme
edge lay Kuala Lumpur, climbing up the hills,
here and there a white bungalow, showing out
from amongst the greedy vegetation kept under
partial control. The Chinese town lay upon the
edge of the plain itself, and between it and the
hills on which the white residents lived, ran the
river, bridged at intervals with the bridges that
grew and broadened with the ever-increasing
population of the town. The atmosphere was
clean and no defiling smoke rose from the town,
for fires are not necessary in the warm Malayan
climate. Ah Heng's house lay almost in the
centre of the plain, and from it could be seen the
range of low hills bordering the outlook. The
hills had trees and jungle upon them, save where
in patches the busy miner had scored their
sides, dug wealth or ruin from the desolation
he had made, and left his working to be decently
clothed by the ever-ready lalang. Some of
AH HENG 107
the patches had been made by dead-and-gone
cultivators, people of the several races and tongues
who had grown something — now long since dead
— upon the slopes, and had then either realised
their possession and gone elsewhere or had
given up cultivation. In places the jungle had
swallowed the insult put upon it by the miner
and the cultivator, and was engaged in spread-
ing itself over the lalang-covered wastes. But
the process was slow, and, spreading from the
hills downward, had as yet left the flatness of
the plain unrelieved. Any change in that dull
monotony of grass was welcome, and the white
man glanced towards a clump of coconuts about
a mile away where at any rate was shade and
the road to the town. He began to be annoyed
with the unreasonable householder behind him,
and, resolved on strong measures, turned to the
house again.
But Ah Heng had allowed his intelligence to
be pervaded at last with the idea that the sum
of two dollars had to be paid then and there,
and had actually produced it. The receipt-book
was brought forward, and the precious counter-
foil made out, signed by the clerk, and signed
108 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
again by the white man. It was torn off and
presented to Ah Heng, who held it gingerly in
two earth-brown hands.
Then the little party went away, and Ah Heng
and his partner were at last in peace, and alone.
They congratulated each other. Ah Heng
smiled ; so did Wee Neo ; then both glanced
towards the fringe of their cultivation, as if,
perhaps, not having paid anything extra for it,
they should find it suddenly blighted by lalang,
as it had been a few weeks ago. But there it
was, and nothing extra had been paid. Ah
Heng said, " We need not have been afraid, for
none of them noticed it." But Wee Neo was
wiser, and, with her slight knowledge of Malay,
had understood the peon's malevolent prompt-
ings to his master. She related what had been
said. Ah Heng chuckled over his little foe's
discomfiture, but to this day he considers that
particular white foreigner to be a fool ; for Ah
Heng's perception is compacted of small mean-
nesses, and by his own measure he metes others.
VIII
THE SINKING OF THE SCHOONER
I
F a man hold the outer gate, shall he not
tax those who would leave the city ? "
Such was the principle upon which my
present friend, the former pirate, guided his
conduct in the days before the white man dis-
couraged the pirate industry. My friend regrets
those old days, but being now known as re-
generate, if not by faith, at least by force, he is
not shy of speaking of them. Sometimes, I
think, the recollection of his former valorous
deeds outruns the sense of truth which should
appear in their telling, but he knows that I have
little, or nothing, of knowledge which might
serve as touchstone of his veracity. I have
never sought to check his tales by any cold-drawn,
chill application of the principles of evidence,
and I have been rewarded. Faith, childlike in
109
no THE MAGIC 0* MALAYA
its ingenuousness, flattering in its application,
has ever been my method, and he finds some
subtle compliment in my patient receptivity.
One day I went with him down the river to look
at certain agricultural developments from which
he expected, or hoped it to be believed that he
expected, great profits, both to himself and
others. I remember that I was not so sincerely
enthusiastic as perhaps I might harmlessly have
been. A polite distrust, appearing probably in
my manner only, combined with a somewhat
ironical deference to his mature judgment in
such matters, seemed to have made itself more
felt between us than I had thought possible.
Perhaps I should not have quoted, in meditative
fashion, a certain Malay quatrain about strangers
and birds, how both will fly whither they list
when the season is over ; his proposed settlers
were Banjarese, and they are not native to this
part of the country, though they will plant you
paddy better than most. But paddy has its
seasons, and is no more permanent than the
Banjarese.
Piqued at my attitude, he appeared, as we
returned against the tide, to be anxious to make
THE SINKING OF THE SCHOONER in
himself valued, if not for his experience of agri-
culture and certain classes of agriculturists,
at least for his experience of war. Mark you,
I am a man of peace, one following, and having
ever followed, a quiet life. I have not fought, or
slaughtered many, nor have I known the lust of
battle, or even taken share in ambushes, saving
those directed against an animal. Therefore
I know little of what this man and his band ma)
have felt as they trained their gun upon the point
which the tide-drawn schooner must round at
length on her slow way up the winding river.
But he did his best to make it clear, and when he
had finished I felt, if not indeed a regret that I
had not been on his side, at least a thankfulness
that I had not been in the schooner on that
occasion. What her exact mission in these
waters was, who owned her, and why he risked
her so far up the river was not very clear, but she
was an armed craft and had probably been sent
to bring away a load of tin by collusion with
one of the warring factions which distracted the
country in those old days. Her hold was never
destined to receive that cargo.
We passed a point, the end of a long reach,
ii2 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
and here, said my friend, was the ambush and
its gun. He pointed out the exact spot, showing
where a chain, or some kind of primitive boom,
had been stretched across the river, invisible at
a fitting tide, cunningly contrived, lovingly set
forth at right level. My mind figured to me the
schooner. Could I not see her, the blind thing
drifting with the tide-run, catching the current on
her stern as she rounded the points, sails set and
flapping, now bellying to a puff of breeze, anon
drooping and languid ? Her steersman staring at
the haze a-dance up the river feels an enormous
anxiety. On his head be it if she grounds and
is attacked at low water. Could he not wish,
fantastic thought, to spy round the corners, to
know, or ever he turned her for the point, what
the next reach would bring forth ? And her
crew — Malays to a man, the so-called bloody
pirates of the Peninsula. Fair-spoken, civil-
dealing gentlemen when not afloat ; fathers of
families, perhaps, some of them ; others with
youth's hot blood pumping in the veins, half
longing that the river passage should be disputed
by the enemy and spoiling, blind as the fool's
heart, for a fight. Her captain, honest man,
THE SINKING OF THE SCHOONER 113
this trip shall make or mar him. Has he not
been retained, at a great fee, for this service ?
May not he depend upon his crew to see that
the fat Chinese, who mentioned that certain sum,
pays to the uttermost fraction of a dollar ? But
her pilot, the man whom they pressed into an
unwilling service, the harmless river fisherman
caught in his dug-out creeping down the river
to visit the fish-traps — of what are his thoughts ?
That stake, gyrating in the water-sway, marks
the spot where is a fish-trap. That fish-trap is
his. When he first set it, his little son went
with him, that the child should learn to follow
his father's arts. And now — he must act as pilot,
and well the captain knows that he will pilot
aright. Such is his one point of safety if he
would see his home, his wife, and little ones again.
What cares he for tin and the winning thereof ?
What knows he of schooners and their sinking ?
Yet will he know soon, for Rantau Panjang, the
long reach, opens out to view. At the upper end
of that reach is the boom, the gun, the gun's
crew, and the ambuscade. Blundering round the
lower point of the reach, the schooner gropes
upstream, as near the middle as may be, and
8
H4 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
with little show of animation. But a short way
up a breeze is blowing, and she catches it fair.
Ripple runs the water from her bows, and at a
fair pace she sets towards destruction.
Those in the ambuscade congratulated each
other. The gun's crew felt nervous, but confident
of a grand mark of aim when the vessel should
strike the boom. Was it not so contrived that
she should hang on it helpless, and give time for
the training of their cumbrous weapon ? Such
indeed was the upshot. On she came, not
without some air of swashbuckling, swaggering,
ignorant, to her undoing. Suddenly her swift
course was arrested ; she hung amazed against
this obstruction ; the gun boomed heavily ;
the musketry opened irregular fire ; and the
schooner, recoiling from the shock with a large
rent in her vitals, settled in mid-river.
I did not inquire what became of her crew,
nor was my friend a volunteer of any further
information. But he told me, and I confess
that I heard it with a certain sense of satisfaction,
that the gun, restive under its heavy charge, had
plunged from the bank into the river, and was
there yet.
IX
EXCEEDINGLY VENOMOUS
** A. T T A TT I "
A
LLAH ! " ejaculated Mahomed of
Palembang, as he leapt for the
bows of the boat, causing her to
rock violently even in that smooth sea, and
" ," an obscene oath came from Hit am,
as he plunged for the stern, and lighting on or
about the stern-post gathered up his feet under
him. I looked up mildly from my task of sorting
fish from meshes and meshes from fish. Both
men were glowering at something in the bottom
of the boat, not so far from my hands, and each
fingered nervously a fish-scale-covered knife.
" What is it ? " said I.
" Snake," they replied, two in a breath.
" Snake ? " I queried, and naturally, for sea-
snakes are common on the Malay coast.
" The worst snake in the sea/' said Mahomed
«s
n6 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
of Palembang. " There is no worse. Exceedingly
venomous. Most poisonous."
I looked down again, and there, writhing forth
from among the fish, the scales, the mesh, and the
sea-washed gear beneath my feet, was indeed a
snake, such as we had caught many, and having
caught, tossed overboard again on the flat of a
parang. But having no natural sympathy with
serpents, I even dealt this one a slashing blow
behind the head, and he was snake no longer.
Seeing him harmless, the two men descended from
their perches, and sorting with solemn care the
wriggling pieces of the worst snake in the sea,
they committed them to the deep. This cere-
mony over, Hitam remarked, somewhat shame-
facedly :
" I was not a little startled."
You look it," said I.
And I also," added Mahomed of Palembang.
" That snake was of the most poisonous breed.
Moreover, now, at the beginning of the monsoon,
they are all more venomous than usual."
" It seemed to me," I said, as I continued the
fish-and-net-sorting process, " that was like most
snakes. A brown snake, a mottled snake, a
<<
(<
EXCEEDINGLY VENOMOUS 117
head and tail alike serpent — are they not all
much the same ? "
" The Tuan does not know that snake's race,"
said Hit am. " Amongst snakes he is peculiar,
and as Mahomed of Palembang has said,
exceedingly venomous."
I knew that the landward Malay will always
assure you that the snake twisted in death at your
feet is the most poisonous of his kind, and the
thinner, the more whip-like it is, the more they
will persist in endowing it with all the evil
qualities. But these men dwelling by the sea,
making a livelihood out of its waters, were accus-
tomed to snakes, and I had never seen them so
put about by a snake before. So I said, " Tell
me the history of this serpent."
Hitam, not being absolutely averse to the
sound of his own voice, as I had long ago learnt,
started to tell the tale of the ular gleri.
" The python," said Hitam, " the largest
snake there is, — the Tuan has seen the snake ? " —
I nodded, — " was once very venomous. If he
bit a man, that man went away and died, or
he died without going away. The python, being
equally dangerous to mankind and animals alike,
n8 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
got a wide berth from both. So the python,
rejoicing in his venom, and being respected by
all his acquaintance, had a mind to have a fish-
pond of his own. Therefore he found him a fish-
pond in the jungle, well stocked with fish, and at
the edge of that fish-pond he lay, so that none
dared approach into it. And having eaten
many large fish out of the pond, he would at
times go away to sleep in the jungle, leaving the
pond to take care of itself. He was well assured
that no one in the world would steal his fish,
since the fear of the venom of the python was
with all creatures. Yet one day, having slept
and feeling hungry, he returned to the pond,
on whose banks he saw a man. The man was
fishing. Now the heart of the python grew hot
against the man who fished even before his eyes.
So he spake to the man and said, ' What are you
doing here ? ' though he knew well that the
man was fishing. The man answered, ' Your
slave is fishing for fish, and if my lord like it
not, my lord's slave asks pardon for fishing.' ' It
mislikes me,' replied the python, and at the word
he bit the man in the thigh. The man being a
strong man, Tuan, ran into the jungle, and so
EXCEEDINGLY VENOMOUS 119
writhed along a path homeward, where he fell
against the steps of his house and there died.
He being dead was afterwards buried.
" The python brooded over the pond, and
selecting the largest fish, ate it slowly, whilst
all the time he thought that no other man would
fish in his pond. After eating he went away
to sleep. Next day coming again to the pond,
he saw a crow upon the bank. The crow, perch-
ing impudently upon a fish-head, was picking
at the eyes. The python came close to him and
said, ' Very bold are you to eat at my pond
where I bit a man but yesterday. Is not that
man dead ? And shall you not also die ? What
do you here ? ' But the crow leered at him and
said, ' The man dead ? Dead ? Dead indeed ?
And what do I do here ? Here ? I await the
feast.' Then the python was very angry, and
said within himself, ' If this crow is awaiting
the feast, the man whom I bit yesterday is not
dead, and my venom in which I trusted is a poor
thing. Surely the man is feasting to celebrate
his recovery and the crow will feast on the frag-
ments. I have no use for venom such as this.'
So he went away, and leaving the pond in the
120 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
possession of the crow, he struck through the high
jungle, and came out upon the seashore. Now
the tide was ebbing, and the python coming to
the edge of the sea, lay upon the sand and spat
forth venom into the sea. The sea-snakes also
came close and said, ' Is not this our relation
the python ? ' To them the python answered,
4 It is I — having no use for this venom, I dis-
charge it into the sea.' Then the sea-snakes
swam together, so that each got a little. But
the ular gleri, being a cunning serpent, took
the largest gobbet. Therefore he and his kindred
after him are the most venomous amongst all the
snakes of the sea/'
Here Hit am paused, and I asked, " But why is
the ular gleri most venomous at the beginning
of the monsoon ? "
" Because," said Hitam patiently, and
Mahomed of Palembang nodded, " it was at the
beginning of the monsoon, a long time ago, that
the python spat his poison into the sea."
o
X
THE MALAY SERVANT
F all the hopeless wasters I ever
struck, this man is the most
hopeless."
" Yes, he has been with me about ten years
now. That child was born when he first came.
I should feel quite uncomfortable without him."
Two different judgments by two different
people passed on two different Malay servants.
They are the type and essence of the general
judgment on the Malay as a servant, and inasmuch
as the evil that " boys " do lives in the memory
after they have departed, and also because it is
easier to damn than to find grounds for blessing,
the first judgment is the most popular. It seems
to be based on the following considerations.
The Malay servant who is a failure will usually
be found to have some such qualifications for
121
122 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
serving a white man as the following. He is
young and unmarried ; therefore he follows after
the flirtatious Malay women of the neighbourhood,
and when his Tuan calls he "is not." He comes
from some remote kampong to which he knows
he can return if he is incontinently flung out by
the enraged white man. Therefore he takes no
thought for the morrow. He is fond of finery,
and his wages do not run to finery. Therefore
he wears his master's things, and is honestly
amazed when the Tuan goes about to beat him
for it. He is lazy by nature of his race. There-
fore he shirks work of all kinds, not seeing the
necessity for it when it can be avoided. He
does not understand the white man's accent.
Therefore he drives his Tuan into frequent furies
by saying " Ta'tau," or worse still, " Ta'taulah."
He does not realise that most people rather fancy
their Malay accent if they speak with the meanest
facility. Again, domestic service under a foreign
race is really quite a new thing in his country,
and he rather despises it. Indeed, he is full
of self-pity at having come down to such a job.
So his heart is not in it, and that reacts on his
work. His master probably takes no interest
THE MALAY SERVANT 123
in him, never praises good work, but is quick
to blame. So that his first and most enduring
impression of a white master is a person who
causelessly flies into rages. He does not under-
stand, and his master never thinks of explaining,
that the white men of this country are at work
all day long and want automata for servants,
silent machines who work with precision, not
erratic personalities who are human.
So finally he gives it up in despair, and drifts
along from one master to another, lazier, stupider,
more shiftless, more apt to try to borrow money,
until probably he becomes a peon in an office.
That is not work which demands energy or even
intelligence. It does demand punctuality and
dispatch. As our young friend cannot command
these, he is finally fired out of half a dozen peon-
ships, and retires from a stage which never had
much use for him. It is idle to wonder what
becomes of him, but bullock driving is probably
his end.
There is, happily for some of us, another kind
of Malay boy. He is of a certain age, married,
with children. Therefore he has given hostage
to fortune. Unlike the bachelor boy, if he is out
124 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
of a job, he has no lady-love to keep him. And
he would be ashamed to return home with
wife and children, a confessed failure. His wife
rubs that in. Her sister So-and-so wears jewellery
costing such-and-such, and her husband earned
it for her. Her other sister lives in a very fine
house with a beautiful kampong. Her husband
worked for it. She alone is ashamed before her
sisters since her husband cannot compete with
his brothers-in-law. So the married Malay
servant does not lightly fling up his situation and
his scrapes together. He stays on, and if his
Tuan curses him, he amends. Gradually he
grows to realise that his wages " paid regular "
are worth having. He begins to wonder if he
can decently ask for more. Each addition to his
family is a reason for an increase, each year of
service is the same. Gradually he learns to
understand his master, in spite of the extra-
ordinary white man accent. Understanding his
speech, he perceives that his Tuan's actions are
governed by reason such as governs his own.
Finally he even begins to doubt whether his own
master is so incurably crazy as people make out
all white men to be. When he has reached this
THE MALAY SERVANT 125
stage he should be carefully preserved, for he has
advantages. To begin with, he and his employer
can converse in a language understanded of both,
and native to at least one of them. Herein
he is less trouble than servants of Chinese nation-
ality, to learn whose language is reputed to send
men mad. Thus very few learn it, master and
man talking a hideous gibberish which leaves
room for a misunderstanding at every full stop,
not to mention the commas. Again, as the
servant has a wife and child, the master will
commonly consider the fact. Faults that would
break a bachelor are perhaps pardoned to the
man with children. Moreover, he is always on
the spot. His wife sees to that. He is not prone
to displaying elsewhere borrowed plumes, for his
wife sees to that too. Lazy he remains, but
experience teaches him how lazy he can be and
'scape slanging. In time his Tuan believes in him
as a rather hard-working fellow, and will resent
comments such as, " That boy of yours has a soft
time of it, I should think/ ' In time the hard
edges of master and man are rubbed smooth.
They accommodate each other, appreciating each
other's foibles. The final result often is long years
126 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
of faithful service, terminated usually only by
the advent of the inevitable " mem." Before her
the boy, who has known how to manage his
master for years and give him a sufficient satis-
faction, at once quails. Her absurd notions,
her continual presence in the house, her irritating
knowledge of the details of house-cleaning, her
magnificent ignorance of his language, all go
to break up the Malay boy's traditions. He is
indeed a pearl without price who has served his
master man and boy, married and single. I
think, on careful reflection, I know of one such,
but of no more.
XI
THE BULLOCK-CART DRIVER
THE stupidity of the bullock is pro-
nounced ; so is the stupidity of his
driver. One of them whom I know
was brought to me as a substitute by a driver,
whose excuse for leaving was that he had to go
away to plant his paddy under pain of fine by
his District Officer. When I asked, " What is
the name of this man who is to succeed you ? "
the new man said " Tahir," and the old one
" Said." As there seemed to be some difference
of opinion and they began to dispute about it,
I let it go at " Said," and for months called the
man " Said." But he
"Answered to 'Hi' or any loud cry."
It is still uncertain what his name is, some
holding that it is " Aid," others that it is " Said."
I fancy the truth lies between them, and that
127
128 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
the real explanation is " Si- aid." The " Si "
prefix, according to the dictionary, i s " usually
half contemptuous or familiar. " Thus probably
" Si-aid " means "That Aid fellow." The
practice of giving oneself a name easily pro-
nounced is common amongst Malays. " Sehidin,"
for instance, will call himse ir " Mat," which he
imagines simplifies matters, though one would
think that it would lead to a maddening con-
fusion in a country where " Mat " is by a long
way the commonest name.
" Who drives fat cattle should himself be fat,"
is perhaps a good maxim. " Who drives stupid
cattle should himself be stupid " is, on analogy,
a sound proposition. Yet at times it is trying,
very trying, in results.
" Take Wahap's bicycle and my luggage in the
cart to the 25th mile."
Answer, " Tuan."
" What are you going to take, now ? "
" Take Wahap, as you said, Tuan."
"Who said Wahap? What I said was"—
and so on, until he gets it right and can repeat
it. But you must send some one else to see that
he does take the bicycle and does not take Wahap,
THE BULLOCK-CART DRIVER 129
or he will infallibly come back to say that Wahap
contumacious-" refuses to go, flatly in defiance
of orders which you gave, which is a shocking
thing, a thing abominable, and what is he to
do now ?
There is a primeval simplicity about the conduct
of the bullock - Mr and his bullocks which has
an unholy fascination for me. I catch myself
wishing I was a bullock-cart driver. What an
absolutely ideal life it is ! They move along,
thinking of nothing at all, a unit in a long string
of carts, all moving along, thinking of nothing at
all. The first carter meets a friend on the road,
and stops for a chat. Five-and-twenty other
carters stop also, though they have no interest
in the conversation and cannot hear a word of
it. One driver lights a cigarette, another goes
really to sleep as a change from the cat-naps
in which he has been indulging. A third
lifts an arm, disengages a bottle from its sling
under the tilt and takes a drink of water.
Yet another wakes up and goes to sleep again.
The bullocks meditate, glad, as a bullock always
is, to stand still. In the distance appears a
Tuan driving a large yellow horse in a high
9
130 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
red dogcart, his sais bawling horrid yells at
the carts still a hundred yards away. The first
driver thinks it is time to get a move on him.
He kicks one bullock with his right foot, and
pokes the outstretched fingers of his left hand
at the haunches of the other. The bullocks
resent the hasty impulse. They shy across the
road. Frantic exertions, curses on the mothers
of both bullocks, and a wild beating and kicking
move them to the near side. The Tuan drives
past. You can see him swearing with persistence.
He gets down the line to half-way and finds that
the original impulse from the head has not
reached the middle. He comes to a full stop.
There are words. Deeds have been known on
such occasions. The bullock-cart driver who
knows his business usually sidles off his perch
on the pole and alights on the near side where
the whip may not reach him. The real culprit,
the first driver, cranes round the cart at the
head of the line, smiling a far-away smile. It
is none of his business. How stupid are those
fellows behind, thinks he.
The Malay bullock-cart driver sees a good deal
of his corner of the world. He can go from
THE BULLOCK-CART DRIVER 131
Malacca to Pahang, and take just as long as
he likes about it. Unless some evilly disposed
person of the baser sort steals his lamp or his
yoke-pin, nothing need stop him. He may crawl
about the country at his own will, so long as
he has a number, an unobscured number. Ad-
ventures are open to him, and his Peninsula is
before him. Some men take their wives on
these trips, and children, peeping from inside
the cart like birds in a cage, with eyes as bright.
The lady often reclines at her ease in a hammock
under the tilt, sleeping continuously, which is
probably a very suitable form of exercise for one
of her race in this country. Anyhow, up there
she is out of mischief. They all live on the land.
The bullocks eat anybody's grass and most
people's tender young trees. The moving tent
is nightly pitched at the side of the road. A fire
is lit close to the wheels. The pot heats and the
rice swells in it. The savour of herbs, unknown
to the white man, rises gratefully to the nostrils
of the family party squatting on, in, and beneath
the cart. The bullocks, tied to the pole, lose
themselves in an ecstasy of stupidity. The
children squabble over the pisang which they
132 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
have begged or conveyed from a neighbour-
ing garden. A peaceful scene and a common,
too common to be often remarked. But it has
its points. We toil and fret and drive ourselves
and anybody else who is foolish enough to be
driven, and then go home to die hastily. We
watch other races doing the same, and applaud
them, saying, " How splendid it is to see such
energy in this enervating climate. How thrice
blest is it to put the steam-roller over every-
thing, including ourselves If all be flat, our-
selves not excluded, is it not really quite
magnificent ? " That is all vieux jeu to the
Malay. He knows it is all very well for
people who bring a store of energy from else-
where, from a bracing northern climate, expend
it, renew it again, and so pass. But it is
not for him. He has to live, and his race has
succeeded in living, in the country. He hopes
his children will do the same. But none of
them have done or will do it strenuously. I
fancy they tried it ages ago. I can imagine
them energetic once. Then arose a prophetic
spirit who said, " Go to, and cut your coat accord-
ing to your cloth," which they have done ever
THE BULLOCK-CART DRIVER 133
since, possibly with unnecessary emphasis at
times.
" If you think," said the driver, " that I can
knock more than two miles an hour out of
bullocks carting bricks, you are mistaken.' 1
Expostulations come from the Tamil overseer.
Two journeys a day, not less, was what he was
paid for. " One," said the driver, " is all I care
for. I fancy the bullocks think it too much.
But the best of everything is good enough for
me. I will take it in dollars and go away if you
like." As all his co-carters agree that he is in
a sound position, and carts are scarce, he gets his
one journey a day allowed. Does he rejoice ?
I think not. It is a matter of such absolute
indifference.
" One journey and I make twenty dollars a
month. Two journeys and I make thirty.
Difference, ten dollars. What use have I for
ten dollars ? What became of the last ten ?
Supposing I were rich beyond the dreams of
avarice how am I profited ? I was born in my
kampong, I shall die there. I have upkept it,
as my father did. He planted fifteen coconuts.
So have I."
134 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
The limit of effort is reached, and he is content.
Content with so little ! How much happier he
would be if he were discontented ! The only
thing about it that matters is that he does not
think so.
XII
THE SHOAL OF THE SKULL
ON a lonely stretch of the West coast of
the Malay Peninsula there is a creek
called Sungei Beting Tengkorak, or
"The River of the Shoal of the Skull." The
little river itself runs, from the point where it
leaves the firm ground, for some three miles
through the characteristic mangrove swamp of
the Peninsula. At high tide it seems little
more than a channel in the mangrove ; at low
tide it is a small stream of water running hurriedly
between banks of the grey and noisome mangrove
mud. At high tide the sea comes up and floods
the mangrove swamp, hiding half its horrors ;
at low tide a vast mud flat extends beyond the
mangrove fringe some two miles out to sea. Not
a pleasant neighbourhood, but in the old piratical
days those who lived up the little stream felt
135
136 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
secure in the conviction that even if they had a
difficulty in getting to the sea, the sea rover had
at least greater difficulty in getting to them.
Thus the firm ground beyond the mangrove
curtain had a value, and this is why the ancestors
of those who lived there now chose the place to
dwell in. But the white man's coming soon put
a stop to all piracy, and the settlement soon
found its proper level as a wretched little place
where, if the coconut palms grew well, their
owners took little profit from them, since they
had no market within reach where they could
dispose of the nuts. Gradually, therefore, the
families dwindled. Some departed in a body ;
some lost now one member and now another,
until those who were left numbered but twelve
souls in all, and only two houses still stood
amongst the neglected coconuts.
Che Kasim and Che Abu were the two heads
of families, both being married men. Che Kasim
had five children, the eldest a boy of twelve.
Che Abu and his wife had three small children.
Both men were of that strange type of Malay
which lives and moves and has its being only,
doing as little as possible, thinking as little as
THE SHOAL OF THE SKULL 137
possible, almost without vices until some ancient
curse of the race begins to stir and work within
them, and they look upon a woman to lust after
her in their hearts. Abu was the younger man,
and he had always lived on good terms with his
neighbour Kasim, taking no account of his neigh-
bour's wife, Kalij ah. He had been at Kasim's
wedding, and Kasim had been at his, and neither
had, until the date of this tragedy, thought with
an evil longing of the other's wife.
Began then the old story of intrigue, mad
passion, and horror at the last, so commonplace
that it scarce needs telling. Living as the two
did so close together, their opportunities for
keeping the unsuspecting Kasim in total ignorance
were many. Did he go fishing in the creek, taking
some of the children with him, how should he
suspect that his wife met his friend under the
coconuts whilst he was away ? What, indeed, was
there in his wife to tempt his friend ? — for the
Malay woman of thirty rarely retains her looks,
and Kalij ah was no exception to this rule. Abu's
wife, too, never had suspicion. Her children
occupied her, for she loved them, and they were
little ones as yet.
138 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
For Malays, however, there is always one, and
that a satisfactory explanation of the strange and
almost impossible. Living as their race has done
for centuries, only slightly affected by their
profession of the religion of Islam, there is
amongst them a great mass and body of super-
stitious practices and observances in which they
really believe. In this, then, they sought for
an explanation, and they needed not to seek long.
It was pointed out, after the tragedy, that living
under Kasim's house was a black pariah dog,
and that in the house itself there lived a black
cat. Moreover, near the house there grew a tree
whose leaves may be used in magic charms, and
the simple explanation then was that Kalijah
had taken hairs from the right whisker of the
black cat and hairs from the left whisker of the
black dog, mingled these with the leaves, made
over them the necessary incantation, and managed
to introduce the potion amongst food which her
lover Abu took. Thus Abu's heart was turned
from his wife, and he was at once under the
spell of Kalijah.
For months, as the woman confessed after-
wards, they deceived the other two, and for
THE SHOAL OF THE SKULL 139
months the tragedy to come brooded over the
little settlement, but at length the strain proved
too much for the man, and he could no longer
bear to put off the catastrophe inevitable. He was
not jealous of Kasim, but he could not give up
Kasim's wife, and he knew that some day recog-
nition would come to Kasim in a flash, and —
Abu was a coward at heart. The Malay who
lives still far away from the influence of the
white rule, still avenges his honour in the old
sharp fashion, and first he kills his wife with
the kris, and after he mingles her blood with
that of her lover.
Abu, then, was a coward and had a coward's
cunning. He dared not kill his friend himself,
but he knew how to urge the wife to murder her
husband. To her credit let it at least be said
that Kalijah resisted this last and dreadful
temptation for long. But at length Abu pre-
vailed, and once the resolution taken, the means
for carrying it out were easy. The end came
thus. Her husband returned on an evening from
looking at the fish traps in the little river, and
they all slept through the night as soundly as
only Malays can sleep. Kalijah slept too, and
140 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
why should she not ? The decision was taken,
nothing could avert the result, success was certain,
and — she slept. In the morning, with the first of
the dawn, Kasim and his wife awoke. He went
to the door, opened it, and stood shivering in his
single sarong at the top of the steps. Then
he began to go down. As he stood on the
top step his wife came behind him, and with
the long chopping-knife, the parang, which is
kept sharp in every Malay house, cut him with
a back-handed and a downward blow upon
the nape of the neck. He fell to the ground,
and she followed. Finding him still stirring,
an instant and a bloody fury came upon her,
so that she hacked and cut upon the helpless
body, as if she would hew it in pieces. The first
heavy blow had sunk deep into the neck, and in
her wild paroxysms she cut the head from the
trunk.
Then came revulsion, with perhaps exhaus-
tion, and looking up she saw upon the top step
her eldest son, staring at the scene with the
child wonder in his eyes. Happy was it for
him that he and the other children were not
attacked. Of this she never thought, but lifting
THE SHOAL OF THE SKULL 141
the mutilated and headless body, bore it forth
to the edge of the mangrove. Then she returned
to the house, taking thence a changkul, the
digging hoe of the country. With this she
buried the body, and then returned to the house.
The boy had disappeared, but the blank eyes
of her husband gazed upon her from the head
still lying upon the ground. She raised it, scarce
knowing what she did, and cast it into the stream
whose tide was ebbing fast. Then she went
back to the house.
Her son had gone straight to Abu's house,
and Abu, hearing his tale, and ever a coward,
told him to go to the headman who lived some
miles away. Then things took their usual
course. The police were informed, they came
and arrested Kalijah, and from her found out
what had happened. The only thing she would
not, perhaps could not, tell them was what she
had done with the head of her husband. Tried
and convicted in due course, she can interest
us no more, but there are yet to be traced the
wanderings of the husband's head.
Some time after all these occurrences certain
Chinese fishermen, aground on a shoal at the
142 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
mouth of the river, saw a round object, which
was not a coconut, or any easily recognisable
thing, lying on the mud at the mouth of the
little river. Having nothing else to do till the
tide rose, one of them waded in the mud, and
brought back to his companions all that re-
mained of the head which Kalijah had thrown
into the river.
XIII
MALACCA
THE earliest date to which the existence of
a town at Malacca can be assigned is
a little later than 1377 a.d., when the
Javanese drove a Malay dynasty out of Singapore
to settle eventually at Malacca. From Chinese
sources it can be established that in 1405 the
Malays sent to China from Malacca an embassy
which was doubtless intended to renew relations
existent between the Malays and the Chinese
before the Javanese invasion of Malay Singapore.
A hundred years of freedom from Javanese
attacks or, it may be, of successful repulse of
these, made of Malacca a flourishing town, whose
fame gradually grew great all over the East
Indies. When Vasco da Gama, Chief Captain
of the Portuguese, in 1498 reached Calicut
(Calcutta), doubtless he heard of Malacca, as
M3
144 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
would Afonso de Albuquerque, " Chief Captain
of three vessels," who set out on the 6th of April
1503, also for the Indies. But it was not until
1508 that Diogo Lopez de Siqueira, Chief Almo-
tacel of the kingdom of Portugal, " went to
explore the island of S. Lourenco, and not finding
therein the silver, cloves, and ginger that it was
reported to contain, passed over to explore the
island (sic) of Malacca." Four vessels formed
his fleet, and one returned with him safe to
Portugal, one to India, and two were destroyed.
In the commentaries of Albuquerque, written by
his son, it is related how Siqueira, whose con-
temporary portrait, by the way, shows him with
a most unmistakable Malacca cane walking-stick,
returned from Malacca " with his head broken,"
that is, with sixty of his four hundred men killed
or taken captives, and he himself having run
great risk of losing all his fleet, if it had not been
that he was advised in time of the treachery
which had been arranged against him. The
intention of the Malay King of Malacca had been
to seize the Portuguese Admiral, and all who
accompanied him on shore, at a banquet, but a
Javanese Malay woman, " the lover of one of our
MALACCA 145
mariners, came by night swimming to the ship,"
and she warned the little fleet.
The chroniclers of the time, and of later times,
are never weary of censuring the relations of the
Portuguese with the native women, " courting the
girls in the town," but in this case had it not
been for this romantic episode of the Javanese
lover of one of their mariners the first Portuguese
had infallibly been cut up in Malacca. Even
so she availed not to save them all, for the King
laid hands upon Ruy de Araujo, the factor, and
twenty other men who were with him on land
attending to the collection of cargo for the ships.
This, and probably losses on the voyage from
accident and disease, obliged Siqueira to burn
two of his ships because he had not hands
sufficient for their navigation and to sail away
from Malacca.
" To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an
infamous history." May we not imagine the
Malay heroine, first overhearing some scrap of
talk not meant for her, then weeping for the
probable death of her lover, then drying her
tears, and at nightfall plunging through the foul
mud of the mouth of Malacca River, feeling it
10
146 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
change from slime to water around her, knowing
it full of crocodiles, yet pressing on, through the
sea, for the lights of the four little ships twinkling
between the Ilha das Naos (Pulau Jawa), " within
a gunshot of the town," and the Ilha das Pedras
(Pulau Upeh), " beyond the range of gunshot,"
where the Portuguese carracks and galleons used
to anchor in four or five fathoms of water ?
When Albuquerque took Goa in 1510 the echo
of its fall and of its sacking reached as far as
Malacca, for Goa had been very much renowned
in all the parts and kingdoms of India, and it is
recorded that the Bendahara who governed the
kingdom of Malacca for the King, his nephew, lost
no time in providing his city with quantities of
supplies against the wrath to come, but, " with
his accustomed dissimulation and subtlety," he
tried to set himself right with the Portuguese
by visiting Ruy de Araujo and the other captives,
giving them better quarters and treatment, and
telling them that the tumult which had arisen
against the Portuguese was due to the Gujeratis
and Javanese, and that he himself desired very
much to be on friendly terms with the Portuguese,
and to see them carrying on a trade with Malacca.
MALACCA 147
Though it is not recorded, yet we may feel sure
that he prefaced his remarks in the usual Malay
manner by assuring them that he was a poor
creature but had a good heart. He went so far
as to provide the captives with money and some
of the trade goods of which they had been de-
spoiled, and to promise them a settlement of
their accounts and the making good of their
losses when the Portuguese ships should arrive.
The Portuguese seem to have thoroughly dis-
believed him, for they managed to send a message
by a trading junk to Albuquerque, begging him
for the love of God to keep them in remembrance,
and rescue them out of this captivity, and warning
him that if he should come to Malacca it ought
only to be with the greatest fleet possible, and
that on arrival he should show a friendly, rather
than a revengeful, spirit. In 151 1, Albuquerque
decided to go and winter at Malacca, and see if
he could chastise the Malays for the treason
which they had practised upon Siqueira, but he
carried instructions from Dom Manuel, King of
Portugal, that the commerce of Malacca should
not be destroyed. His arrival at Malacca must
have been a picturesque sight, for he reached
148 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
there one day at evening, the sun dying in the
west behind him, yet lighting up for the eyes of
those on shore his fleet all decked in flags. To
the roar of all his artillery saluting the city, and
to the plunge of all his anchors and rattle of his
cables the sun sank, and immediately there pushed
out a messenger from the King, bringing what
seemed to the Portuguese an " artful apology '
for things past. Of this, probably the most
acceptable part was the news that the Benda-
hara's head and his policy had been abolished
together.
Apparently he had not been allowed " the
honourable privilege of dying by the kris,"
and the Portuguese believed that he had really
perished in an attempted palace revolution, not
as a sop to them. For days and for weeks the
negotiations went on, the Malays at times com-
pleting their defences, urged on by harangues to
the effect that the Portuguese were renegades
and thieves, desirous of lording over the whole
world, and at times listening to the forebodings
of those who pointed their lamentations by asking
their hearers to look at the cannon, the men, and
the boats of the Portuguese just outside the port.
MALACCA 149
Meanwhile, Albuquerque and his fleet had ample
time to look at Malacca from the sea and to
wonder whether it was true, as people then said,
that the city from its small beginnings under its
first Malay king had become so noble that with
its suburbs it contained a hundred thousand
inhabitants and extended a good league's length
along the sea. But both parties were agreed on
one point, and that was that the port itself was
very safe, for there were no storms to injure it
and never a ship was lost there. It formed a
point where some monsoons begin and others
end, hence the Malay division of the peoples
of the world into those above the winds and
those below the winds, the West and the East.
They were also agreed that the place formed a
general mart of all nations and was well worth
a fight. So a fight it was, and upon the morning
of the 25th of July, the day of St. James the
Apostle, the fortunate day of Albuquerque's
patron saint, the day on which he had successfully
attacked Goa. Ruy de Araujo, handed over by
the Malays some weeks before, was asked his
opinion, and gave it that they should first attack
the bridge on the river, between the palaces of
150 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
King Muhammad on the hill and the houses of
that part of the city then known as Upeh. There
has always been a bridge at Malacca, shown in
all the old plans, and a bridge is there to-day.
The bridge lay, then, on the river, and looking at
it from the sea, as we may do from the seaward
end of the pier, the Portuguese saw on the right
or south the hill with its Malay palaces, and at the
hill-foot close to the bridge-head, also on the right,
was the mosque, a strong place kept by a garrison.
On the left or north of the bridge was the city,
its sea (west) and land (north) fronts protected
by those palisades which have given it the present
name of Tranquerah. Two hours before the
break of day Albuquerque ordered the trumpet
to be blown, and the landing party repaired
aboard his ship, where all made a general con-
fession and then set out together and came to
the mouth of the river just as morning broke.
Each battalion in its proper place, undaunted
by the first fury of the Malay artillery, they
raised the warcry of " Sanctiago," and with one
accord fell upon the stockades.
The mosque, in spite of the presence of the King,
mounted upon an elephant and his son upon
MALACCA 151
another, together with many other elephants
armed with wooden castles, fell almost at once,
thus delivering the works beyond the bridge-head
on the south to the Portuguese, and Albuquerque
on the north side of the bridge seized that head
also.
Poisoned darts, shot through "sarabatana " (the
Sakai sumpitan or blowpipe, of course), "espin-
gardas " (matchlocks), long spears and Malay
krises and swords, wounded many Portuguese,
and of those wounded by the poisoned arrows
but one escaped death. The bridge itself,
strongly stockaded, was held by the Tuan Bandar
and seven hundred Javanese who fell upon
Albuquerque's rear. He beat them off. The
Malay king and two thousand men, pursued up
the hill on the south, turned on the Portuguese,
but his own elephants charged the Malay force
and routed them, as is the unhappy habit of
the elephant.
The scene may be pictured thus : the elephants,
restive already, constitutionally averse to hurry-
ing, especially downhill, prodded on by their
gembalas, jolt down and down, get close enough
to be wounded, " and whereas elephants will not
152 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
bear with being wounded," they turn tail and
lumber uphill again, probably close by the site
of the present Stadthaus, gembalas tugging at
their ears with the angkus, and Malays on foot
frantically cursing them, their mothers, and their
remotest ancestry. The King's elephant, mad
with a mortal wound, seized its gembala with its
trunk and, roaring loudly, dashed him in pieces,
spitting the body on one tusk, setting a foot upon
head or legs, and then with an upward jerk
riving the man into two separate pieces, as still
at times happens in Malaya. The battle raged
until two in the afternoon, all through the hottest
hours of day, and as yet the men had not eaten
anything. The captains at length warned
Albuquerque that no more could that day be
done, and, carrying with them fifty captured
bombards, the Portuguese retired to their ships
after the setting of the sun.
For about a fortnight neither party attacked,
unless desultorily, the Malays using the time to
repair damages and the Portuguese occupying
themselves in fitting out a junk with which to
attack the bridge direct. The Javanese Utimuti
Raja or headman sent secretly to put himself
MALACCA 153
right with Albuquerque, and the Chinese asked
that the blockades might be raised so far as to
allow them to sail for China lest they should
lose the monsoon. Albuquerque took the oppor-
tunity of sending by them a letter to the King of
Siam. He then assembled his captains and made
a speech, in which he showed that once Malacca
city was gained, all the rest of the kingdom was
of so little account that the King would have not
a single Dlace left where he could rally his forces.
The city itself, he said, was the last headquarters
of all the spiceries and drugs of the world which
was not yet in Portuguese hands. If they took
Malacca, then " Cairo and Mecca are entirely
ruined, and to Venice will no spiceries be conveyed
except that which her merchants go and buy in
Portugal."
A great prize then, this Malacca, and Albu-
querque attacked it again in the spirit of those
who said, " Let us kill the heir and the inheritance
is ours." Identically the same reasons applied
to the capture of Malacca by the Dutch, and
would apply to the capture of Singapore, that
great trading-place, to-day.
The second attack soon gave the Portuguese
154 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
possession of the bridge, the key of the position,
for they had sent up the junk on a high tide
and it dominated the bridge-works. Having
secured the bridge, they covered it and the junk
with nipah atap thatching, for the sun was very
strong, and from this shelter they sallied forth
on either side, taking the mosque again, attacking
the palisaded area, both north and south, from
the inside, whilst the sailors along the shore
rowed up and down killing the fugitives who had
cast themselves into the sea. Night fell again,
and all through it a continual cannonade went on,
so that at length it was a terrible thing to look
upon the city, for, on account of the constant
bombardment, it seemed as if it were all on fire.
For ten more days the Portuguese so continued,
killing without intermission or remorse of slaughter
the miserable " Moors " (Malays), who from
the south side risked their lives to go and look
for food in the city on the north side. At
length the various headmen of the different races
came in for mercy, the Utimuti Raja of the
Javanese, and Ninachatu, head of the Hindus,
the latter assisted by Ruy de Araujo, to whom in
captivity he had shown kindness. Albuquerque
MALACCA 155
then realised his victory, and after the usual cus-
tom of those days gave permission to his men,
as a recompense for past labours, to sack the
city, allowing safe-conducts to all except the
Malays, who were to be put to death whereso-
ever they were found.
No certain evidence of the number slaughtered
is procurable, but it is stated in the " Commen-
taries " that " of the Moors, women and children,
there died by the sword an indefinite number, for
no quarter was given to any of them." Three
thousand pieces of artillery were taken, of which
two thousand in bronze, and one very large gun
which the King of Calicut had sent to the King
of Malacca. Large matchlocks, poisoned blow-
ing tubes, bows, arrows, armour-plated dresses,
Javanese lances, and other sorts of weapons — it
was marvellous what was taken, besides much
merchandise of every kind. The gunfounders
of Malacca in those days were as good as those
of Germany, it is related. For himself, Albu-
querque took only six large lions in bronze for
his own tomb, and to the King Dom Manuel and
the Queen Donna Maria he sent young girls of
all the races in the country ; but this unhappy
156 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
consignment never reached Portugal, for all were
lost in the ship Floy de la Mar on the voyage back
to India. The early history of Portuguese explora-
tion is full of losses of ships, " so that if any of them
come safelie into Portingall it is onlie by the will
of God, for otherwise it were impossible to escape
because they ouer lade them and are so badly
prouided otherwise, with little order among their
men : so that not one ship commeth ouer but
can shew of their great dangers by ouer lading,
want of necessaries and reparations of the ship,
together with unskilful saylers," as Linschoten
wrote nearly a century later.
The ill-fated King and his son drew off to wait
for his Laxamana, the Malay admiral who was
south of Malacca with a fleet, but as the Laxa-
mana never arrived, being too wary, and as
Albuquerque was evidently intending a per-
manent settlement in Malacca, the King withdrew
three days' march away. The party eventually
separated. The Prince stockaded himself, but
fled on the appearance of a Portuguese force,
abandoning much spoil for the Portuguese, amongst
it his palanquins, very rich, gilded, and painted,
and seven elephants, with their castles and hous-
MALACCA 157
ings. Reduced to a following of fifty men, the
King, the Prince, and their wives and children,
together again, but quarrelling with each other
over the loss of the kingdom, and suffering from
the discomforts of famine, shaped their journey for
the kingdom of Pahang on elephants, through a
deserted and marshy region.
Fifteen hundred slaves of the King, the Malays
rounded up by the Javanese, the people of
Ninachatu, " called Quilins and Chetins " (we
recognise the Kling and the Chetty), and the
Portuguese directing and aiding them, were all
set to work to build the very strong fortress,
" A Famosa," of stone and masonry discovered
in some ancient sepultures of bygone kings.
Of this, the Torre de Menagem or Castle-keep
was four stories high. Artillery on this tower
would dominate the slope of the hill over against
it. Albuquerque also built a church, " Nossa
Senhora da Annunciada," later called St. Paul's.
Thus did Europe knock upon a door of Asia
and with no uncertain hand.
The Portuguese, left by Albuquerque at
Malacca, were subjected during their tenure of
the place to perpetual attacks from the Malays,
158 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
who formed coalitions of the Johore Malays, the
Javanese, the Sumatra Malays, and even of
Malays from high up the east coast of the Penin-
sula, but against all they held their fortress of
Malacca and from it dominated the Malayan
East. The place was reckoned, for strength of
fortification and size, superior to any other in
the Indies ; it had been the seat of Malay kings
and the greatest mart of all those seas. It had
been a great prize to win when the Portuguese
took it, and at length the Dutch could no longer
endure it, still a great prize, to remain in Portu-
guese hands. With the naive self -righteousness
of those days, the Dutch historian Valentyn
records that the Portuguese " really could not
be astonished at the terrible destruction of this
town by war, famine, and pestilence (the three
scourges of which God so often makes use to
punish similar places), for they had led such an
incredibly godless life." However that may have
been, and whatever reasons moving them thereto,
the Dutch " resolved to attack in full force and,
if possible, to take that strong and famous town."
So Their Honours of the Honourable Company
entrusted the execution of this important business
MALACCA 159
to Serge ant-Major Adriean Antonissoon, an old,
experienced, and brave soldier. He left Batavia
in Java for Malacca in May 1640, and by June
was rigorously blockading. On 2nd August he
landed in Tranquerah and possessed himself of
all that suburb, but was brought up short in his
attack from it on the fortress by the river between
Tranquerah and the hill. From the north bank
of the river he battered the fortress with sixteen
24-pounders, and his ships, drawn up in a half-
moon on the seaside, harassed the Portuguese
with an uninterrupted cannonade, thereby killing
many people, but also, to the disgust of the
thrifty Hollanders, " wasting much powder and
lead." The Portuguese did not fail to reply
patiently and bravely from extraordinarily heavy
pieces on St. Paul's Hill, where Albuquerque
had built Nossa Senhora da Annunciada. Portu-
guese " pride and stubbornness " still lived in
Malacca, and several offers of what the Dutch
deemed " a reasonable capitulation " were re-
jected with contempt. Five months and many
remarkable encounters on sea and land passed
without the smallest improvement but with great
expenditure and loss on both sides, the Portuguese
160 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
hoping against hope for relief from Goa or a
raising of the siege by the Dutch.
Famine arose in the town and the Portuguese
expelled many women and children and all use-
less mouths. At length, at daybreak on the 14th
January 1641, six hundred and forty men of
the Dutch in three columns crossed the river
from Tranquerah, stormed the bastion Sam
Domingo (at the New Market of to-day), drove
the flying enemy along the walls to bastion Madre
de Dios, took that after a weak resistance, and
so successively round the fortress they seized the
small bastion, the Santiago bastion, the Curassa,
and the Hospital Bulwark, thus arriving at
Albuquerque's fort " A Famosa," or bastion Sam
Pedro. Here the Portuguese, their feet upon
the very stones of that Fortallessa Velha built
by Albuquerque, desperately rallied, and, with a
courage worthy of that notable warrior, kept
back the Dutch to the Hospital Bulwark, until
the then Dutch commander, Heer Kaartekoe,
and the Portuguese Governor, Manuel de Souza
Coutinho, arranged a capitulation. There was
no sacking of the town, and nothing was heard
of murder, brutality, or ravishing, for the Dutch
MALACCA 161
controlled their own men, and the Johore Malays,
who arrived to help the Dutch, when all was over,
were not allowed to enter the fortress. " Thus,
not without great loss of men and money to the
Honourable Company, we at last conquered that
famous strong and powerful mercantile place of
the Portuguese, the matchless Malacca, which they
had possessed one hundred and twenty years."
The Dutch, under Heer Johan van Twist, the
first Governor, at once began to set their posses-
sion in order, and in May 1641 were already
repairing the Sam Domingo bastion (renaming
it Victoria) and the bridge. They also began to
pick up all the threads of trade dropped by the
Portuguese, so that by 1726 they had no less than
thirty-eight trading stations on the coasts of the
Malay Peninsula. The capture of Malacca by
the Dutch was a blow fatal to the Portuguese,
and they never recovered their footing in Malaya.
The Dutch had a very uneasy time of it at
Malacca. Up to 1785 they were almost con-
tinually engaged with risings against them in
the interior of Malacca and threatened attacks
by the Malays upon the town itself. Of these,
the most successful was that led by Raja Haji,
11
i6a THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
who in 1784 got so near the city on the Tranquerah
side that he was killed bv a round shot fired from
the Dutch fleet at sea.
The first mention of the British at Malacca is
in 1641, when the English ship Anne arrived there
on 8th August, seven months after the Dutch
capture of the city and fortress, sailing again on
8th September for Palembang in Sumatra. This
was a trading ship. In 1785 the British obtained
a settlement in Penang, and occupied that " barren
and uninhabited island " on 12th August 1786.
The Dutch retained Malacca until August 1795,
when it surrendered to a British expedition after
a show of hostility which deceived no one. In
November 1795 it was considered to have been
held by the British for the Prince of Orange, who
was then H.S.H. William v., in strict alliance with
King George 111., but in 1818 the Dutch denied
that Malacca was to have been restored in 1803
at the Peace of Amiens. This peace was in-
operative, and the British held Malacca until
1 81 8, administering the law of Holland and seeing
carefully to it that all decrees were passed in the
names of Their High Mightinesses the States
General. On 21st September 1818 the British
MALACCA 163
Resident, Colonel Farquhar, handed back Malacca
to Dutch Commissioners, but in 1824 it was
finally ceded to Great Britain. In 1807, during
the English occupation, when they were anticipat-
ing the restoration of Malacca to the Dutch, the
English blew up the fortress in order to render
its recapture more easy should such necessity
subsequently arise. To destroy this fortress
which the Portuguese took thirty-six years to build
the British spent the large sum of 260,000 rupees.
" This being now removed, the houses are dis-
tinctly visible, and, by their modern appearance,
afford a pleasing contrast to the fine old ruin of the
church, dedicated by Albuquerque to the ' Visita-
tion of our Lady/ which crowns the summit."
With such " pleasing contrasts ' as these the
taste of later generations could well have dis-
pensed. " Nossa Senhora da Annunciada " and
an old gateway — nothing beside remains. Fortal-
lessa Velha, Baluartes Sam Domingo, Sam Pedro,
Madre de Dios, Santiago, Curassa — the pleasant-
sounding names of them and the romance that
clings to ancient story are all that are left to
us of that part-religious, part-commercial, part-
military furor of the Portuguese which gave them
1 64 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
being. Recall him once again — Afonso de Albu-
querque, " this great Captain, a man of middle
stature, with a long face, fresh-coloured, the nose
somewhat large, greatly feared yet greatly loved,
very valiant and favoured by fortune, very
honourable in his manner of life, and his greatest
oath which he ever took when he was very much
annoyed, ' Curse my life,' who on his death-bed,
writing to his King Dom Manuel, set down, ' As
for the affairs of India I say nothing, for they will
speak for themselves and for me.' " The city and
fortress of Malacca indeed spake with a loud voice
for him nigh three hundred years. After four
centuries they are almost silenced, or speak at
most in whispers. To hear them we must mount
the hill and, facing to the setting sun, call up
the galleons and carracks of Albuquerque to lie
beyond the river mouth ; look down to the river
below the bridge, and call up the stones of Fort-
allessa Velha, " A Famosa," till the crest of its
Torre de Menagem rises to meet us. It may be
that as they fade again we shall glimpse on a
far horizon the ill-fated Flor de la Mar, sailing
into the sun's path and bearing Albuquerque and
his fortunes from Malacca,
XIV
A BERI-BERI HOSPITAL
THE Doctor was to come down to the
port by the midday train, and the
beri-beri patients were to arrive by
the train before that, so that our cargo of suffering
should be aboard the launch by the time we were
ready to start for the beri-beri hospital by the
sea. But finally they came by the same train
as the Doctor, so I was on the platform when
they arrived.
It was a lovely day ; the sun shone, the breeze
blew from the sea, and the waves rippled under
the jetty. The beri-beris were Chinese. As
most of them could not sit, lie, or be anyhow
otherwise than as they happened to be laid, they
had been sent down in covered trucks, arranged
as comfortably as possible, in charge of a dresser
and attendants. The train which brought them
165
166 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
went back, whilst we (I as a spectator) started
to unload the cars. Ah, those patients ! Few
could walk. Here was one, thin, so that all his
bones were visible, looking as if they should break
asunder at a touch. And one — it had run in his
case to water, his body being swollen and huge.
Another's flesh showed the depressions made when
he was taken up and lifted into the stretcher.
They went past me, some with eyes shut,
others staring at the blue and unwinking sky,
others again with that dull gaze of sickness so
difficult to meet and not shrink from it.
Five-and-twenty in all were taken from the
trucks and laid at the end of the jetty. The tide,
of course, did not suit, and the launch lay below
the level.
The scene at the railway station was repeated
here, but with a variant. The Doctor, ever the
same, of even temper, though dealing with the
most exasperating stupidity on the part of his
attendants, devised a shute with a stretcher,
along which the beri-beris were lowered down.
When they arrived safely on the launch they were
carried to the stern, and there disposed, one by
another, for the voyage.
A BERI-BERI HOSPITAL 167
All aboard at last, I followed and we cast off.
It was but a two hours' run, and only part of it at
sea. The first few miles were smooth water, and
we throbbed along.
The beri-beris were as comfortable as they
could be, but with beri-beri one is never quite
comfortable, I take it. To see one's leg move
and wonder why, to drop one's arm and not be
responsible for the action, to roll over without
exercise of the will and to remain unable to alter
the position — these are things the beri-beri
patient has to bear.
When we got out to sea, there was a little
choppy motion to which the launch gently
inclined herself, as it lifted and lifted her. The
beri-beris were not good sailors, so sea-sickness
added to beri-beri must have been an additional
trial. Moreover, they could not keep position.
The attendants were continually propping this
man from the scuppers, lifting this fellow from
the other over whom he had fallen. Feeble
co-ordinations failed in this extremity, so that
the movements of the launch did with them as
seemed fit to the sea.
At long length, as it had seemed to me, we
168 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
arrived opposite the hospital. This was a severely
useful building situated on the white beaches,
as close to the sea as it could be placed. The
tide was right and all had gone well, had it
not been that the expected boats, in which the
patients were to be landed, were not to be seen.
Our eyes searched those deserted stretches,
lighting on nothing save the high waving of the
coconut palms, the white columns of the trunks
beneath their nodding heads, and along and
below all, the white beaches stretching in the sun,
winking, glaring, pressing their whiteness upon
the vision, as though pushed towards us by a
moving impulse. Sea, the beach, the hospital,
this last looking out of place, exotic in this
land of sun, sand, and palms, but never a boat
pushed out from any creek, and again we came
to the so common conclusion that the arrange-
ments had gone wrong. The percentage of
arrangements which do not go right, merely
because they pivot upon a Malay mind, should
indeed be very great. This swelled the total.
Yet I have heard people of no experience wonder
that the white man grows irritable here. But a
doctor cannot be irritable, nor was my companion
A BERI-BERI HOSPITAL 169
an exception. With an air of ordinary deter-
mination he asked for the loan of my boat, which
we were towing, with its five of a crew, behind
the launch. The boat was lent and came jumping
alongside. We lay sideways to the sea, and the
wave that rolled the launch jested with the boat,
so that the faces of the Malay crew who stood
fending her off rose jerkily to us, descended as
suddenly. The brown hands clutching the
launch's rail tightened as the boat sank, released
as she rose. I lay and watched the transhipping
of the beri-beris. My boat was large and roomy,
meant for a sea and sailing. Into it they put
many of our twenty-five patients. In spite of
the sickness which gripped them all, each man
had some little thing to which he attached the
importance given to trifles by the mind of the
sick man. Had one a short stick by which he
could almost manage to shuffle on the ground,
that stick must be passed along into the boat
before he was handed down himself. Yet another
had a long semambu cane. It was of a very
inconvenient length, but that too was sent down
into the boat. The man whose case had struck
me before, whose legs were thin to breaking,
170 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
his arm-bones fragile to the touch, had a red
handkerchief to which he attached far more im-
portance than to the set of his Chinese trousers.
These latter fell anyhow, and he had no strength
to cover even his nakedness. One man, swollen,
huge, and dreadful, delayed the boat, whilst he
insisted in a Chinese which we all understood,
though nobody spoke it, that he would not leave
his bundle behind. It was found, handed down,
and placed between his feet. I think he could
not hold it in his hands. So we pushed them
from the launch, and, just as they were making
for the shore, there appeared the arranged-for
boat, with the local dresser on board. He must
have detected a reproach on the Doctor's face,
for his first words were, " Sir, I arranged with
these people that they should be ready this
morning, but when I went to get them and their
boat they said it was the fasting month, and how
should they do work during the daylight ? '
Of such is the Malay. They did not seem
to mind, however. What was it to them whether
Chinese beri-beri patients were safely landed at
the hospital or not ? Allah alone knew why
that strange power, the " Kompani," the Govern-
A BERI-BERI HOSPITAL 171
merit, had troubled the peace of the place by
building a hospital there. But they came along-
side in the usual serenely good temper. Their
cockleshell danced, pitched, was pushed off, came
on again. Abu was reproached for the foolishness
of his steering, and retaliated upon Awang, who
knew not how to fend off from a launch but
must needs push the whole craft away altogether.
To them were entrusted four patients, the
little fleet setting off for the shore with the
Doctor in charge. The landing of the beri-beris
I watched from the launch. The big boat and a
rowing boat which had been borrowed from the
launch treated the passengers kindly, but the
Malay cockleshell shipped a sea on grounding
and all hands leapt out to bail her with energy.
The plan for getting the patients out was very
expeditious. There ran down to the boat a
Chinese hospital attendant, who seized upon a
beri-beri, speedily carried him up the beach,
laid him on a bed in the hospital, and thence
returned to take another. This went on until
all were safely in the hospital and the Doctor
came back.
An idle curiosity prompted me to ask him
172 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
how many out of that twenty-five would die.
" Not more than one or two, and the others
would recover, probably all of them become
entirely well."
So we proceeded on our voyage, afterwards re-
turning to the same place to take away recoveries.
I went to see the hospital. There were many
beds in it, each occupied by a Chinese dressed
in white coat and trousers. In one ward the
Doctor told them to get up and walk. They
all rose. The long room was filled with Chinese
walking with the beri-beri walk, which is some-
thing between the way in which a duck swings
its feet and a hen lifts up her toes. They walked
and jerked, some reeled, some were proud of their
recovery, and walked just as if on an errand.
One fat-faced man said he was well, and pro-
ceeded to prove it by walking in what seemed
to him the ordinary fashion. But we were
not deceived, for we had not, like him, passed
months among beri-beris, and we had not for-
gotten how a man should walk. Doubtless, as he
gradually recovered, he had spent his days upon
the sea-beach, walking before his companions,
showing them how to walk, but his recovery
A BERI-BERI HOSPITAL 173
was not complete, and he had yet to pass many
a day giving his walking lessons.
We took back some half-dozen patients cured.
These too were commanded to walk. So excited
were they that their walks broke into little
trickling runs, so that they had to be told to
walk slowly. Then they walked strongly and
solidly as a man should do who carries baskets
of earth in a mine all day. So we returned again,
and the Doctor said the system was a success.
I wondered to myself whether the recoveries
felt any gratitude towards the " Kompani."
Note. — Medical science has, since this was
written, discovered a more certain mode of cure
than was formerly employed as here described.
XV
ON THE PATH
THE presence of two Chinese and only
thirteen Malays seems to indicate that
there are not many cases in the Land
Court this morning. The District Officer, for the
time being a Collector of Land Revenue, alights
from his car in the bright blaze of sunshine,
and, in his capacity of Chairman of the Sanitary
Board, walks to the nearest dust -bin on the side
of the road and inspects it. Much of his life he
has spent in inspecting things, and he is an expert
in dust-bins. The present receptacle is full to
the brim and running over with the ovoid shapes
of durian fruit skins, glittering white in the inside,
and pickled-olive green on the out. The Malay
penghulu comes up, salutes him, and complains
that people throw these fruit skins wildly and
blindly on to the road, thereby causing a dis-
174
ON THE PATH 175
orderly litter. Is he to prosecute such persons ?
The Chairman of the Sanitary Board thinks it is
not worth while. " The durian season," says he,
" is like a flood, and we must wait until it abates,
as did Nabi Noh." The penghulu smiles re-
spectfully at the jest, privately congratulating
himself on having exhibited such zeal for sanita-
tion without having incurred the trouble of having
to continue to exhibit it. In spite of the sun-
shine there is a dampness in the air, and in every
direction beneath the coconut trees on both
sides of the road are pools and puddles of water.
For it is the rainy reason, and the village of
Katang has been favoured with seven inches of
rain in twenty-four hours, and also with high
tides in the Katang river. The penghulu
observes that there are two feet of water on the
road farther on. The District Officer replies that
in this case he will refrain from inspecting the
Police and the Customs Stations beyond it. There
being nothing further in sight to inspect, the
Collector of Land Revenue enters the square
ground-floor building used as a Land Court, and
takes his seat on the bench.
The cases to-day are not very interesting.
176 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
Ng Peh Yeow lays claim to 3 acres 3 roods and
4 poles of land which belonged once to Ng Seh,
whom he alleges to be dead. All is in order
and his claim sufficiently clear. Almost too
clear, perhaps, thinks the Collector, for Ng Seh
is stated to have died on the 17th day of the 5th
moon fifteen years ago. Does claimant remember
that date ? Not in the least. Then how does
he come to state it ? Because he read it on the
tombstone. A careful people, the Chinese, they
record such things on the graves. A Malay
would not have had any more than a very vague
notion of the date, and in the overgrown welter
of vegetation which is the first and last char-
acteristic of a Malay burial-ground no record is
usually to be found of any one's death.
The case of Milah who claims her dead husband
Abdullah's land next engages the Collector. Milah
has four children, two girls and two boys. Of
these Minah is twenty-two, and has a husband.
Milah disclaims the claim now, and says she meant
to ask that the land's title be transmitted to her
children. But three are legal infants. Very
well then. The title shall be transmitted to
Minah. Minah's face lights up, and the Collector
ON THE PATH 177
notes within himself that he does not speak
Malay so very badly after all. Minah is all
smiles. The Collector notes that if she gets the
land she will sell it and her husband will waste
the proceeds on women strange to Minah. There
will be a caveat by the Collector put on the title,
and nothing will be done with the three children's
shares until they are of age, when they will each
get their share registered. The register in Minah's
face indicates depression. The children's bread
is saved from being cast to female dogs, anyhow.
Minah must seek more legitimate means for re-
taining the affections of her husband.
The day seems likely to hold fine, and the
triplicate official decides that he will not return
to the District Office and work at a mass of papers,
but will take a walk. Close at hand is a six-foot
path which wanders into the rice fields and the
fruit orchards of the district. It needs inspec-
tion, so do the gang of Malays who are paid to
keep it in order, so do the bridges on it, and the
schools at either end and in the middle of it, as
well as the two mosques and the irrigation, the
paddy-planting, and in general the life of the
Malay community. It is the snipe season, and
12
178 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
though most birds have probably found the
water far too deep for the probing of their bills,
a few are likely to be found in odd patches not
too far from the path. So a gun and cartridges
are unloaded from the motor and a start is made.
The first stop is at a school. As the District
Officer mounts the steps the master calls, " One,
two, three," and an elaborate salute is made by
each little brown right hand. It is returned,
and another inspection begins. A Malay book
is handed to a bright pupil who opens it at the
accustomed place and would have read aloud
had not the District Officer taken it from him
and opened it at the unaccustomed place, the
place which he does not happen to have by heart.
The child makes shift to read, and after several
false starts, gets so well into a sing-song of reading
that he can with difficulty be stopped, but on
being asked to say in his own words what he is
reading he is struck dumb with surprise. Reading
and understanding are apparently two separate
matters for him. Yet this, too, he eventually
compasses, and writing on slates proceeds. Here
again strange words are demanded and with
difficulty produced in writing. But the final
ON THE PATH 179
test of dividing three hundred dollars' worth of
buffalo by three tails of these cattle — such is the,
to us, topsy-turvy idiom — is for some time too
hard mental arithmetic for many, though even
this is at last solved. The attendance is bad,
only a third of the boys are present. Why ?
Many are ill. Why ? It is the durian fruit
season. They eat too much durian. Many are
merely absent. Why ? It is the durian fruit
season. They are too much occupied in carry-
ing durians from the orchard to the roadside
market where Chinese higglers buy them. Still
are many merely absent again. Why ? It is the
durian season, and they are about the congenial
business of watching the great fruit, as big and
bigger than a boy's head, drop from the trees.
The durian season seems to pursue the party.
The smell of the fruit encompasses them. The
District Officer, like all Europeans, loathes it ;
everybody else loves the fruit to sickness. They
push on beyond the school. At an unexpected
turn in the path they meet the upkeep gang, but
not unexpected by the mandor, for all his men are
at work, all so industrious, all rejoicing in labour.
Moreover, the real number of men is written in
180 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
ink on the check-roll, and there is altogether
nothing to carp about. The path would adorn
any garden, so neatly kept is it just here — but
a little farther on it crosses the swamp and
has to be maintained by the arduous labour of
carrying solid earth in baskets some fifty yards.
Is it all right there ? A little poached by the
rain, he is told, the rains are so heavy now.
He is not surprised when he sinks to his knee
at the expected spot. " Let them concentrate
their efforts here," he says to the penghulu,
who replies that it shall be so. Whether it will
be so is matter for the next inspection. A likely
spot, this, for snipe. The penghulu, who is not
so active as the District Officer, though he is
younger, is left on the path, and the assistant
penghulu follows into the mire of a paddy-field.
The District Officer is glad there is no audience.
Usually at least seventeen people will congregate
on the path and in loud tones comment on
the agility of snipe and the difficulties of shooting
a flying bird. The assistant penghulu relates a
tale of a certain District Officer who always re-
fuses to fire into flocks of snipe. He prefers,
it appears, to shoot at one at a time — singular
ON THE PATH 181
preference, and not to be explained to the
Malay mind. A few snipe are found and much
mud of a holding quality. The path is re-
gained and followed to the point where there
is a girls' school. It is one of the mysteries
that schools are invariably close to a path or
a road. In consequence, whenever a person or
an animal or any moving thing whatsoever
passes along the path, a score of little heads bob
up along the windows to stare — and forget the
task for a moment. After all, perhaps, this is
a merciful dispensation of an all-wise adminis-
tration designed to prevent school life being
too utterly wearisome to the small Malay child.
As the District Officer approaches there is a
flutter in this feminine dovecot. The elder girls
giggle and look roguishly at each other, the
smaller ones goggle their eyes. For be it remem-
bered that in these remoter Malay kampongs
the white man is still a strange phenomenon.
The only English men who are ever seen here are
the District and Assistant District Officers, the Sur-
veyor and the Engineer, and the Education man.
Their visits are all rare, and all except the District
Officer and his assistant, who may be a Malay,
182 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
and the Education man, avoid girls' schools. So
a visit from the District Officer is a really inter-
esting event. To-day it is not so interesting
to him as it might be, for out of forty girls who
should be present, he counts but nine, and these
mostly tiny children whose education so far
has made little progress. The small things are
squatting on the floor with slates, copying from
the blackboard. As he approaches to examine
their work they clutch their slates in an ecstasy
of shyness and are with difficulty persuaded to
show them. But when he sees the writing he
notes a feminine neatness about it which com-
pares well with the writing of children of this
age in a boys' school. Two older girls are seated
near a loom where a woman is weaving a sarong
in a complex pattern of blue and gold thread.
Some unusual turn of the coiffure or pallor of
the complexion leads him to look more closely
at her, when he sees that she is a Japanese. So
low has fallen the weaving of cloth by Malay
women that the only local person who can teach
it is a Japanese who has married a Malay. He
asks a question, " Does any girl keep up her
weaving after she has left school ? J " No,"
ON THE PATH 183
replies the mistress. " And why ? " says he.
" They get married, and have enough to do to
keep a house, and husband and children ; more-
over, imported clothes from India are so cheap
and good that it is not worth while to weave
in Malaya." Weaving in silks was at one time
and in a few very remote places practised by
Malay women, but as trade with India was in
full force before the days of Albuquerque, there
can be little doubt that weaving was never a
real industry generally. In this country there
are no unappropriated female blessings, the
feminine Malay population being always less in
number than the male, and life is made so easy
by Nature who lavishes crops upon the least in-
dustrious labourer that no need is felt for any
industry to supplement the fruits of agriculture.
Farewells are duly taken of mistress and pupils,
and again the path is followed. At a turn they
come upon an old Malay pottering about near
the path amongst the paddy. It is noticeable
that much of the flat land near by which should
be in paddy is still in jungle, and a secondary
growth that looks about ten years old. Whose
land is this waste and unproductive patch, then ?
184 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
Whose but the old man's himself ? Then let us
ask him all about it, and why he defies the rules
which enforce a communistic cultivation of
paddy, so that no one's jungly patch harbour
destructive rats and pigs. The penghulu hails
him and finds he is very deaf, but he is obliging
and polite like all Malays, and leaving his labour
comes up and salutes the Collector of Land
Revenue, who has been transmuted into this from
District Officer since he left the school.
" How is it, father, that this land is not culti-
vated so that it is likely to grow rats and pigs
when it should grow paddy ? "
" Ah," says the ancient, " I had it all in paddy
once, long ago that was, when I was younger."
" And your sons and daughters, do they not
help you ? "
" They have lands of their own, paddy and
fruit lands, and must till them, so I am left alone
with this. What little I can, that I do, but it is
getting beyond me."
" But could you not sell some to some one who
would cultivate ? "
" It has always been mine and I should not
like to sell it."
ON THE PATH 185
M But you would have more money and could
keep that without need to cultivate it."
" What should I do with money ? I have no
use for money. Kept in the house it would be
a burden to me, and if I buried it, would not
some one evilly dig it up ? "
" What is to be done with the old man, Tuan ? "
asks the penghulu.
" Even let him alone," says the Collector, " yet
tell him that what he has cultivated is fair to
see, and that I think he does his best."
These words, shouted in the ancient's ears,
bring a smile to his face. The law has been
flouted, it is true, but if the laws were always
enforced life would be largely intolerable. In
this case it is not for long that the old man will
disregard the rules. Malays do not live to great
ages. Very old men are curiosities. Deep-
seated malaria always current in the blood, lack
of medical attendance, and plenty of quack
Malay medicine-men see to it that age is in-
frequent. Soon the greedy heir will succeed the
old man, and on that heir will descend the wrath
of the penghulu, the warnings of the Malay
assistant, finally, perhaps, the summons and the
186 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
fine, so that when the old man's land knows his
feeble scratchings no longer, some one stronger
than he will hack down and burn up the jungle,
hoe the land, flood it, plant the paddy, and
this patch of unkemptness vex no longer its
neighbours.
Again the path is followed, and sitting to rest
under a tree, the District Officer engages in con-
versation with yet another ancient and his wife.
He too is deaf, but his wife's volubility discounts
that weakness. They have a request to make.
It is like this. The Malays of the place built,
at great expense, the Government helping them
with dollar for dollar, a mosque. This mosque
is the pride of the neighbourhood — it is the
largest in the parish. If it had a cement tank
for ceremonial bathing it would rival the mosque
three miles away. It is very atrociously ugly,
a square wooden box of a building, with a cor-
rugated iron roof, but it is totally unlike any
Malay building, approximates in appearance to
one of the Government halting bungalows, and
is consequently considered very superior by the
Malays, whose taste in architecture runs to the
exotic. However, it is on solid cement founda-
ON THE PATH 187
tions, and as every beam has been laid and every
nail driven by the Chinese contractor under the
close scrutiny of the village elders, the timber
and materials generally are of the best. For
many years to come it will serve the needs of the
simple piety of generations of worshippers. The
site for the mosque was provided by this old
Malay. To have that site cut out from his own
land he went to much trouble and some expense.
First of all he had to extol to his neighbours this
as the only possible site, and all other sites pos-
sible and impossible had to be depreciated. This
alone was a matter which may have taken him
years, for in these peasant communities all moves
are slowly made. Then the District Officer had
to be approached and his approval solicited and
gained. There was nothing to prevent the
Malays building this or a dozen mosques any-
where they pleased, but to hold the benevolent
approval of the District Officer was necessary for
the sake of politeness at the least, and the gaining
of a sense of security. Next came the making of
a request to the Council of the State for assist-
ance from the public finances. A petition had to
be drawn setting forth the deplorable condition
188 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
of the old mosque, tumble-down, riddled by
white ants, small, and altogether beneath the
dignity of the place. This petition ended with
the request that for each dollar collected by the
people and banked by the District Officer, a dollar
should be contributed by the Government. The
request was granted, but it is much easier to get
the Government's dollars than to collect those of
the congregation. Promises were made and mis-
fortunes of all kinds retracted them. Some gave
little of their abundance and some of their poverty
gave much. Slowly the money came in, but at
long length enough was collected and the Govern-
ment, as agreed, doubled the amount. But a
contract with a Chinese carpenter had to be
made, and this necessitated the intervention of
the District Officer again, and, for the greater
security of the project, the contract was made
between him and the Chinese. The work at last
was begun, and then only did the old Malay
begin to move in the matter of having the site
cut out of his land-grant. This brought the
Malay Settlement Officer on the scene, noisily, on
a motor-bicycle. He conferred with the donor,
consulted plans, set forth pegs, returned, and the
ON THE PATH 189
next visitor was the Surveyor. Chains and com-
passes put it all forth accurately and stones were
set up to mark the boundaries. Again the Settle-
ment Officer came, met the owner, and was assured
that the site was perfectly demarcated. He left,
and after many days the old man was summoned
to produce his grant, receive two new documents
in exchange, and surrender to the Ruler of the
State that one of them which evidenced the title
to the mosque site. There was signing and
witnessing and paying of fees, and the site was
assured. For all this was the old man to have
none but a spiritual reward ? Surely some
material benefit should reach him, he thought,
hence his present request, put forth at first with
much vagueness by himself and volubly explained
by his wife. When he dies may he be buried
on the mosque site just beside the mosque ?
Now the law is strict in matters of corpses. No
person shall bury a corpse here, there, or every-
where. Each community has a burial or a
burning ground. The adherents to the various
religions of all the world have many graveyards
set apart in this country, and elsewhere may no
man bury, unless he be licensed in that behalf.
iqo THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
May this old man's heirs, executors, and assigns
be licensed in that behalf ? The District Officer
considers, the old man regarding him with his
eager, deaf look. It means so much to him.
There is not now left so overmuch in life that
death has terrors for him. When " the order
comes ' he will be the readier to meet it if he
knows that his body is to lie here near the mosque
where he may hear the blessed mutter of the
Friday services for ever. He gets his answer.
If the Health Officer is not against it the British
Resident shall be asked to license in that behalf
the old man's heirs, and if he agrees to license
them then they shall be licensed. So much is
gained, but when will it be settled for certain ?
Let him inquire again in one month's time, and
perhaps there will be an answer ready. In a
month's time it came, approval.
But what are these loud shouts of warning
that come along the path ? " Hai, hai," and
again "hai," shouts a Chinese coolie, heel and
toeing it briskly, bearing a strange burden.
" Beware, Datoh," says the District Officer,
" be very ware, here comes a pig."
" A pig, indeed it is a pig," and with a hasty
ON THE PATH 191
jump the penghulu is off the path and in the
long grass. The Chinese passes, his body,
dripping in sweat, glistens from waist to head,
for he bears a heavy load. Slung at each end
of a carrying stick balanced on his shoulders are
the two halves of a large wild pig. Pleasure
at the sight of this very dead beast, so destructive
to crops, does not allow the District Officer to
forget to ask how it was killed. " Who shot it ? "
he flings after the coolie.
" Spring-gun," gasps back the reply.
" Oh, monstrous ! Who dare use a spring-
gun ? " wails the penghulu. " No one may set
a spring- gun."
The coolie is probably well aware of that, to
judge by the speed with which he races down
the path, twists round the corner, and is gone.
Yes, it is so. Without permission no one may
set a spring-gun, for of all dangerous devices this
is the chief. For a tiger, or for a panther, well
and good, a spring-gun. When these are a-prowl
no human is likely to be killed by the spring-gun,
for people retire early to their houses and bar the
doors. But casual spring-guns for mere pigs
are likely to kill the neighbours, so the penghulu
IQ2 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
will find out who broke this unwritten law, and
he will warn him and advise him and inquire of
him and blame him, and generally so trouble him
that he adopts other methods, possibly the more
laborious method of fencing his crops.
This talk of the spring-gun suggests a question,
and the District Officer asks, " How about the
tiger of last month ? "
" Gone, Tuan, and has not been seen for long.
Perhaps it has gone across the hill."
At this point, jutting above the path where
it circles a jungle-clad hill, is a high huge rock,
overlying another huge rock, both granite
boulders, the decomposition, under heavy rain,
of whose fellows has left these two naked to
undergo the dripping of the rain and in their turn
to provide the smallest subdivision of an inch
of earth for the plain below. At some long
future day this twin pair will be no thicker than
a sheet of paper and spread in sandy ruin over
the flats. But to-day their giant faces jut from
the hill amongst the soft growth of leaf and palm.
It is apparent from below that between them
is a space where a man may stooping stand,
and the District Officer thinks he will stand and
ON THE PATH 193
stoop there. This incomprehensible desire is
made known to the penghulu, who is at once
against it. He thinks that with tigers about
you never know. His feeling is perhaps that
acknowledged by the crew of a launch who once
protested against the District Officer bathing in
the sea from their craft " because if you were
drowned or taken by a crocodile, people would
say we murdered you, and much vexation would
be incurred.' ' But with a " tigers don't eat white
men " the District Officer is off and up, painfully
followed by the other two. He gets there first,
lays his gun on the dusty platform which is the
top of the lower rock, hauls himself up into the
narrow space, and looks about him. The tiger
has been here. In the dust, never reached by
the rain, are the moulds of his pads. In this,
nothing very remarkable, but is it not worthy of
remark that in the centre of the platform lies one
green leaf, fresh, quite unfaded, a thing of this
hour, and upon that one green leaf, also fresh
and slightly glittering to the eye, there lies, like
a red pearl on a green shell, a gout of blood ?
So worthy of remark seems this, and so unworthy
thereupon seems his shot-gun as sole weapon of
'3
194 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
defence, that he forbears to wait the tedious
arrival of the penghulu and his assistant, but
slips off the rock and rejoins them, not without
celerity. He tells the tale. They look fearfully
upon him, and the three descend in silence to the
path. For this tiger is no mild-mannered beast.
It has killed a man ; worse, a woman saw the
man killed. It was on this wise : The two, man
and wife, Malays of a village hard by this place,
fared forth on a morning to collect sticks for
firewood. They made a bundle and the man
shouldered it. His wife preceded him along
the narrow path. In time some little distance
separated them. He had stopped, perhaps to
shift the load. At a sound behind her she
turned and faced a tiger. Now this woman was
latah, hysterical, and when startled she
became a senseless mimic of anything that was
opposite her at the moment. At this moment a
tiger was opposite her, with its mouth slightly
open and snarling. To mimic the beast she
squatted down, opened her mouth, and also
snarled, all this quite unconsciously. Thus the
two for a great gap of time faced each other,
snarling, both tigers. The tiger turned away
ON THE PATH 19
into the jungle, the woman sprang up and was
woman again, screaming woman, who fled adown
the track and burst yelling into the open space
about the houses. These buzzed amain. Taking
spears and krises the men reversed her route,
marked where, printed in the mud, were the
footmarks of the woman and the beast, called for
her husband, called in vain, and so found him,
lying face downwards, dead. The tiger's coughing
snarl, on this side and on that, pulsing out at
intervals from depths invisible of forest, followed
them home. She, for the woman swore her
female, would not face the open to attempt a
rescue of the prey, but slunk in and out of the
skirts of the forest which lay, as round so many
Malay villages, like fringe upon a petticoat.
The place was eight miles from anywhere,
and anywhere, when reached, was a cart
road. To avoid the vexatious appearance in
the village of police, doctors, and magistrates,
and prolonged inquiries by way of witnesses
as to the condition of a long-buried body, they
decided at once to convey it to the police station.
A party went ahead along the path and then
along the road, and along the road were to send
196 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
back a bullock-cart. The body was carried,
mute witness to its own end, along the path, and
with the bearers went the tiger, mourning not
loss of life but lack of meat. The day was hot,
the wounds were dire. The sun beat upon dead
and upon living. A poignant scent from time
to time nauseated the Malays and whetted the
anger of the tiger. She ceased not from following,
snuffling unseen in shadows, till they reached the
road where met them not a bullock-cart after all,
but a cart with a small pony. His quick trot
bore away the body and the party of Malays
turned for home. Single file along the narrow
path they went, and the last man knew that
behind him might be treading that striped and
sudden death.
These shuddering stories somewhat shake the
party, nor are they reassured on reaching a
muddy piece of path to find that the tiger is
apparently preceding them by a few minutes, for
there are the tracks in the clay, and in the cup
of each pudgy toe-mark is washing to and fro
the muddy water. But the brute has turned off
somewhere, for shortly they meet a Malay holding
a wet bathing-cloth in his hand and coming
ON THE PATH 197
towards them. His face is grey with fright.
The healthy brown colour has disappeared. " I
was there, washing this cloth at the spring, and
I heard the tiger snarl, I heard the tiger snarl.
And Ahmad was near me and he heard it too,
and now he has fever and is shuddering in a cold
fit." A singular thing this, thinks the District
Officer, and proceeds to interview Ahmad, who
is found seated on the top step of the ladder up
to a Malay house a little farther on. Ahmad is
very evidently in the cold fit of a malaria. The
rattling of dice is under his lips, for he has lost
control of the jaw muscle, and his teeth are
chattering briskly. He is wrapped in a series of
dirty cloths, and has the general appearance of
a large sick bird on a perch. He can hardly
speak, but can at last say that it is even so.
He heard the tiger's snarl and he fled to his
house, and he fell into an ague. Well, the tiger
is gone and a good riddance, but here is Ahmad
full of fever. This exasperates the District Officer.
He knows that quinine is to be had from every
police station, every school, every hospital, and
every penghulu in the country, and he knows
that Ahmad to be now in this state must have
198 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
neglected or refused to get and eat quinine, or he
would not be so million-full of malaria parasites
that a fright from a tiger could cause them in-
stantly to sporulate, send forth their poison in
that act and send up Ahmad 's temperature.
Why, why has Ahmad not taken quinine ? This
question is fired at the penghulu. The penghulu
opines that it is not his fault. But it is, but it
is. If this one man is full of fever is he any
different from the others ? Are not all Malays
full of fever, and how many hundreds of times
has he preached to all and sundry, using occasions
convenient and inconvenient, talking to persons
ignorant and persons intelligent, that there is
no medicine but quinine, that by quinine alone
they may be saved, that lack of quinine-taking
accounts for fever, that he must, and will, have
them all take quinine, provided free by Govern-
ment, therefore and beyond contradiction, being
so provided, an absolute guaranteed cure for
malaria, and if they are still full of fever, whose
fault is it ? Is it not the penghulu's ? Why
does he not force it on them ? What happened
to the quinine sent to the thirty-seven Malay
native doctors whose addresses had to be procured
ON THE PATH 199
with such difficulty, so shy were they (and
perhaps so conscious of their murderous in-
capacity !) ? The penghulu does not know what
happened to the quinine, but he knows what
happened to the medicine-men. What ? The
majority were exceedingly frightened. Many ran
away. Some ceased practice. " That," bitterly
remarks the District Officer, " must at least have
saved many lives ! "
As they leave Ahmad, who is far too sick to
care whether the District Officer is annoyed with
him, rightly or unrighteously, and would, so
violent is the attack, lift no finger to prevent
himself being torn in pieces by a hundred tigers,
the District Officer continues to fume in his
heart. This is the curse of the country, the
bitter, deep, abiding, constant, ancient, and native
curse, this malaria. Show him a Malay who has
never had malaria, and you will show something
that was never yet. The babes of Malaya are
born fever-stricken, actually and not so un-
commonly born suffering from malaria. From
that early age the boys and girls of the nation
continue on to young men and maidens, to old
hags and aged men, still malarious, suffering at
300 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
uncertain intervals, for uncertain times, for
uncertain causes, from constantly reiterated
attacks of fever. What can be hoped from a
race so doomed from birth ? Bitterly and truly
he replies to himself, nothing. Nothing is ex-
pected of them by other races. Seventeen
years has he served this people as he would
serve, nay, better than he would serve, his own,
and he knows that here, in the Malay's own
peninsula, the Malay is, amongst the welter of
other races, not of the force he should be the
instant you start comparing him with others.
And races do not any longer live isolated. From
under his coconut shell, the Malay of old times
could say to himself, " Verily we are the people,
and wisdom shall die with us ; " but to-day, if it
were not for malaria, which afflicts immigrant
aliens quite as badly as it afflicts Malays, the
Malay's position would be even worse than it is.
There is a large Chinese population. The Chinese
has to fight an unaccustomed climate plus
malaria. The Malay fights malaria only. The
Chinese has the heavier handicap. Why is he
the more successful at whatever he takes up ?
He would not be — the District Officer almost
ON THE PATH 201
stamps with vexation as his mind reaches this
point — if the Malay were not so malaria-ridden.
The Malay could get, were he not so full of malaria,
health, wealth, and happiness out of his own
country ten times more abounding than he gets
now. Those, by some philo-Malay sophists,
reckoned amiable characteristics, indolence,
laziness, pococurantism, unambition, slothful
content, dull happiness, and stupid self-conceit,
which may all be found well-developed in any
Malay, are all malaria characteristics. The plain
fact is that the world does not know the real
Malay character, so overlaid with malaria is it.
That ostensible character is little better than a
fever temperature chart, and bears as little
relation to what might be normal as does a high
temperature to health.
Every organ of the Malay body and every kink
of the Malay mentality is malaria-mined — and I,
suddenly thinks the District Officer, am growing
malaria-mad.
The boy with the owl is a welcome diversion.
It is a fluffy and a yellow little owl, like a toy,
with goggling eyes bright as glass, and two horns
of feather sticking out from each eyebrow. They
ao2 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
hoot at night, says the penghulu, and if a man
be dying in a house there, they hoot worse than
ever. That is why they are called the haunt-you
bird, the ghost bird. A cosmopolitan super-
stition this, evidently. The boy explains that
the owl was on a tree, that the tree fell, and the
drowsing owl was taken. They cut the longer
feathers of its wing, tied a long piece of soft bark
to its leg, and have had it five days.
" And upon what do you feed it ? ' asks the
District Officer.
" Upon rice," says the boy, in a tone of
finality.
" Then it will die," says the District Officer,
" for its natural food is mice, or a bat perhaps,
at least something of flesh and blood."
The boy then shyly says he gives it
these things, catching birds with bird-lime.
Apparently he gives it rice as a luxury, and is
rather proud of lavishing rice on an owl. Would
he like to sell it ? Well, he will sell it if this
great gentleman wishes to buy it.
"But I don't think I do," says the District
Officer, " for consider, if I buy the owl and I take
him home and he dies, upon whose head is the
ON THE PATH 203
blood of this creature of Allah's creating ? Is it
not upon my head ? "
Yes, the boy thinks it is.
" And if it dies in your hands ? "
The boy looks graver, and the District Officer
wonders if he has been too unkind and hopes the
owl at least will profit. " Is it at all sick yet ? "
he asks.
" Not a bit," says the boy stoutly.
" Looks a bit depressed, perhaps," says the
District Officer.
" Well," says the penghulu, " ask this woman
— she is a doctor."
Three women have come along the path, each
with a primitive fishing-rod and a small basket
for captures. The streams and pools of Malaya
swarm with fish, and fish is a staple food amongst
country Malays. These three are typical Petani
Malay women, and their most striking character-
istics are neglected hair, dirty clothes, ugly faces,
lips vermilioned with constant chewing of betel-
nut, and teeth which look as if they had been
filed in youth down to the soft centres, as indeed
they have, for it is considered better to have
artificially treated teeth like this than teeth white
204 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
like a dog's, as is disdainfully said of others who
use not this custom.
" So our elder sister is a doctor, is she ? " asks
the District Officer.
" Not a doctor," says she, " but a midwife, and
her principal patients are women in labour."
The District Officer glances at her filthy hands,
wonders how many cases she needlessly loses, but
considers that the enormous majority of births
amongst peasant populations are normal par-
turitions and present no excuse for homicidal
interference. Thus he finds some consolation for
the many cases known to his experience where
ignorance has killed the young mother and the
child together. It is these cases that he hopes
to save when the new lady doctors in the district
next door over the hills get to work, and have
taught their English methods to a few selected
Malay women ; but he feels not over-enthusiastic,
since it is well known that a little learning is a
dangerous thing, and to him it is further well
known that it is not a Malay's characteristic to
drink deep of the well of knowledge, even though
the water thereof be brought to the ladder of his
house.
ON THE PATH 205
The three women do not seem interested in the
owl overmuch nor in the District Officer. He has
a vague feeling that he has seen them before.
Probably they have sat at his feet at some land
court and have, as hour followed hour and case
followed case, chewed their betel -nut, nursed
their own or other people's babies, and discussed
in undertones the make, shape, clothing, and
probable mentality of the District Officer until
they feel they know him quite well. At a land
court or a rent collection the attendance ranges
from the little old gnome of a Malay who is far
gone in senility and insists on attempting to
shake the Collector of Land Revenue by the hand
whenever he can get near him, and is never
without a propitiatory bunch of the very best
langsats — down from him it ranges to the newly-
born babe, who wails when its attack of malaria
is due and is removed beyond crying distance by
its mother.
" Come, and bring your friends," is the word
on these occasions, and a whole parish will cull
forth a holiday and combine claims to succession
to land with shopping in the Chinese village close
by. A great advantage this, and encouraged by
fc
206 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
the Collector, for a liar has to be bold indeed who
lies in the immediate presence of all the other
interested parties, and all their relations and
friends and his own too. Moreover, corroborative
testimony is seldom lacking, and everybody's
affairs may be threshed out with wealth of detail
and an expansive hilarity, often, which does
much to relieve the tedium of the law.
The three women wander off down the path
to their fishing near by, and the District Officer,
the penghulu, and the assistant penghulu walk
on, shortly reaching the end of the path, where
the motor which went round is waiting. He
gets in, bids them good-bye, and is off. What has
he effected in his morning's walk ? In sooth he
has accomplished little, has he not ? Merely —
he has been seen by men. What is there in
that ? Why, nothing in England, but very much
in Malaya, where are simple folk.
r | ^
XVI
THE ACCIDENT
HAT, and that, and that," screamed
the Tunku Chik passionately,
"take that, and that, and that."
She paused, panting. At her feet lay a Malay
girl, swathed in a sarong up to the waist, her
ankles held by two strong women, and her hands,
stretched above her head, by two more. The
Tunku Chik paused ; her sarong, caught up
above her breasts, had slipped to her hips, and
she had to replace it.
" Now," she said, " go, go, whither you will, you
bastard, you spawn of unmarried parents, you
person of no descent, child of a mother who "
but the true Malay climax which she used is not
within the scope of modest English. " Go," she
said, " and as for the marks of the beating, there
will be none. Truly, Minah," to one of the old
207
208 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
women near by, " you are crafty. I had refrained
from punishing this accursed one, for fear of the
marks. The last time — when Maimunah, curse
her, escaped — the marks were yet upon her.
Therefore she went to the Tuan, who saw that
she had been soundly thrashed. But this evil
girl — let her go, Minah, for who will believe her
story that the Tunku Chik's feet have danced
upon her breast ? For there will be no marks,
you say, Minah ? "
" No marks, Tunku," answered old Minah.
" I remember well the cunning punishment your
mother used to her girls left no marks."
" Let her go, then," said Tunku Chik, "ami
not weary of her ? Away with her ! Come, you
others, the youth we saw to-day, and bade do us
reverence at eventide, where is he ? "
" Please, Tunku," answered one of the women,
scarce able to restrain her mirth, "he will
not come. He " — she smiled — " dreads your
favours."
" What," said the Tunku Chik, " he will not
come ? Nay, then, but he must be prevailed
upon to greet us as we will. Let one go fetch
him " Her voice died away in the distance,
THE ACCIDENT 209
and the room remained empty, save for the
gasping figure upon the floor. Silence occupied
the place, broken only by sobs from the half-
naked girl. She lay for some time helpless, the
pain of the punishment being hot upon her ;
but at length she gathered strength to hitch her
sarong above her heaving breasts and raised
herself upon her arm. The tropic twilight
gathered in the room, and scarce revealed the
crouching figure. At length it rose slowly, and
staggered to the doorway. The last breeze of
evening fanned the girl's cheek as she gazed
fearfully into the growing shades of night ;
but taking courage from the memory of her
wrongs, she passed down the steps, and fled into
the shadows.
In those days there were only two white men
in the place. One was a trader and the other was
a Government official.
The trader sat upon his verandah, the lamp
behind him, a book in his hand, a cigar in his
mouth, and whisky and water at his elbow. He
had reached the evening of his usual day, and
was longing for the time when his servant would
announce dinner. Forthwith he would eat it,
14
2io THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
and thereafter go to bed. He sat thus, in the full
glare of the light, wrapped on all sides by the
thickest blackness of the night, and the heavy
jungle, a-scream with shrill insect voices, was but
a few yards from his chair. Dinner was long
coming, and the white man communed with
nature and his own thoughts.
" Tuan ! " said a voice at his feet, and again,
" Tuan ! " The white man might perhaps have
started up had not long training told him that
the barefoot Malay does not always cough loudly
to assert his presence ; so he betrayed little
interest in the matter and said simply :
"Siapa? " (Who is it?)
" Sahya " (It is I), said the voice, with usual
Malay failure to explain who "I" might be.
" Siapa ? " said the white man again, with an
emphasis intended to show that he could not see
the speaker.
" Sapiah," said the still unseen visitor. This
told the white man nothing, except that the
owner of the name was a woman.
" Sapiah siapa ? " (Which Sapiah ?)
" Apa handak ? " (What do you want?)
queried the white man, still at a loss. Then
THE ACCIDENT 211
followed a torrent of words, an incoherent telling
of a tale, clear enough to the speaker, but un-
intelligible almost to the hearer. Only he learnt,
perhaps guessed chiefly, that the mysterious
visitor had been entreated evilly of certain
persons highly placed, and here sought protection.
The trader called up his only trusted servant,
and said :
" See this woman ; she has come to the wrong
house. Let her have shelter for the night and
remind me of her to-morrow morning. Also tell
the cook that if he does not send up dinner, I
will infallibly strike off his head and his cheating
extra charges together."
This horrible menace, though well known, by
dint of frequent iteration, to the household, eventu-
ally resulted in dinner being served. The white
man sat down to it, and dined sparely of
tinned provisions and newly-slain chicken. After
lingering as long as he could manage to keep his
cigar alight and his book between his hands,
he went to bed, desperately sleepy and quite
forgetful of the commonplace episode before
dinner.
Next morning, when the day broke, the
212 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
mists rolled up from the river valley and fled
away before the strong shining of the sun, and
the Government official walked out upon his
verandah. He looked down upon the river and
wondered idly whether the people already bath-
ing below ever felt a twinge of liver : also he
wondered whether the day would bring forth
" another circus," as he bitterly termed the
murders, quarrels, fights, snatchings of damsels,
thefts, and various other happenings with which
his lot was to deal. For he was the officer-
in-charge, that is to say, he had been provided
with a set of elementary notions concerning the
rights and wrongs of matters judicially regarded,
and it was hoped that he would succeed in im-
posing these notions upon a set of people to
whom they were the worst of annoying anathe-
mas, more especially as he and his notions were
quite inevitable, and himself but a spoke in
the wheel, the wheel of a steam-roller. The
" circus " which he vaguely anticipated, possibly
by instinct, arrived quite promptly in the person
of a very fat and intensely respectable Malay
gentleman, correctly dressed, if out of breath.
" What is the news, Datoh ? "
THE ACCIDENT 213
" Good news, Tuan," answered the Datoh,
which is the equally usual answer. This fair
opening was belied, however, by the haste
with which the Datoh plunged into his
message.
" There was a great trouble this morning,
Tuan, yes, not at all a small uproar — and Tunku
Chik," here he puffed portentously, " Tunku Chik
— Allah, what a hill is this, I have no breath —
Tunku Chik sent me " Here he collapsed,
and the other said soothingly :
M And so Tunku Chik doubtless sent you to
tell me all about it."
" Yes, Tuan, yes, that is it, Tuan. She thought
you ought to know at once ; such a thing, dis-
graceful ! Tunku Chik hopes you will take
steps, ah, immediate steps. Doubtless you will
take immediate steps to "
" But what is it, Datoh, that has happened ? "
" I myself," replied the Datoh, " cannot im-
agine what has come upon the country. In my
young days, was it not an honour for a girl to be
an attendant, but now, yes, even a little reproof
they will not endure. Extraordinary it is ; most
strange ; as I have said, Tuan, it is about that
214 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
Sapiah. Ah ! she has no shame. Such a thing !
Amazing ! ! "
Losing himself in his amazement, genuine or
diplomatic, the worthy man paused, and looked
at the white man. It may be doubted whether
what he saw in that face entirely reassured him,
for he began to relate the circumstances more
clearly. It appeared, from his statement, that
one Sapiah, maid of honour to the Tunku Chik,
had, absolutely for nothing, merely for being
reproved for not carrying out her duties properly,
fled at night, and was now, even at this very
moment, in the trader's house. The white man
listened, and the more he listened the less he liked
it, and the less he liked it the more he remembered
tales he had heard of the Tunku Chik and the
mildness of that lady's reproofs to her handmaids.
The Datoh, with a not uncommon native quick-
ness, read these thoughts, and he said gravely :
" Tunku Chik desires me to assure you, Sir,
that there can be no reason for this girl's so sud-
denly leaving the palace, and she will be glad if
you will see that she is restored to her proper
guardians, for it is not fitting " here he dwelt
a moment, and was answered by :
THE ACCIDENT 215
" Be good enough, Datoh, to say that I will
investigate the affair, and will let her know what
I would recommend later."
So the Datoh departed with his message, and
the other went to breakfast with what appetite
he might, for he foresaw the usual trouble.
Investigation, which meant the interviewing
of Sapiah and the trader, resulted in a formal
message sent through the Datoh, to the effect
that it was to be feared that the information
was perhaps at fault, and that Sapiah would
appear to have had grounds for her hasty action.
Tunku Chik in reply stated that she had no
doubt that the Tuan was, as usual, quite right,
and that the matter would probably settle itself.
I remember that at this point my informant,
the man who told me this tale, which is, as I
forget whether I told you before, probably quite
untrue, did not seem exactly able to say how it
happened, but he did state clearly that in the
trader's house there had for some time been
engaged a young Malay boy as peon, or
general message-runner. So the rest of the
story resolves into two actors — the girl and the
boy. Here comes the difficulty, because nobody
216 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
but the boy knows the truth. Moreover, nobody
is quite clear as to where the boy came from,
or whether, when interrogated, he told the truth,
but many think he lied, and if he did — but
nobody will ever know. Anyhow, the matter,
as had been remarked, settled itself — thus —
at least this is what the boy says. It fell on
that day that the trader went out, and left,
with the usual carelessness, a pistol lying about,
inviting the curiosity of the boy. Upon him snap-
ping the hammer idly, the girl came and asked
why he fooled with the pistol. For answer, he
snapped it again, and this time it exploded, shot
her below the left breast, and killed her at once.
The affair was an accident, and thus " the matter
settled itself."
XVII
THE TIN-STEALERS
THE considerable towns and even some
of the small villages in British Malaya
derive their water supplies from
catchment areas in the hills and mountains which
are usually but a few miles from town and village.
The catchment area will converge to a single
valley at low level, and here or hereabouts is the
water caught as in the neck of a tilted bottle.
At any spot in this valley deemed favourable
for the purpose a tank is constructed, of the
granite blocks which lie handy and of cement to
bind them together. Some of the reservoirs are
large and some small as need dictates and money
serves, but upon their freedom from contamina-
tion depends, where the filter beds are non-
existent, or are liable to be overtasked, the
purity of the pipe supply. Upon this purity
217
218 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
depends again human life in the towns and
villages. The Asiatic, no less than the more
backward of the Europeans, is careless about
his water supply. By him any water which
looks not absolutely muddy may be drunk, and
of water-borne diseases he recks as little as he
knows. The fresh salad, sewage-fed in youth,
is in its marketable mid-age, and on its way to
market, soused, to preserve its freshness, in any
wayside ditch. It arrives, harbouring typhoid
in every one of the cool crevices amongst its
leaves, ready to distribute that disease to pur-
chasers. Wayside ditches, therefore, have slain
their thousands but wells their ten thousands,
for it does not incommode a dweller in the brick
and tiled houses and shops in towns to draw
drinking water from a well in one corner of a tiny
courtyard and to use a leaky latrine in the other
corner, so that water mingles with sewage and
sewage with water. Yet something have these
people already learnt, for an order from Authority
to close the well will evoke protests on the score
of expense, and a vehement denial that the water
is ever used for drinking. With some slight
touch of pride at his acquaintance with " Western
THE TIN-STEALERS 219
knowledge," the worthy Chinese householder will
tell you that all his drinking water comes in
buckets from the stand pipe in the street. If
a person living in a private house prefers to
maintain a presumably typhoidal well he risks
destruction for himself and his household alone,
but when he maintains a well and eating-house,
public-house, coffee-shop, or other place of common
resort, the chances are that to save expense of
water-carrying he serves out typhoid with meat
and drink to others than his family. These at
least must be protected, so " close that well "
goes forth first to the sellers of food and of drink,
and secondly it goes forth to the private house-
holder. Such orders cause some annoyance, but
what will you ? If the British are to justify
their presence in this land, by their works must
you know them, and amongst those works sanita-
tion is foremost, or should be.
Thus we have arrived at the other end of the
pipe, at the tap in the street, and up the water we
must go again through the town, under the
angsena trees, dropping odours in their golden
blossom, past the mosque, the temple, and the
church, past the gaol, the racecourse, and the
220 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
mines to the dense bush, child of the long since
vanished jungle, to the narrow valley, where
the catchment area's water comes down. Here
are the waterworks, the service reservoir,
various tanks, and pipes, and sheds, all of a
singular hideousness, but that hideousness re-
deemed by their jungle setting. They are like a
common gem in a mount too rich for it. But we
lift up our eyes to the waterfall and are satisfied.
That is still unspoiled in spite of the able and the
energetic schemer who would like to tap its power
and draw away its jetting strength to the dull
purposes of money-making in the mines. So the
waterfall plunges and spume arises from it, and
the spray of its leaping is seen across the country,
glittering white, its radiancy enhanced by the
walls of high green jungle which on either side
hem it in. In spate on those dull, cloudy, rain-
swept days, when thunderstorms brood and burst
on the mountain above it, the waterfall comes
down a turbid yellow, thick and natural to such
a stream. Yet, sometimes, on a day of cloudless
blue sky, when rain is not upon the mountain,
when, if every one had his rights, the waterfall
should show bright white, when nothing but the
THE TIN-STEALERS 221
hand of perverse man can possibly be disturbing
the high-set sources in the catchment area, then,
and for such reason only, does the waterfall run
a sad yellow ; another tincture clouds its argent,
and Authority, ceasing for a moment to drive an
irksome pen, looks up and across and says to
himself, " Tin-stealers again ! That water is not
as white as it should be."
Authority makes the same remark, and others
more cogent, to the telephone, and ends with,
" It means typhoid, and it has got to be
stopped."
At six of a bright morning on the day follow-
ing, two Englishmen, one Sikh mines-overseer,
one Chinese clerk, English-speaking, one Indian
Muhammadan policeman, and one Sikh policeman
leave the town, and, walking as quickly as may
be, arrive at the neck of the catchment area's
lowest valley with the comfortable conviction
that nobody has got past them to give the alarm,
and the uncomfortable foreboding that somebody
is as likely as not now going by a different route
to the top of the mountain for the purpose of
giving that same alarm. The party does not
expect to be out long, and though each English-
223 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
man has a small box of sandwiches, the others
have nothing. Speed being of the essence of
success in these expeditions, they hasten along a
stony path by the side of the valley's stream,
dripped upon by last night's rain from every
branch they touch. The police knock the toes
of heavy boots against the boulders and, in their
own tongue, swear discreetly under their breaths.
The path begins to mount, progress becomes
slower, and the details of the way are a little
observed. At one point, after crawling from one
rock on to another higher up, they come to an
overhanging rock where in days of old, when
tin-stealers were more bold than now, sticks had
been cut in the jungle and laid on poles to form
a seat or bed. A black mark on the under surface
of the rock shows where a fire had been lit. One
of the Englishmen remarks on the discomfort
of camping under rocks. Up mounts the path
again, preposterously steep, slippery, and long on
that grade, so that finally it is only by gripping
at tree roots that progress can be made. The
stream now courses far below in the valley, and
when they crossed it, hardly knee-deep, it had
lost last night's spate. But it is discoloured, and
THE TIN-STEALERS 223
not, it is probable, by soil washed into it by rain,
but by tin-stealers.
Between the party on the path and the stream
itself there stretches a thorn-infested jungle, dark,
dripping wet, hanging on the sheer hillside. The
little, hardly visible path meanders, just wide
enough, as is pregnantly observed, to allow the
passage of a man carrying, after the Chinese
fashion, a stick across one shoulder, from either
end of which stick depend rattan loops where
rest two baskets, and in those baskets two bags
of stolen tin ore. It is a little difficult to see how
a heavily-laden coolie — and tin ore weighs very
heavy — can pass down such a path, but the
reflection that there is money in doing it offers
an explanation. As the party mounts, the air
grows cooler with the altitude, and their skins
cease that output of sweat which has soaked
through their light clothes. The path too, having
reached a long, straight, and comparatively flat
spur, is now easier to travel. Therefore they
hurry along, for indications point to their being
still far below the tin-stealers. These indications
are simple, for they consist merely of the colour
of the water of the small streams which run down
224 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
the mountain-side. So long as a stream is clear
there is no tin-stealing along it. If a stream be
muddy, and there is no rain to account for that
mud, then some one is troubling the water up
above. That some one must be a tin-stealer, for
there is no agriculture upon this side of the
mountain. It is certainly unfortunate for the
tin-stealer that he must, so long as he is working,
provide such plain tell-tales of his illicit labour.
As the party mounts up and ever upward, they
come at last to an open space. Its brighter light
warns them that they are reaching it before they
leave the jungle which till now has concealed
their movements. At this point they call a halt,
and the two white men move cautiously forward
to reconnoitre. As the jungle path is about to
lead them into the cleared space, they halt and,
peering through the last screen of vegetation,
take stock of the place in front. It lies on the
steep hillside, covers several acres, and is exposed
to the sun. A murmur of several streams arises,
an irregular splashing and jumping of water,
different from the monotonous drone of the
natural hill stream. For here nature's drainage
has been altered. The waters, no longer confined
THE TIN-STEALERS 225
to the several few and small channels ordained
to them from the beginning by the growth of the
forest, no longer cooped within the ways them-
selves have worn through the rocks in dropping
down the mountain, now pass by devious paths,
through a welter of raw granite boulders, under,
round and over the very bones of the formation
of the mountain. For this is an old working of
the tin-stealers. Here they have evidently in
the past maintained a long and undisturbed
burrowing. Feeble folk though these Chinese
tin-stealing coolies be and ready to run from
Authority's first footsteps, yet here they have
lived amongst the rocks and set a whole hillside
aslide and astumble. On this mountain, though
isolated boulders of granite not rarely jut forth
from the soil, yet usually the covering of earth,
laid down by the thousand dead generations of
trees, is so thick that, except where streams have
worn it through, it is difficult to realise that the
whole surface underlying the skin of earth consists
of piled and repiled and again piled blocks of
granite, poised, leant, slanted against, and on
each other.
The tin-stealers' operation of skinning the
15
226 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
mountain-side and exposing its bones to view
borrows from geology itself, and proceeds upon
the same lines as those on which Nature works
when her rain washes away a top formation and
brings to light another underlying it. The skin
of the mountain, a soft, yellowish earth, is easily
rubbed off by the action of water. The con-
centration of several small streams diverted from
above and impinged upon the soil in any given
spot washes down the earth and with it the black
tin sand. The tin ore may be rich on the surface
in favoured spots, but is usually far richer deep
under the rocks, where it lies in pockets and holes.
Thus the tin-stealer is not content to wash off
the uppermost cuticle of the mountain, but
maintains his spouts of water upon it until he
lays bare its cyclopean bones. In doing this he
destroys the balance of the boulders ; venturing
and meddling, each stroke of his tool and each
spurt of the water may make the rocks totter
above him, and the farther he burrows the deeper
digs he what may be his grave. The gathering
of tin ore by these methods is a fearful trade,
and many a revenge must the outraged majesty
of the mountain take. Well the Chinese know
THE TIN-STEALERS 227
this, and all about the rocks are traces of the
red candle-wax where tapers have been lit and
scented joss-sticks burnt by the tin-stealers to
propitiate the spirit of the mountain. The two
white men, who have sweated up here on no
other errand than to catch and prosecute the
tin-stealers, find themselves considering with a
natural admiration how into the dark caverns
now before them, under rocks which a touch
might set swinging, and deeper yet under rocks
which only stand upright because a rock above
ready to swing has not yet swung and toppled,
there have crawled these Chinese coolies, clutching
each a short-handled hoe in one hand and a
candle in the other, not knowing whether last
night's heavy rainfall has loosened the mighty
keystone which till last night maintained the
balance of the whole, not knowing whether one
stroke, nay, one half-stroke, into the water-
soddened soil shall provide a last exasperation
of the mountain's spirit and decide it to bring its
whole titanic fall-trap down. Here under these
mighty ribs of the earth they have been wont
to creep about and scrape around, and to carry
away the sand and ore in shallow baskets, each
228 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
time they descend affronting the spirit of the
mountain, each time they ascend arising as from
a grave prepared. Yet each has gone down, if
even to his death, a free coolie, owning allegiance
to no foreman, earning his own living on his own
terms, self-tempted to these hazards, realising
the illegality and the risk, counting, no doubt,
the pains and penalties likely to be exacted by
Nature and by the white man as nothing to the
chance of wealth beyond all dreaming.
It is plain to see from the colour of the streams
issuing from the tier of rocks lowest down the
hill that no one is at work here. Each rivulet
comes forth quite clear to sparkle in the sun and
thread its way downwards some three thousand
feet to the waterfall and the reservoir. So the
reserves are called up and the party strikes across
the bare rocks, where no path shows, using such
foot and hand holds as have been left by the tin-
stealers, and after some uncertainty finding an
upwardly path to follow. Once again they are
in the deeply silent spaces of the jungle, the huge
trees ranged round them seeming to defy the fate
of their lately standing comrades, whose naked
stems and leafless branches lie tossed down above
THE TIN-STEALERS 229
the bare rocks as they have been hurled by the
workings of the tin-stealers. At this height the
air is lighter, and an exhilarating sparkle is felt
in the little breeze which begins to blow. The
party hastens on, and several men step across
it before one of them recognises that the little
stream they have now reached is muddy. The
announcement brings them all to the alert. The
police, who have been carrying their tunics and
marching in blue flannel shirt sleeves, now put
on the tunics again and even button them. The
two white men confer together, and, trying to
gauge the nearness of the tin-stealers by the
yellowness of the stream, decide to creep on
quietly and make a rush at the right moment.
There is only room on the path for single file and
the footing is bad. For some little time great
caution is exercised, but at length the continued
muddiness of the stream and the continued
failure to reach any workings lead to a doubt as
to how far off the tin-stealers may be, and to an
unconscious quickening of pace and relaxation of
caution. The result is, that in pressing on round
a rock the first white man comes plump upon a
Chinese coolie stooping over a runlet of water
230 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
and raking therein at the mixed sand and tin ore
slipping past him. The coolie happens at the
same moment to look round, and with a cry of
dismay flings aside his hoe and leaps headlong
down the hillside, here a little clear of timber,
gathering impetus as he goes, and finally dis-
appearing in the thick jungle before he can be
caught by the less nimble police who hurry in
pursuit. Not otherwise does a startled deer
bound madly down a hill till he reaches cover
in the impassable jungle. The police pant up
again, and revenge themselves by picking up the
coolie's tools and baskets with a handful of
abandoned tin ore, such being the only spoils
for the victors. The white men advance again
with the annoying conviction that to-morrow
the same man will be working in the same spot,
even more wide awake and less liable to capture
than he was to-day. The stream is clear again
above the working and so are many subsequent
streams until at last the party reaches an amphi-
theatre in the hills. This place has been differ-
ently planted by Nature from the rest of the
jungle, for it is studded by great groups of the
bertam palms bearing their accustomed armour
THE TIN-STEALERS 231
of long black spikes down every frond, the
ground beneath the plants themselves being sown
with bertam leaves in every stage of decay,
but in all stages equally piercing. Viewed from
below, this amphitheatre hanging on the hill is
seen to be even more gloomy and dark inside
than the jungle which surrounds it. It is drained
by a single stream which is discoloured but not
precisely muddy. A council is held and it is
decided to divide and converge on the amphi-
theatre. Accordingly this is done, and, as usually
happens in broken country covered with jungle,
in two minutes neither party has any idea where
the other may be and still less idea where the
tin-stealers are. The party which went to the
right afterwards related that they had come upon
a hut made of leaves and branches where a bag of
rice, several empty tins — your tin-stealers can
afford to live on the local fat of the land in tins
— and some tools showed plainly that this was a
tin-stealers' bivouac. But of tin-stealers they
saw none. The other party had the more enter-
taining experience, for it broke, unexpected
either by itself or by its objective, into the heart
of the amphitheatre of bertam and stumbled
232 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
upon a number of Chinese coolies, washing tin
ore in basins, who ran, yelling wildly, in the
gloomy murk. The rain was heavily falling by
now ; it splashed through the leaves with a noisy
clamour ; at moments rending crashes of thunder
shook the whole mountain-side ; whilst vivid
flashes of lightning came again and again as if
to illumine a scene from some inferno. The
whole place was full of bertam spikes, and any-
sudden movement of foot or hand would run them
deeply into the hand or foot ; falling on the
slippery surface meant several thorns in the back.
A few minutes of a wild delirium, with Chinese
flying yowling past, shadows on thudding feet,
with police shouting, thunder roaring, lightning
flashing, rain hammering, and darkness growing
visibly, reduced all but the tin-stealers, who were
familiar with the place, to complete helplessness.
The Chinese vanished. Everybody lost every-
body else, and when any discovered another,
both were picking out bertam thorns and look-
ing foolish. Eventually the two police and the
Chinese clerk joined the white man, the washed
tin ore was seized, and a search for the rest of
the party began. No one who has not tried it
THE TIN-STEALERS 233
knows how difficult it is to rendezvous in the
blank jungle after a separation and a scrimmage.
There are no particular places in which to rendez-
vous unless some large rock or large tree is
selected, and since the whole vast mountain
range consists of large rocks and large trees, they
are useless as marks, more especially as sight
does not serve beyond some dozen yards, so
thick is the growth. But, fortunately, though
one may be lost in such a country the way home
is never lost, since following the streams down-
wards infallibly leads to the plain, and the plain
having all, in the past, been mined, offers no
obstacle on the return home. But the present
situation was not pleasant. The elevation was
about 3000 feet, which meant 3000 feet of
slipping and sliding and clambering, if a path
were again found ; and if a path were not found,
and the line of a stream were to be followed,
the descent would be steeper and also have to be
pierced through jungle. The day was far spent,
for it was by now half after three of the clock,
and darkness might be expected in the jungle at
six, or earlier if the storm continued. It was
heavily raining, and each individual was already
234 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
soaked to the skin. There was not any prospect
that the rain would abate ; the little streams
met with on the upward journey would be raging
torrents on the downward. The other half of
the party was hopelessly lost by this half, and
no amount of calling and miserably wandering
availed to effect a meeting. Nothing had been
done to control the tin-stealers ; disappoint-
ment was visible on all faces ; and, hardest of
all, everybody was hungry and no one had any-
thing to eat. However, with plenty of luck, it
might still be possible to get out that evening,
and the descent was ordered. The path of
ascent had long been lost, and the only indica-
tions of the homeward way were the slope of the
mountain, and the flow of the water. The white
man went first, the Punjabi policeman came
second, the Chinese clerk third, and last of all
the Sikh policeman, he limping in trying to save a
bruised foot. Then began a progress downwards
whose every single step was misery. Cold,
weary, drenched, empty, stuck with thorns,
footsore, they started to fight their way through
the dreary sodden jungle. For fighting it is to
walk straight ahead through the virgin jungle.
THE TIN-STEALERS 235
The strength and agility of the boxer to ward off
or dodge the swinging blows of the branches,
the wristwork of the fencer to thrust aside the
dangling vines are demanded and must be found,
together with the best of eyesight to detect the
straight spikes, the retorted thorns, the scimitar
spines of the more malignant creepers. The
torrential rain had quickly filled all the streams,
and to descend on the left bank of the main
stream on reaching the lower part of the valley
through which they had ascended alone offered
any chance of outlet. But the difficulties of the
terrain drove them unwittingly to a point where
to reach the left bank meant a scramble across
wet rock faces swept by momentarily increasing
streams of water, and prudence decided against
it. Thus it was inevitable that a slipping,
sliding, swinging, swaying progress downhill,
through the embracing, detaining, clinging jungle,
should bring them at last, and as darkness fell,
to a point where the true homeward path was
recognised, but across a raging spate of yellow
foaming water, belt-deep, for the white man
tested it. Here a dejected four crept under
a rock below which ran a little trickle of
236 THE MAGIC OF MALAYA
water, and there they huddled on the humid
ground.
The tinkle of the morning's knee-deep stream
had changed into the deep and unabating dia-
pason of the evening's mountain river. High
above all other sounds it rose, and only by shout-
ing close to his ear did the Chinese make the
Englishman hear, " Sir, I think you must have
committed some grievous sin that you bring
us into this horrible place. Sir, I think and I
think and I do not think of any sin which I have
committed. So you, Sir, have committed some
dreadful sin and therefore we are here."
Too cold or too disdainful, the Englishman
made him no reply, but sat listening to the
Muhammadan making a long prayer which, as
soon as it ended, was capped by a plaintive love-
song from the Sikh. All around them there
glowed the fantastic phosphorescent shapes of
the dead wood lying on the ground, and occasion-
ally there floated past the syncopating gleam
of the fire-fly's tiny lamp. At first mosquitoes
hummed and attacked, their onset helped by the
sand-flies, but at length they retired before the
ice-cold chill which settled on the place. By
THE TIN-STEALERS 237
fits and starts the party dozed through the night
and longed for the day, with teeth chattering
briskly and bodies convulsively shuddering.
Here they heard in the distance shots fired by a
search-party, which, fearing some misfortune,
had set forth at night to find these four atoms
of humanity under that mighty cloak of giant
vegetation. So they endured until the daylight,
then forded the shallow stream of the morning,
which had been the belt-deep torrent of the
night, and got themselves away to their homes.
The experience of that expedition availed,
however, to suggest methods which eventually
drove out the tin-stealers and gave peace to the
streams of the catchment area.
GLOSSARY
Alir .
. A floating bait and hook.
Angkus
. An elephant goad.
Atap .
. Palm-leaf thatch.
Baba .
. A Chinese born in Malaya.
Boy .
. A servant.
Changkul .
. A digging hoe.
Damar
. Resin.
Damar matakuching
. Resin of Hopea globosa.
Datoh .
. Grandfather, also used as a title of
distinction.
Gembala
. A mahout, elephant driver.
Gharry
. A four-wheeled carriage.
Ijok .
. Vegetable fibre.
Kajang
. A matting of palm-leaf.
Kampong
. A hamlet or collection of buildings
and land round it.
Kris .
. A dagger.
Lalang
. A tall grass, Imperata cylindrica.
Langsat
. A fruit, Lansium domesticum.
Latah
. Hysterical.
Mandor
. A foreman.
Mem .
. A European lady.
NlPAH
. A palm, Nipa fruticans.
Papau
. A fruit tree.
Parang
. A chopper.
239
240.
GLOSSARY
Pa WANG
. A wizard.
Penghulu .
. A local headman.
Peon .
. A servant or orderly or messenger.
PlSANG
. A banana.
Sakai .
. An aboriginal tribe.
Sampan
. A boat of Chinese type.
Sarong
. A sack-like skirt held in place by
being folded and cross-folded
about the waist or below the
arms.
Semambu
. The Malacca cane, Calamus
scipionum.
SUMPITAN .
. A blow-pipe of reed.
Ta'tau
. I do not know.
Ta'tau-lah .
. I don't know.
TUAN .
. Master, sir, lord.
Tuba .
. A plant, Derris elliptica.
TUNKU
. A title.
Ubi .
. Any tuberous root.
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